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Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp AFF A-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Hitachi Virtual Storage Pla...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
NAS (10th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (5th), Frame-Based Disk Arrays (1st), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
NetApp AFF A-Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise SAN (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 6.6%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is 3.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF A-Series is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Everpure FlashArray6.6%
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform3.3%
NetApp AFF A-Series0.9%
Other89.2%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
DA
Associate Vice President at Federal Bank Ltd
Reliable and secure storage solution supports core banking operations effectively
The replication technology that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform uses is quite older, and the replication methodology they employ for data between the data center and the production and standby database shows no significant improvement in that particular field. With respect to storage administration, I'd like to see more clarity on the encryption side; data being stored in an encrypted manner is essential, but the customer or end-user doesn't understand which encryption is being used and doesn't have a direct view stating that their data is encrypted using AES 256 or DES, or whatever standard they follow. This lack of transparency may not be acceptable during audits.
Raymond Ciscon - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at MacLean-Fogg Company
Gives us the foundation to grow efficiently
We're a manufacturer. All of our ERP software is dependent upon fast performance and connection to this hardware. So when there was an issue years ago when something was wrong or slow, that prompted us to say, "Can we check storage? Can we check the network?" Ever since we've gone up to all-flash FAS systems, there's never any questions about performance when it comes to storage. There's been a huge leap from spinning disks to SSDs. I'm hoping with the next update, we'll go to NVMe and we'll have similar experiences. Last year, we refreshed the SAN at our headquarters. We signed a Keystone agreement with the ability to pay for storage as a service at an excellent price point yet still have the hardware on-prem. I manage the hardware, and, for me, it's the best of both worlds. We've just come up with a situation where, finally, after some time, we're going to need to buy some additional storage. In previous situations like this, it usually meant the purchase of an additional shelf at a large price. Now we have Keystone, and we're locked in at that price per tebibyte. We just have to say that we want to add 25 tebibytes and they take care of it. It's worked out really well. We work ISO 27001 certified. Since I manage the enterprise storage, we use SnapMirror, and we're currently using Veeam for backups. Thanks to what this tool provides, we are able to get through that portion of our certification without a problem. No changes, no rectifying. It's very slick. Our company's goals include maintaining a level of consistency. We're never going to be on the bleeding edge. We're never going to have the super fastest abilities. We want something that works, is easier for us to manage, and has a better growth path. For us, in the past, in the need for additional disk space, if we didn't do the sizing right in the first place, buying additional disks was incredibly expensive. Now, with Keystone, that's no longer an issue, and that's what we like.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have perfect run through times and latency."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"The support has been very good from Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Once it's set up, it just runs on its own and only requires the occasional checkup."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"For an organization, it can take storage from 40 terabytes down to five terabytes."
"The intuitive way of managing storage is what I appreciate about Pure Storage FlashArray, along with the clever use of flash modules, and absolutely the data reduction, because they are using that in a very clever way to do compression and deduplication."
"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"The most useful features of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform for our storage needs are the redundancy and the security."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The active-active option seemed to be working well and overall, it was a solid product."
"It's best features are its reliability and stability."
"The performance was decent."
"The deduplication is useful for us because we don't have that much money for our lab infrastructure. Deduplication means we have more storage available. And the IOPS are really fast."
"The first thing that attracted this model to us was the non-disruptive migration."
"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is scalable, reliable, and secure, impacting our infrastructure positively in terms of scalability."
"NetApp support is fantastic."
"NetApp AFF A-Series is faster and more robust compared to the all-flash storage of NetApp."
"The amazing thing is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could do things for us, usually within the next revision of the software."
"NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors."
"NetApp's hot and cold storage are its most valuable features. We currently use the A series. Immutable snapshots are another advanced security feature that is positive."
"MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package."
"We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability."
"The deduplication and compression options from NetApp AFF A-Series are good to use for efficient storage capacity."
 

Cons

"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"It seemed like every time we turned around it was a statement of work and we'd have to pay for something that our previous vendors would not have billed us for."
"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform needs to improve its scalability options where there are a few shortcomings."
"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series is not easy to use and this needs improvement. This product also has a complex setup and is not easy to implement."
"The centralized management console in Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is not very comfortable and user-friendly."
"The snapshot and clone operation functions can be made easier."
"We have not been able to procure more discs for upcoming projects and this has been a problem for us. Not having additional storage is going to be an issue. The solution is at its end of life and will be replaced soon."
"We've only faced some minor issues. For example, the documentation of some features isn't as detailed as we would like."
"In terms of ransomware, Pure Storage is probably a couple of steps ahead of Hitachi, but Hitachi does not rush in terms of features."
"Pricing could always be lower."
"I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues, however, they've really done a great job of reaching out."
"It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision."
"We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us."
"NetApp AFF A-Series should work on cost. The solutions, especially enterprise-level storage, should be more affordable to improve their appeal to businesses."
"Regarding tech support for NetApp, once the engineer understands our problem, they provide solutions that suit our environment; however, it is essential for the engineer to understand that our environment may differ from standard setups, which can sometimes cause discrepancies in recommendations."
"The solution's ransomware protection could be improved."
"NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"For us, as the customer, it reduced the price of the management."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"The cost of Pure Storage is subjective and determined by your environment. Pure Storage tends to be more expensive than NetApp, but it is cheaper than EMC. Performance varies with data workload, making cost considerations complex."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"Our costs are around $100,000."
"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."
"The pricing is very competitive compared to other vendors. It really depends on the type of media we're using, like SaaS, SSP, or NVMe."
"This solution is cheaper than Dell EMC VMAX. When you are looking for a high-end solution, price matters, but availability and stability are more important than the price."
"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a three out of ten."
"The licensing cost of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series, whether it would be high or more affordable, would depend on location. For example, here in Brazil, Hitachi charges in dollars and this means my company still needs to convert that into local currency. Sometimes, my company also needs to discuss the pricing with the Hitachi sales team and request for a discount. At the moment, pricing for Hitachi is high, but my team can have some global funding or global accounts that would help reach the price my company is aiming for."
"The solution is expensive."
"The main difference between Hitachi and other vendors is the cost. At the time that we bought the solution, it was the best option but the price, compared to other vendors, is a little high."
"We pay for a support contract agreement."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?
The cost of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is reasonable compared to competitors, but it is dependent on the custom...
What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
The centralized management console in Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is not very comfortable and user-friendly. How...
What is your primary use case for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
I work in the financial sector with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, specifically VSP. We did not need tiering in Hi...
What needs improvement with NetApp AFF A-Series?
NetApp is doing great with cloud integration; however, there may be room for improvement in integrating with existing...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF A-Series?
It would be great to see some automation from NetApp. I rate NetApp AFF A-Series a nine out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp AFF A-Series?
With respect to pricing, NetApp can be competitive but hasn't been explored to a large extent.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF A-Series and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.