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HPE All-Flash Storage 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
HPE All-Flash Storage
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (11th)
NetApp AFF
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (3rd)
 

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.
CH
IT Infrastructure Senior SAP BASIS Administrator at Embraco
Solution provides high availability and seamless integration for virtual environments
HPE All-Flash Storage offers flexibility for management, networking, storage for servers, and ease of integration, all of which are valuable. There is a good facility to increase more space. The storage has been very simple to use and offers high availability. I have never had any problems with it. Additionally, HPE support is very good with high knowledge and accessibility.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
Unified storage has delivered efficient AI analytics and low latency for critical workloads
There might be some lag or response time with respect to support cases, but even then I will rate it 8.5 out of 10. All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond. The only reason I rated it 8.5 is because the warehouse for spare parts, when a problem comes, a spare is needed to replace it, for example, a disk. In Pakistan, they have only one warehouse in Karachi. This warehouse manages all the problems when a problem comes. They ship the part based on the customer use case and customer service request. That is the only reason I rate it 8.5 because they have only one warehouse in Pakistan, which is in Karachi. For example, if a problem comes in Islamabad, it will take time to deliver the spare because the part will be shipped from Karachi to Islamabad, which will take around maybe a day. Other OEMs have their warehouses in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi also. In terms of part replacement requirements, they are very efficient in that area because they have warehouses in multiple cities of Pakistan.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Despite the overuse of buzzwords and re-classifications, the storage industry has actually seen dramatic improvements over the last 3-4 years."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"It releases those to new teams within minutes at a very small storage cost amount."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"The pricing of Pure Storage is all-inclusive; it is very fair, very easy, and the solution is a lot easier to install than the Dell EMC product."
"This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space have good deduplication."
"It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage."
"The initial setup is easy compared to other vendors."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to process huge amounts of data."
"HP has its own software called InfoSight for the users. It performs predictive analysis and takes a proactive approach to identify issues even before failures occur."
"HPE is excellent, at least in this part of the world in Kuwait."
"The solution is easily manageable."
"The storage has been very simple to use and offers high availability."
"Using an all-flash solution, we have a performance guarantee that our applications are going to run fine, no matter how many IOPS we do."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"With the All Flash FAS, we could see that there are oodles of power, not only from disc utilization figures on the actual storage backend but also from the CPU consumption of the storage controllers."
"The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer."
"We have not had any stability issues and it gives us flexibility, mainly in our VMware environment, because we're all NFS and are able to buy new equipment, retire equipment, and swap things in and out very easily."
"I would tell potential users that NetApp is one of the best primary storage systems with many good features."
"The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster, and the time to move data around, boot, and migrate VMs is much faster, which has helped improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs."
 

Cons

"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"The overall scalability for this product could be improved as well as having a single console to management multiple arrays."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"More cloud connectivity would enhance the solution."
"I think the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray is the major issue because all the great things come with the price, and a lot of customers simply are not willing to accept it."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"Pure will probably have to move to other layers of the stack, not only storage but, maybe, hyperconverged."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"The product’s ability to recover information and generate reports needs enhancement."
"The support, visibility, and reporting features must be improved."
"It might be expensive. If budgets are not a concern for any client, I recommend All-Flash."
"HPE All-Flash Storage does not have snapshot immutability, which is something I need. This was a significant factor in my decision to switch from HPE to Dell PowerStore."
"It might be expensive."
"The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"The only problem is, it's a little too fast in some situations."
"I want to see more send features."
"We did encounter scalability issues, the solution is not delivering the requested performance (I/O response time for the requested IOPS)."
"I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard, because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs. I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right."
"The graceful shut down feature is no longer there, in the version that I have."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no fees for licensing. The hardware is paid for only once."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"The price of the solution can be a bit expensive. There is an additional fee for support."
"In comparison to the competitors, Pure is very price-competitive for the future functionality that it provides."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"The product is not cheap."
"The product is more expensive than one of its competitors."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"You need to be careful with the licensing since it can become expensive."
"We benefited from implementing all-flash by reducing our data center footprint. We took it from 30 racks to just over five. This is one of the biggest savings for us."
"The price to performance ratio with NetApp is unmatched by any other vendor right now."
"I find the pricing to be reasonable, particularly with the recent inclusion of features like snap locking and ransomware protection within the ONTAP license instead of having them as separate licenses."
"From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage."
"The stability of AFF alone has been a significant ROI."
"The licensing and pricing are fine. As a reseller for the product, we need to make the differentiation in the minds of the customer. They are not just buying some tool that does only one thing, e.g., showing a LAN for a customer. The pricing is fair for what it is."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable for what we get. But if you have to buy any more disk space, it can be quite expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees
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
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
10%
Music Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
 

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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE All-Flash Storage?
In my region, the pricing is good. We work with a local channel for HPE, which provides a good final price. The list ...
What needs improvement with HPE All-Flash Storage?
There are some areas that could be improved in HPE All-Flash Storage. The performance could be enhanced, as it is cur...
What is your primary use case for HPE All-Flash Storage?
The main use case for this storage depends on the organization. HPE All-Flash Storage is primarily suited for small a...
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 Storage FlashArray
No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE All-Flash Storage vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.