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Hitachi VSP E Series vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
1.0
Organizations reduced costs and improved performance with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, achieving quick ROI and efficient resource management.
Sentiment score
1.0
Hitachi VSP E Series' ROI varies by use case, excelling in high IOPS workloads, with efficient manageability and support.
Sentiment score
7.7
NetApp AFF enhances performance and storage efficiency with cost savings, better response times, and reduced downtime, proving ROI.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
Return on investment depends on the use case, especially for workloads demanding high IOPS.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe's technical support is praised for responsiveness, despite occasional follow-up issues, earning high customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
3.6
Hitachi VSP E Series support receives mixed reviews, with higher-level interactions providing better experiences than initial support.
Sentiment score
8.2
NetApp AFF's customer service is praised for responsiveness and resolution speed, though response times and consistency can vary.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
The support and AI-driven initiatives are well-suited for accommodating specific workloads like AI and storage for transactional workloads.
If the call reaches a senior engineer, then the support is quite good.
The support for NetApp AFF is comprehensive—not just the documentation for self-guided reading, but for simple questions, spare parts, or urgent needs, you can have a contract that enables delivery the next business day or within four hours, depending on your process requirements.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable storage with low latency, easy upgrades, though capacity customization and high costs are noted.
Sentiment score
4.9
Hitachi VSP E Series offers excellent scalability with flexible upgrades, handling up to 3,000 users but at a high cost.
Sentiment score
7.8
NetApp AFF offers scalable, adaptable storage solutions, easily expanding without disruption, though cost and physical limits present challenges.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
These products are highly scalable, offering excellent compute, memory, and storage scalability.
The product is easy to scale, although it is expensive.
You can add more disks, more disk shelves, or migrate the data seamlessly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage offers exceptional stability and reliability with outstanding support, consistently achieving high user ratings for performance and service.
Sentiment score
7.0
The Hitachi VSP E Series has mixed stability reviews, praised for performance but criticized for maintenance downtimes.
Sentiment score
8.4
NetApp AFF is highly stable, reliable, and handles tasks without disruption, with minor bugs resolved quickly.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
There have been no known glitches or performance issues.
They have always been upgrading very fast and implementing patches to resolve these issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Pure FlashArray X requires cost-effective improvements in UI, integration, cloud features, multitenancy, analytics, backup, AI, and scalability.
Hitachi VSP E Series is costly, has a complex interface, and requires unified storage and improved marketing and documentation.
NetApp AFF users seek easier setup, enhanced management, lower latency, better support, improved documentation, and cost-effective, scalable solutions.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
I recommend creating one product for unified use, like other manufacturers, which includes both block and file storage in one platform.
Hitachi is quite expensive, and small to medium-sized organizations usually do not purchase it.
The GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect.
Our backup system, Commvault, has an amazing capacity to do compression and deduplication better than NetApp AFF by itself.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers see Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a justified premium investment due to performance and comprehensive licensing.
Hitachi VSP E Series is an enterprise-level, costly storage solution ideal for banks requiring high performance and availability.
NetApp AFF pricing varies widely, viewed as expensive yet cost-effective, with negotiation impacting affordability and overall value justifying costs.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
Hitachi is generally expensive, providing products designed for enterprise customers like banks with transactional workloads.
The solution is expensive, which can be considered a con.
NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support.
While it is not cheap, they have introduced a new series of AFF that are more affordable.
 

Valuable Features

Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and seamless VMware integration, enhancing workload efficiency and user experience.
Hitachi VSP E Series provides high-performance, all-flash storage with NVMe, offering reliability, scalability, and user-friendly automation features.
NetApp AFF excels with efficiency, seamless ONTAP integration, ease of use, high availability, low latency, and real-time replication.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
Hitachi offers this twenty-four by seven without needing downtime.
The Hitachi VSP E Series is all-flash storage, so it is fast.
You can even download the ONTAP simulator and deploy it on your virtualization platform and test almost all features.
Two important features that NetApp AFF has are the performance and the capacity to save data against attacks in general or hardware failure.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
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Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (14th)
Hitachi VSP E Series
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
14th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
312
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.9%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi VSP E Series is 2.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 19.7%, down from 20.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
Paolo Brega - PeerSpot reviewer
Rated highly for robust integration and diverse features
Currently, we are not approaching the virtual storage. We are working with Hitachi and Pure Storage; in some cases, we work with NetApp. We work with more or less all the stack of Hitachi products, starting from the small machine up to the VSP, the big family, the high-end, depending on the customer, the end user. We have very poor experience with Hitachi VSP E Series because we don't have big customers, just a couple. We had experience with VSP, specifically the E Series. We don't take care of data protection features from Hitachi because our customers do not generally involve us in this area as it is not our focus. Integrating Hitachi VSP with a hybrid cloud environment is not particularly complex. The automation process is handled by our storage administrator; I support them in the choice but don't work directly with that. I would rate Hitachi's pricing around a three, stability an eight, and Hitachi VSP's scalability a 10, as you can scale whenever you want. Hitachi VSP can compete absolutely on the market. When comparing solutions, Hitachi VSP is the best for me. I have rated this solution 9 out of 10.
Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage
Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
No data available
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
What do you like most about Hitachi VSP E Series?
Its user-friendly configuration and maintenance processes contribute to its reputation for being straightforward and ...
What needs improvement with Hitachi VSP E Series?
Everything has room for improvement. Hitachi is quite expensive, and small to medium-sized organizations usually do n...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Hitachi VSP E Series vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.