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Huawei OceanStor Dorado 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:
 

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)
Huawei OceanStor Dorado
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
37
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
312
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

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 Huawei OceanStor Dorado is 4.5%, up from 4.1% 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 - 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.
TOLGA ALNIAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ransomware protection for files stored on servers
Data processing is the most important feature. We are using Huawei OceanStor Dorado, which employs SSD storage on the hardware side. No reported performance issues or improvements are required for our systems because all of the systems run on memory on the host side. The Oracle data and Oracle virtual machines also operate from memory. Additionally, we use Oracle for patching systems, with all data residing in memory. There is some latency during backup times, typically at night, but this is acceptable for us. These latencies occur outside of office hours, so they do not impact our operations during normal times when there is no noticeable latency.
Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"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."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The support team is responsive and effective in addressing any issues that arise."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the price to performance ratio."
"The fast performance and reasonable pricing of Huawei OceanStor Dorado are the main reasons we sell them."
"The installation and management are very easy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SmartMigration, HyperReplication, HyperSnap, HyperCopy, HyperClone, SmartPartition, and SmartCache."
"The most valuable aspects encompass a comprehensive set of common features, such as NetFlow technology, hyper-micro, and hyper-application functionalities."
"The initial setup is straightforward. Deployment takes about a day."
"The performance is good."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The stability is solid. It doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want. We are in a critical business that we can't have any percentage of downtime."
"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."
"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."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"One of the key areas that need enhancement pertains to the software procurement process."
"The technology and the features need improvement."
"Difficult integration with third parties."
"For future releases, it would be beneficial for OceanStor Dorado to integrate advanced analytics and AI-driven functionalities for predictive maintenance and performance optimization."
"An area of this product that has room for improvement is the NAS capability."
"Huawei OceanStor Dorado could improve by having a multi-tier cloud option and additional protocols"
"There are some limitations to this product because they do not have unified storage."
"This solution can improve by providing easier migrations and better Metro features."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once you've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to."
"On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release."
"I know they're working well with Microsoft and VMware. However, they could integrate with more."
"Stability could be improved."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported."
"One of the challenges we face with NetApp is identifying bottlenecks in the systems they integrate with."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"This product is not too expensive, and the price is competitive on the market."
"There are some costs in addition to the standard licensing fees, depending on the requirements."
"The price of the solution is reasonable. There is not a vendor that offers an All-Flash Storage Array at the price of Huawei OceanStor Dorado. The other solutions are approximately 50% higher."
"We saw ROI in terms of both money and time saved. It is worth the price."
"It stands out as the fastest purpose-built storage solution available on the market, and the pricing is highly competitive and excellent."
"You need to pay for the license."
"I rate the pricing a six on a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, not cost-effective, and ten is cheap."
"The price of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is very inexpensive, it cost approximately $5 per gigabyte."
"Look at the different options that NetApp offers. Look for a model and option which fits your needs correctly. Don't buy a low-end product for a high-end job."
"The licensing and pricing are fine. As a reseller for the product, we need to make the differentiation in the minds of the customer. They are not just buying some tool that does only one thing, e.g., showing a LAN for a customer. The pricing is fair for what it is."
"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
"We have been able to utilize and leverage equipment which was purchased a decade ago up until this past year. So, we were running disk shells for 13 years and all we were doing was upgrading the filings and controllers, and using the same disk shells. Therefore, we were able to do something where we didn't have to invest that much. Recently, we had to upgrade all our disk shells, but it was a lot less because the technology had changed a lot since those times. It is faster now, and we have SSDs. We have larger drives that are 4TBs and 6TBs. Everything can condense so we are saving disk shell space and rack space. We are paying less now than we did at that time"
"One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license."
"Our space savings through dedupe and compression is over 50 percent, so we are saving. I think our 8080s has 20TBs. We are saving at least 10TBs and that's over 50 percent of the capacity that we're using."
"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."
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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
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
52%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

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 Huawei OceanStor Dorado?
The product has the best compression and encryption features. The most valuable features I have found in the tool are...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Huawei OceanStor Dorado?
The products they offer are quite cheap. However, I do not have much information about licensing since we don't buy t...
What needs improvement with Huawei OceanStor Dorado?
Some customers have reported not understanding how the immutable part can be unlocked. From my perspective, it's not ...
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
OceanStor Dorado V3 All-Flash Storage System
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Telecom Italia, Hi3G Sweden, KPN
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.