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HPE Alletra Storage vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
HPE Alletra Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
5th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
311
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Alletra Storage is 9.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.3%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Lisa Whalen - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a cloud-like operation model on-prem for managing data infrastructure
I've always said I love that it's easy to use. At one point in time, we had a 3PAR. And with 3PAR, I always thought it was a little more difficult. There was so much more to maintaining it, setting it up, and everything. With the [HPE] Alletra [Storage], it's just easy. It's easy to provision space to use and to set up. InfoSight is invaluable to me. With it, I can just quickly go out there and see what is going on. Alletra provides a cloud-like operation model on-prem for managing data infrastructure. [HPE] Alletra [Storage] is very good for predicting problems and preventing them before they occur. InfoSight has really helped with that. I honestly don't have to look at it much. However, there's the alerting and everything that will tell us what's going on. That said, I check InfoSight every once in a while. [HPE Alletra Storage] reduced the time spent on storage provision. It's so much easier than the 3PAR. It's just so much easier. I don't spend time in there at all. The product improved our storage performance experience in terms of IOPS. Our end users that use the SAP environment were a little concerned at first. We said we were going to switch over from the 3PAR to the Alletra since they've always been more familiar with the 3PAR. However, when we moved them over, they noticed a performance increase.
Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency
I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"HPE Alletra Storage helps simplify storage operations, integrating with vCenter."
"The performance is valuable. The NVMe performance with VDI plays a big role. There is efficiency of the array and replication between two sites. A lot of customers use Alletra for production and DR and do replication."
"The simplicity of use is great."
"The most important feature is scalability, which enables us to rapidly scale without any disruptions. We can easily scale up to more arrays without stopping any services."
"The reliability is very good."
"Clients like the insights tools within the solution that came from Nimble and were pulled in."
"The stability is incredible. We haven't had a single storage event since we put it into production."
"We have improved storage performance."
"From my standpoint, NetApp AFF is the most powerful enterprise solution. I find it to be highly flexible, allowing me to do whatever I want."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support."
"The NetApp technology that has delivered the most value to our organization is FabricPool."
"It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out."
"At the file level, the protocols they support are easy to use. This improves resiliency and helps us run the environment."
"Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
 

Cons

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"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."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"It could use improvement in correctly identifying and naming the systems. The solution keeps changing the names of everything. It's been hard to track."
"We faced many problems with HPE Alletra 6000, and we did not understand whether it was because of some issue with the controllers or the disk."
"Technical support from HPE can be hit and miss."
"The plug-in for vCenter and integration into vCenter is spotty at best."
"We have more than traditional use cases. If they could explore new configurations for data storage, it would be ideal."
"They have a new update coming out that I'm going to be using as far as lack of snapshots. I'm going to put that into place as soon as I upgrade to the new version."
"We haven't had any issues with the solution so far."
"I would like to see some form of direct connect fiber channel options."
"Customer support is a hot-button issue, so we definitely need better customer support. We get some support from our vendor that helps. If the C-Series had a more user-friendly GUI, that would help us get our LUNs built and data storage connected faster."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"I would like to improve the ransomware aspect. We get a lot of false positives, and there are no details of what is happening. This seems to be already fixed in the new version."
"To enhance the already excellent administration, one area for potential improvement could be in terms of integration."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"There are no RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The product is expensive."
"So far, so good."
"Its pricing is very competitive."
"HPE was a clear winner on price per terabyte. It was very smooth."
"Its licensing is good. Pricing-wise, there can be a little bit more flexibility. It would help to have different sizes. However, it fits into the budget that we have, so we are happy."
"It is reasonably priced."
"The solution is expensive and can cost around five lakhs."
"It is fairly priced. It is in line with industry standard pricing and cost models."
"Overall, it was good. It had a good price per gigabyte."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable for what we get. But if you have to buy any more disk space, it can be quite expensive."
"Our TCO decreased significantly because we were paying maintenance on nine different arrays throughout the country. We've condensed those down to three arrays, and our maintenance fees from the IBM product dropped by over a half million dollars a year, saving us $500,000 USD."
"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."
"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."
"The only area where the product has room for improvement is the cost."
"In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF."
"ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system."
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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
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
69%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

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.
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 ...
What do you like most about HPE Alletra?
It offers rich features and high speed for transferring data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Alletra?
Scheduling a Proof of Concept to demonstrate ROI - Will be a well documented way to portray Alletra's performance, ju...
What needs improvement with HPE Alletra?
I would say that maybe the user interface and experience could be improved. There are a few areas where enhancements ...
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
Accenture, Aetna, AIG, Airbus, Allianz, American Express, ATT, Bank of America, Barclays, BASF, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Comcast, Credit Suisse, Dell, Deutsche Bank, ExxonMobil, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Google, HSBC, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Kroger, L'Oreal, Merck
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Alletra Storage vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.