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NEC D3 series vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

NEC D3 series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp FAS Series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (3rd), NAS (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of NEC D3 series is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 15.2%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp FAS Series15.2%
NEC D3 series1.2%
Other83.6%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1369971 - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable, performs well, and the technical support is good
We use this storage solution to host our ERP, CRM, file server, databases, and lots of other things The performance is better than with our previous version. We are not satisfied with the cost of licensing and would like to have a better price to performance ratio. We have had contract-related…
Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported long-term data protection and backup while requiring better part availability and pricing options
For monitoring purposes, we normally use flash access storage exclusively. We utilize a hybrid system because we need performance, combining NL-SAS for the volume and SAS flash to use as a fast cache system that provides more IOPS. We normally implement RAID 10, which we prefer over RAID 6's n plus 2 combinations. We utilize it for data redundancy, even with write intensity on. Regarding the unified storage architecture for NetApp FAS Series, we normally opt for exclusivity unless budget constraints exist. Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k. The high performance ensures minimal latency. An advantage we've seen with NetApp FAS Series is that snapshots provide very rapid backup and fast recovery. We basically use snapshots for data protection as first-level protection, with deduplication between the two storages serving as second-level protection.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The performance is better than with our previous version."
"The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is its stability."
"Fast Snapshots"
"It is good to have a unified storage where you can have block and file level protocols."
"The solution has tiers inside which means we do not only need to use SSDs."
"​NAS stability"
"The migration of the volume on the cluster is very useful and easy to use."
"Flexible and reliable storage solution with multiple features such as cloning, replication, and deduplication. Data migration can be done without any performance implications on the production systems."
"The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems."
 

Cons

"We are not satisfied with the cost of licensing and would like to have a better price to performance ratio."
"We no longer have OEM support in South Africa which is not helpful, it can be difficult. They should add an office back to the country because it was better."
"There are some technical limitations, but it would be great to have in-line deduplication and in-line compression for the FAS series as well."
"The WAFL is slow."
"It lacks automatic tiering, When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives."
"NetApp could improve costs while making the solution more straightforward to use and deploy."
"It could be more flexible in terms of configuration."
"It was not possible to have a custom user inside ONTAP without the delete permission to delete the volume. We wanted others to be able to create a SnapMirror and volume, but have no volume deletion permission. In the newest version, it seems to already be in place, but there was a bug enabling this one in older versions 9.11, 9.10, or earlier."
"They should add new features to the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It’s difficult for us to get money, so make sure you get everything in order, because there’s no going back and saying “oh, I missed this or that”, so make sure you plan well and well in advance."
"The price, compared to competitors, is quite high."
"The solution’s cost is reasonable."
"If we want a ransomware solution with the product or other extended features, we need to pay an extra cost."
"The price of the NetApp FAS Series is reasonable and it provides value for the money with the feature sets. NetApp FAS Series are competing with Huawei storage which has an office and does aggressive marketing with a discount. However, we found that if our customers do a technology refresh they are happy with the performance of the NetApp FAS Series."
"It is a moderately low-priced platform."
"The process for going to cluster mode is expensive."
"The tool is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

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Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?
Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They fo...
 

Also Known As

D3 series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tsukuba Science City, Hokkaido Telecommunication Network Co. Inc, PHP Institute
Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, IBM, Hitachi Vantara and others in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network). Updated: October 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.