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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
7.3
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
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 (12th)
NetApp AFF
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
314
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

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.
KK
General Manager at Zenith Business Solutions
Has reduced deployment time significantly and provides valuable data optimization features
I have provided feedback on various HPE tools including HyperConverged, Nimble Storage, GreenLake, and Alletra. HPE All-Flash Storage includes impressive AI features for data analytics and InfoSight capabilities. The solution demonstrates impressive speed and performance metrics. I currently work as General Manager with Zenith Business Solutions. Overall rating: 9 out of 10.
KennethEtsula - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager at Spartec
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It worked flawlessly."
"Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations."
"It makes things ten times easier."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"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."
"The initial setup is easy compared to other vendors."
"The storage has been very simple to use and offers high availability."
"The solution is easily manageable."
"HPE is excellent, at least in this part of the world in Kuwait."
"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"So, my experience overall with NetApp has been great and the product is really great."
"SnapMirror is definitely the most valuable feature for us, as it allows us to have a snapshot in minutes and we can use it to restore quickly from a backup."
"It is a stable solution."
"We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower."
"The most valuable thing I have seen since we've got it is that predictable performance has stayed below a millisecond, which was not the experience we've had with spinning disk."
"It provided an amazing response time for all apps, with websites getting better stability, and QA for all final users."
"It is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware."
"Regarding documentation, it would be helpful if we could have access to the root passwords for administrative tasks."
"The cost of the storage needs improvement."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The solution is not cheap."
"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"The product’s ability to recover information and generate reports needs enhancement."
"It might be expensive."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"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."
"Customer service was 7/10, as there were a couple of issues which took technical support some time to handle."
"Lower the price. I would say being forced as a small shop wanting to go to All-Flash and being forced to buy all of the licenses that we don't use and we don't need, that was a bummer, and that was a stretch as far as convincing management."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"Where I see room for improvement is their technical support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"Pricing is very competitive, and it's better than other competitors."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"The product is more expensive than one of its competitors."
"The product is not cheap."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%."
"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."
"It definitely reduces costs because it simply takes less power to run these systems. While the SSDs don't take power, they are in general very big right now. So, the running cost has decreased for a lot of our customers."
"NetApp is getting too expensive."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage."
"NetApp AFF is somewhat pricey. If they weren't as pricey, that would be a big deal for us."
"The stability of AFF alone has been a significant ROI."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions are best for your needs.
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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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Music Company
12%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise152
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
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?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
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: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.