HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp are both solutions in the NAS category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.1, while NetApp is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

HPE 3PAR StoreServ and NetApp FAS Series compete in the enterprise storage solutions market. Based on a feature comparison, HPE 3PAR StoreServ appears to hold the upper hand due to its advanced multi-tier management and fault tolerance capabilities, whereas NetApp FAS Series shines with integrated data protection and protocol flexibility.

Features: HPE 3PAR StoreServ is notable for thin provisioning, wide striping, and adaptive optimization. It excels in multi-tier storage management and includes robust fault tolerance through Peer Persistence. NetApp FAS Series offers integrated data protection with SnapManager Suite and supports multiple protocols, enhancing its flexibility. Its strengths lie in superior data replication and space efficiency via deduplication and compression, tailored for hybrid cloud setups.

Room for Improvement: HPE 3PAR StoreServ users suggest improvements in storage migration, deduplication on FC disks, and GUI intuitiveness. They also seek better cloud compatibility. NetApp FAS Series users desire better integration with all-flash and converged infrastructures, smoother upgrades, more competitive pricing, cluster-mode ubiquity, and improved monitoring tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both HPE 3PAR StoreServ and NetApp FAS Series are primarily deployed on-premises, with NetApp also offering hybrid cloud options. Customer service for both is highly rated, often above 8/10. HPE is commended for proactive support and technical help, while NetApp is praised for strong technical knowledge. Users noted that HPE could improve support responsiveness in certain regions, and NetApp could enhance integration tools.

Pricing and ROI: HPE 3PAR StoreServ's pricing is high but justified by its features and reliability, often delivering a significant ROI through reduced downtime and enhanced throughput. Users value bundled license options but criticize additional licensing costs. NetApp FAS Series is considered more expensive, but its performance and bundled offerings justify the cost over time. Users acknowledge its high initial pricing but note it offers competitive solutions, especially when all-flash upgrades are essential.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series

May 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 859,687 peers since 2012

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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

Read full review

Muhammad Saqib

System Engineer at Hybrid Tech

Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.

Read full review

Arnaud Salmon

Presales Engineer at SFR

Offers good performance and

Once, I've been in a program, but they stopped supporting protocols like HTTP, STP, and that kind of stuff. All of the DIP supports at the beginning were kind of support when it was just Python and just five storage. And it happened a few times that the customer required the STP and HTTP protocol for storage. And I was surprised I couldn't do it anymore with NetApp. So, it would be beneficial for them to support both kinds of protocols. The only little black points that I would put on top of NetApp FAS Series. There is room for improvement in deployment and configuration processes. The thing with ONTAP is that we have a lot of layers, from the raw disks to the volumes we present to servers and configure. There are quite a lot of things to configure. Probably NetApp should ease the way to install that. In NetApp products, such as ONTAP and FAS, a solid understanding of storage is still necessary to handle configurations in larger systems. It's not the same with Pure Storage or Huawei. Even someone less familiar with storage could manage it, making it more accessible.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"The latency is good."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The remote copy group failover is very useful and has helped us."

"We also use dynamic optimization to go between tiers."

"It is a rugged, performance system; it is trouble-free and a workhorse."

"I benefit from the HPE Call Home feature. It tells me about any issue once I have it."

"Having moved over from a lefthand, which was seven or eight years old, there's a massive boost in performance. It has definitely improved the speed, the responsiveness, of all our applications."

"HPE 3PAR has all the common storage features like cell provisioning and deduplication. Usually the solution is chosen by the customer as they have a preference, or the setup is already in their environment."

"We have been able to scale faster and get our applications out in much less time. We don't need to worry about the platform's ability to manage the workload, so we are pretty happy."

"The solution has increased our performance by about 40 percent."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

"NAS stability"

"The tool's most valuable features are ease of use, ease of access, expandability, availability, and performance. NVMe drives have improved their performance."

"Better performance and lower costs."

"Snapshot, deduplication, and compression features are valuable."

"One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments."

"The new FAS series is a good fit for some customers. We have good performance and capacity, even though it is full flash."

"It gives us the performance we need and the reliability we need to make sure that our systems have the uptime that our internal customers demand."

"The solution has tiers inside which means we do not only need to use SSDs."

More NetApp FAS Series pros

Cons

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The solution could improve by being more secure."

"The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected."

"The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year."

"We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us."

"There is a slight difference between what we expected and what was delivered."

"There were a few goofy things with support where we were trying to do OS upgrades and HPE MyRoom failed. However, they would not get on WebEx because they are only allowed to get on HPE MyRoom."

"If HPE 3PAR could handle NAS and all things related to NAS, you would not need to have a mixture of different storages, storage boxes, one solution could fit all."

"There are some weird things that we can't figure out."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ cons

"The user interface could be improved to have better graphics and the performance analyzer could be better."

"It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays."

"The adoption of the cloud in Argentina is very slow. Customers do not move most of their applications to the cloud. Moving applications is a simple task, but the cost is a concern in Argentina. There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP."

"With scalability, we feel the system is limited."

"We're supposed to have used NetApp FAS Series for replication, but then one of the nodes failed, and then it's taken us some time to bring it up."

"The product should improve its user experience."

"NetApp FAS Series could improve by being more secure."

"It lacks automatic tiering, When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives."

More NetApp FAS Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"The product is expensive."

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution could be reduced for the license and for support."

"It is lower in price as compared to other vendors, such as Dell. As compared to Huawei, all storage solutions are expensive, including this one."

"From a comparison of bang-for-the-buck, what you get for the money, I'd have to say they are one of the market leaders. Are there solutions that do it faster? Sure, but you're going to pay for it. 3PAR isn't the cheapest, it isn't the most expensive, but in my opinion, it's the best."

"The cost is reasonable given that the licensing is all included once you purchase it."

"Budget wise, 3PAR is a lot of money compared to other solutions, but what is in the 3PAR integration that customers are getting now from the Nimble and InfoSight acquisitions, it is worthwhile."

"The SSD is a little bit expensive."

"We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice."

"The price of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is reasonable, but buying upgrade licenses are priced very high. There are additional fees."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

"The solution is more expensive than other vendors."

"It is expensive."

"The product is on the expensive side."

"The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They focus on storage only, which is really good; it works."

"The price it not low, but comparing features to other vendors, the price can be balanced."

"Low-priced product, but pricing could still be made more attractive."

"It’s difficult for us to get money, so make sure you get everything in order, because there’s no going back and saying “oh, I missed this or that”, so make sure you plan well and well in advance."

"The product's pricing is reasonable."

More NetApp FAS Series pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

57%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

26%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

See all answers

What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...

See all answers

Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?

Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp FAS Series?

Flexibility in data replication.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?

The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable be...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 22% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 20% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

HPE XP STORAGE ARRAYS vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 2% of the time

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 20% of the time

HPE MSA vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 9% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 7% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 6% of the time

More NetApp FAS Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

June 2025

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp FAS Series

June 2025

Download NetApp FAS Series product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

No data available

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment. The solution is very easy to use. The product is very robust and offers very good performance.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.

NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.

NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features

NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:

Scalability: NetApp FAS series is easy to scale, allowing organizations to rapidly grow their storage capacity according to demand.

Security: Protect and manage your data with various data protection and data management tools, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication.

Seamless integration: Integrate with other NetApp products and solutions to ensure a unified data management platform across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Reduced costs: Consolidation of multiple storage boxes greatly reduces the data center footprint. From a management point of view, with NetApp FAS you manage a single storage box instead of multiple storage boxes.
Compatibility: Forward and backward compatibility ensures that you don’t have to trade in existing controllers. New controllers can always integrate with previously released controllers.

Multi-protocol support: Support for multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

High performance and availability: The solution has high input and output per second performance and ensures that critical data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure.
Intuitive interface: The FAS series has a user-friendly interface and management dashboard, making it easy to manage your storage systems. With unified management, you can quickly run a single protocol on your entire system
Data cloning and replication: Easily clone databases of any size. Clones occupy a very, very small footprint on the storage until they are severed from the main database. Replications carried out by the system are fast and require very little bandwidth.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.

Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”

Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series

May 2025

Free Report: HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp FAS Series report.

See our list of best NAS vendors, best Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) vendors, and best All-Flash Storage vendors.

We monitor all NAS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.