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HPE Nimble Storage vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 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
2.5
HPE Nimble Storage boosts performance, reduces downtime and costs, enhancing speed, efficiency, and satisfaction among users across sectors.
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.
 

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
8.4
HPE Nimble Storage is praised for responsive, effective support, proactive issue resolution, and knowledgeable engineers, enhanced by InfoSight integration.
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.
They are very fast in resolving any issues.
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
8.2
HPE Nimble Storage provides scalable, modular solutions to expand capacity and performance efficiently, despite limitations compared to top-tier competitors.
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.
It can adapt to our customers' needs very well.
There are no issues with performance and latency.
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
7.7
Users praise HPE Nimble Storage for reliability and minimal downtime, with efficient support quickly resolving rare hardware issues.
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.
Support resolves problems normally within one or two hours, which is very good.
Sometimes their first and second-tier engineers cannot solve the problem effectively and need to escalate to the third-tier engineer.
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.
HPE Nimble Storage users seek better scalability, pricing, integration, and interface enhancements, along with active-active arrays and improved replication.
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 can't activate the system without a cloud connection, which is a bit laggy if I don't have the right firewall settings, making it take longer to implement the storage.
Currently, customers need to buy everything together to update, and a little more flexibility would be good for both the customer and the reseller.
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.
HPE Nimble Storage offers competitive all-inclusive pricing, justifies high initial costs with performance, and saves in high IOPS environments.
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.
Other storage companies are very expensive, similar to HPE Storage.
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.
HPE Nimble Storage offers ease of use, integration, high performance, scalability, proactive analytics, reliability, and excellent support.
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.
It's very fast and simple to implement for us as a system integrator.
The positive aspects of HPE Nimble Storage include very easy cloud management to identify problems, and it also has the capability to forecast performance in the future.
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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
HPE Nimble Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
122
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
313
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Nimble Storage is 2.3%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.5%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp AFF9.5%
HPE Nimble Storage2.3%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe1.0%
Other87.2%
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
Ajit Pratap Kundan - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool that offers protection against ransomware and other enterprise-level attacks
HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides. HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high compared with any HCI solutions, like HPE's SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware, or Dell VxRail. A person requires a special skill set to operate HPE Nimble Storage because there are hardly any solutions similar to Nimble Storage in the market. The product's support can be made faster and more responsive if HPE trains its partners in such a way that they acquire more expertise on Nimble Storage through the training sessions. HPE Nimble Storage is dependent on only VMware vSphere Hypervisor. In the future, HPE has to make Nimble Storage feasible with other hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and RHEV, meaning it should be hypervisor agnostic.
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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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise40
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 ...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...
Which would you choose - HPE Nimble Storage or HPE Primera?
HPE Nimble is a versatile synced WAN San solution. It is easy to use and doesn’t require much training for admins. Th...
What do you like most about HPE Nimble Storage?
The solution's predictive analytics is good. It helps to save costs.
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
Nimble Storage
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Ace Relocation, Atkins Nutritionals, Berkeley Research Group, Canadian International School, City of Hot Springs, Clackamas County, Corona-Norco Unified School District, Ideal Integrations, Linear Technology, P&O Maritime, Retail Apparel Group (RAG), Virtual Radiologic
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Nimble Storage vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.