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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 improved performance, reduced costs, and enhanced reliability, making it a worthwhile investment despite high initial costs.
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 effectiveness, with varying support quality and strong higher-tier assistance.
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.
I have communicated with them, and they are effective and responsive.
 

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, flexible storage solutions, allowing easy horizontal and vertical expansion despite some cost and controller limitations.
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.
I would assess the scalability of NetApp AFF as excellent in handling massive data volumes.
 

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 praised for its stability, reliability, and efficient non-disruptive operations, making it ideal for critical environments.
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 improved setup, intuitive interfaces, robust third-party integration, and enhanced management and support features.
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 offers competitive pricing, valued features, and flexibility, though some users find expansion costs concerning over time.
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.
The licensing cost of the product is expensive, and when combined with support, it becomes quite costly.
 

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 offers high speed, low latency, and robust performance with advanced data management and seamless integration for storage solutions.
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.
Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF.
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
9th
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
313
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 3.1%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi VSP E Series is 2.4%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 19.0%, down from 20.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp AFF19.0%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe3.1%
Hitachi VSP E Series2.4%
Other75.5%
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.
KennethEtsula - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers seamless installation and efficient data handling with robust support
NetApp AFF provides an all-flash storage solution for unified SAN solutions, supporting both SAN and NAS functionalities. Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF. With the storage efficiency from a NetApp AFF installation, users can manage substantial data running on all-flash. The features such as compaction and compression provide storage efficiency guarantees in an all-flash environment.
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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
7%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise242
 

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?
Hitachi needs to work on the marketing side because communication is a problem, as many customers do not know what th...
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.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.