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HPE Nimble Storage vs NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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:
 

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 Nimble Storage
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp EF-Series All Flash ...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
28th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Nimble Storage is 2.5%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is 0.6%, up from 0.6% 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.
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.
Tayo Olubanke - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexibility and top-notch technology
You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"The solution is scalable."
"The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity."
"The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies."
"Their tech support is very professional, know their products, know what they do, and they are very informative in terms of keeping the customer updated."
"InfoSight has helped us resolved an issue where the snapshots were growing too big."
"The most valuable feature is data mirroring."
"Performance, reliability, InfoSight, the ability to upgrade the O/S on the SAN without taking it down, and cost."
"It is easy to use. Not too complicated."
"It's easy to use, it's just like 3PAR. I made clusters of 32 hosts with 50 volumes and that took barely an hour. I scripted a lot of it, filled in the names of volumes, the names of servers."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"One of the most valuable features is the overall performance it provides. You're able to throw a pile of IOPS at it and it will handle that without much issue."
"Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"Its performance is most valuable. This solution is much faster than other as well as older storage solutions. The performance of the system is very good. We are getting 50 times better experience than the older storages. We are using AFF 300. It also has native cloud integration and most of the features."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
 

Cons

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"The dashboard can be improved."
"It's a good product, but the implementation with the new systems is done via the cloud dashboard from HPE. 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."
"I’d like to see in-line deduplication extended to Nimble non-flash (called “Hybrid”) arrays, even if it’s only the C500 and higher controllers that support it."
"I would like to have integration into cloud providers, apart from HPE."
"The solution should allow for easier configurations."
"The quality of technical support depends on which member of the support team you speak with."
"I think the scalability of HPE Nimble Storage could be improved."
"Scalability, in terms of being able to scale out, is not easy and should be improved."
"It needs a better management tool."
"The solution's technical support is not as good as it is supposed to be since you have to push them to get support."
"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."
"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."
"I’d like to see bigger, faster, better hardware, of course. I think that is the way the hardware is trending anyway; bigger, faster CPU, better software, fewer bugs, all that stuff. T"
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"Better support technicians for CAPP."
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"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."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"The product is expensive."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The solution is a little pricey compared to others on the market."
"It is expensive, but it is worth the “uptime”."
"The price is negotiable and when we first received the quote it was expensive, but after dealing with them and receiving a discount, the price is reasonable."
"Once you purchase the solution, you don't have to buy any license for this Nimble product."
"The price has room for improvement."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten."
"The pricing is expensive, although we do not pay anything in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"I would classify it as an expensive product."
"Cheaper pricing is always good. NetApp has been doing everything the right way. They've been figuring out things really well, going in the right direction."
"Adding more capacity will increase the cost."
"Its cost-effectiveness is a major selling point. Compared to other storage vendors, the EF-Series offers excellent value for its price. It's truly a leading product in the industry."
"The pricing of the solution is expensive, considering the initial investment required...At the end of the product's life cycle, it could get cheaper, but the initial investment in NetApp makes it one of the most expensive solutions."
"It's a way to get relatively low-cost, very high-performance, low-latency block storage as a point solution."
"Price-wise, NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is costlier than Dell. You have to buy a lot of licenses separately."
"The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt."
"This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
68%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

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 ...
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 do you like most about NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?
Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?
One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to rene...
What needs improvement with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays?
The support of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. I want NetApp's supp...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Nimble Storage
NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series
 

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
RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Nimble Storage vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,043 professionals have used our research since 2012.