HPE Primera vs NetApp AFF comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.1. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 4.0% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

NetApp AFF and HPE Primera are high-performance storage solutions. Users believe HPE Primera has the upper hand due to its superior features which justify its higher price.

Features: NetApp AFF users value its unified architecture, efficient data services, and robust data protection. HPE Primera users praise its reliability, scalability, and AI-driven management. HPE Primera stands out for enterprise features.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest NetApp AFF could improve integration with third-party tools, expand AI capabilities, and enhance customer support. HPE Primera users desire better documentation, enhanced customer support, and faster implementation of updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp AFF deployment is straightforward, with efficient customer service praised for its responsiveness. HPE Primera has a steeper learning curve but benefits from proactive management tools. HPE’s customer support is considered detailed but could be faster.

Pricing and ROI: NetApp AFF is noted for being cost-effective with a quick ROI. Users value its competitive setup costs. HPE Primera’s initial investment is higher, but users feel the long-term ROI justifies the price due to its advanced feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF

June 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Primera is 4.0%, down from 5.1% 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

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

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.

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Taufeeq Rauf

Head of IT at NATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL FACILITATION TECHNOLOGIES (PVT.) LTD.

Offers a simple user interface and is useful for data replication

I use HPE Primera for mission-critical applications. My company uses the product as a storage solution for our machines. The availability of HPE Primera in our company is critical for us, considering that we operate in an HA environment where we can't have downtime since we need to deal with cheque clearance for banks. The product's interface is simple to use. I am satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The ease of use of the product's interface has directly had an impact on our company's operations, along with the improvement in the availability and performance of machines. Compared to HPE Primera, I work with a much more reliable storage solution like Dell PowerStore. Compared to HPE Primera, Dell PowerStore's features related to deduplication are very good, and it also offers a physical storage capacity of eight TB, which can be expanded up to forty TB. I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it only after taking into consideration their usage and requirements. From the price and performance point of view, Dell PowerStore is a better choice. I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

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Ian Rousom

Owner at RTX

Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The greatest advantage is the support when we encounter incidents, as HPE's support is highly responsive."

"HPE Primera provides me with system reliability and 100% data reliability. The storage is good and is consistently reliable and scalable, allowing me to use it whenever needed. The overall performance is great. The product is stable. The customer service and support is excellent. It's a commendable solution, especially suitable for online transactions. It is reliable in meeting data requirements."

"HPE Primera is an all-flash storage product that's very stable and has a higher storage capacity. It can also give better ROI compared to NetApp."

"The system is stable, particularly with mission-critical solutions in place."

"The most valuable feature of HP Primera is that you don't have to buy an additional product for application replication. It's a stable product. The tool is scalable. I recommend HPE Primera because it's one of HP's most stable product."

"It is a stable and scalable solution with quick and efficient storage capability."

"For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product."

"It is stable and reliable."

More HPE Primera pros

"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."

"AFF works well for VMware storage."

"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."

"High availability"

"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."

"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."

"There are many reports accessing the applications. We receive them very quickly. We used to wait a long time for them. Now, you just need to wait a moment."

"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."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"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."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The cost of HPE Primera could be lower."

"There are certain shortcomings in the technical support offered by HPE where improvements are required."

"We used to receive hardware errors a lot of times. The ambient temperatures rise rate was approximately 35 to 55 degrees, but when it was approximately 27 or 28, we used to get errors a lot."

"HPE Primera's pricing model is an area of concern and can be considered for improvement."

"When we asked for HPE support to resolve issues, their help was punctual and on time. However, the depth of root cause analysis provided was not satisfying."

"We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted."

"The initial setup is not straightforward."

"We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data."

More HPE Primera cons

"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."

"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."

"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."

"The quality of technical support has dwindled over time and needs to be improved."

"We have to work with technology that we can deploy ourselves, run where we decide, and not necessarily anywhere, and that can survive for long periods of time disconnected from a cloud. For us, that's probably been one of the bigger cybersecurity challenges: how do we maintain security, maintain updates, patches, profiles, policies, and all that stuff without subscribing to a service from your friendly neighbourhood cloud provider? This product does a better-than-average job of that."

"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."

"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."

"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."

More NetApp AFF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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 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."

"The product is expensive."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis and the cost of GreenLake service is included."

"I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"The price to capacity ratio is good."

"The solution is quite cost-effective."

"I believe HPE Primera and Pure Storage are similar in price."

"From what I see, this is competitively-priced and HPE are doing their best to stay competitive."

"HPE Primera is an expensive product but has competitive pricing."

"The solution’s pricing is affordable and worth the money."

More HPE Primera pricing and cost advice

"I looked at other vendors for other potential projects and thought NetApp's pricing was very competitive."

"With other options, you need to buy a couple of different products to achieve the same outcome."

"All features are included in the license, whereas with an EMC solution, you have to pay separately for extra terabytes."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"NetApp AFF is somewhat pricey. If they weren't as pricey, that would be a big deal for us."

"The pricing is good."

"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."

"Our TCO has increased by 15 to 18 percent."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user186357

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

33%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

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What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

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What do you like most about HPE Primera?

For over a year, I have not seen any downtime in the product.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 37% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs HPE Primera

Compared 19% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs HPE Primera

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE Primera

Compared 7% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs HPE Primera

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE Primera Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Primera

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

June 2025

Download NetApp AFF product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Primera

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

HPE introduces HPE Primera, a new storage platform designed to deliver superior simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications
HPE Primera advances the HPE Intelligent Data Platform, a portfolio of products and solutions designed to help customers transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

NetApp AFF Benefits

Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Information Not Available

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan

Buyer's Guide

HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF

June 2025

Free Report: HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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