Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs NetApp AFF comparison

Huawei and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Huawei is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.8, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.1. Huawei holds a 4.5% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 9.4% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Huawei 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 Huawei OceanStor Dorado compete in the high-performance storage market. NetApp AFF holds the upper hand in deployment ease and customer support, while Huawei OceanStor Dorado is noted for its superior performance features.

Features:NetApp AFF users highlight efficient data management, multiple protocol support, and scalable options as key features. Huawei OceanStor Dorado users value its exceptional performance, intelligent data tiering, and high-speed flash storage capabilities.

Room for Improvement:NetApp AFF users suggest improvements in the firmware update process, enhanced integration with other systems, and more thorough documentation. Huawei OceanStor Dorado users propose better documentation, streamlined support services, and improved interoperability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:NetApp AFF is praised for its intuitive deployment process and responsive customer service. Huawei OceanStor Dorado, although powerful in performance, is perceived as more complex during deployment and receives mixed feedback regarding customer service.

Pricing and ROI:NetApp AFF is viewed as more cost-effective with a quicker return on investment. Huawei OceanStor Dorado requires a higher initial investment, but its advanced features can lead to a beneficial ROI in performance-critical environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs. NetApp AFF Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Huawei OceanStor Dorado 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 July 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 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.4%, 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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Saleem Ahmed

Cloud Architect at ESDS Software Solution Pvt Ltd.

A highly stable solution that provides features like SmartMigration, HyperReplication, and SmartPartition

Other Huawei mid-end storages, like 5600 and 5500, are very easy to use. Engineers with two to three years of experience with Huawei will find that Huawei OceanStor Dorado is a bit complicated to use compared to other Huawei storages. Unlike other storages, you cannot configure the disk domain and storage pool in Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

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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

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

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

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"The latency is good."

"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."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado is equipped with powerful controllers"

"The platform’s most valuable features are speed, accuracy, and encryption."

"The integrated Huawei Flash technology within OceanStor Dorado stands out as one of the most valuable features."

"There are plenty of features available in this solution."

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado is fast and has significantly improved data storage efficiency."

"This is a stable product that we can use for DR in production."

"The deduplication features and the graphical user interface (GUI) of the solution are the most valuable to me."

"Two things really stand out for me. First, there's group cloning, which is very nice. It simplifies managing multiple clones across the group. Second, Huawei's multi-controller architecture with load balancing is a good part."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado pros

"The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files."

"We're not fully utilizing NetApp's Converge BlueXP, but it's a great help. It integrates on-prem and cold storage and provides disaster recovery. We'll see more benefits as it improves."

"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."

"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."

"Multi-protocol is the most valuable feature for us. It does everything in one system: sifts, EBES, ISCSI, and fiber channel. Other systems don't do all that."

"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."

"If the data is deduplicated, we'll hopefully begin to save space."

"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"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."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado could improve the integration, there have been some compatibility issues with some operating system functions."

"For future releases, it would be beneficial for OceanStor Dorado to integrate advanced analytics and AI-driven functionalities for predictive maintenance and performance optimization."

"In additional features, it would be easier to do snapshots on a regular basis. So, like, a new feature that would allow you to take snapshots every hour."

"Having distinct modules for data compression and encryption features enhances flexibility and performance optimization for users with varying requirements."

"Difficult integration with third parties."

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado could improve by having a multi-tier cloud option and additional protocols"

"It should have easy connectivity with the AIX, however, I've found that with AIX, it has some issues and due to this, we need to remove the exact fiber card sometimes and then plug it in again so that it can connect with the AIX systems."

"From the customer's point of view, Huawei OceanStor Dorado is expensive."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado cons

"NetApp AFF is a highly expensive solution, and its pricing should be reduced."

"I need faster Fibre Channel over Ethernet. They top out at 10GBs today and I would like that to go to 40 or 100."

"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."

"The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions."

"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."

"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."

"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."

"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."

More NetApp AFF cons

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 VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

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

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The price of Huawei OceanStor Dorado is very inexpensive, it cost approximately $5 per gigabyte."

"Huawei OceanStor Dorado is more affordable than the competitor solutions"

"Huawei has very good pricing. They have some promotions that can be taken advantage of at certain times of the year, such as the end of December. They are providing aggressive pricing. In the Pakistan market, they are ready to beat any vendor in Pakistan because they want to grab the market."

"We usually recommend our customers choose advanced licensing and enterprise companies are more inclined to choose this solution because it is more cost-effective than competitors."

"The solution's licensing structure needs improvement."

"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."

"It's not easy to receive an upgrade license of Huawei OceanStor Dorado. It's easy to buy OceanStor with several features, but when you want to add on features later it's not easy. I had some problems."

"The pricing is one thing that works for them. I think their pricing is more competitively affordable than these top competitors."

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is competitive when we compare it to other products."

"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."

"It is pretty expensive compared to other solutions. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10 in price (where 10 is expensive) compared to similar solutions."

"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"

"NetApps offers a lot of different options. Just take your time and work with the consulting teams. Lay out what your needs are to ensure you are purchasing what will help you be successful."

"Its price is quite competitive, but there is still scope for better pricing."

"I think the pricing and licensing are a little high, but compared to those of other storage vendors, it's within reason. After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."

"We would like it to be free."

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

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

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

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

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...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 28% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 19% 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

Dell PowerStore vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 17% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 14% of the time

Huawei OceanStor vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Compared 6% of the time

More Huawei OceanStor Dorado 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 8% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 4% 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

Huawei OceanStor Dorado

June 2025

Download Huawei OceanStor Dorado product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

June 2025

Download NetApp AFF product report

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

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

Huawei's OceanStor Dorado V3 all-flash storage is the ideal choice for enterprises' mission-critical business. It is the industry's first commercial use of NVMe all-flash storage, and it delivers high-performing, reliable, and efficient storage services.

Huawei

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

Telecom Italia, Hi3G Sweden, KPN

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan

Buyer's Guide

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs. NetApp AFF

June 2025

Free Report: Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs. NetApp AFF

Find out what your peers are saying about Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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