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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
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (4th), NAS (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of NEC D3 series is 2.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 10.7%, down from 17.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp FAS Series10.7%
NEC D3 series2.0%
Other87.3%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1369971 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
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
DIRECTOR at Vellore Online Systems
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."
"Technical support from NEC is very good."
"Our business has grown two and half times in size over six years, and we’ve added more disks and shelves, as well as upgrading controllers, and we’ve done it without any down time."
"The input and output per second performance are satisfactory."
"The most important features are SnapVault, Snapshots, and SnapMirror."
"It’s a High Availability environment in which I haven’t had problems."
"The performance allows me to provide backend storage for large number of VMs and databases at a competitive price point."
"At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature."
"A customer was running legacy FAS3140's, 5+ years old, and began deploying VDI clients on their 10GbE network, their storage became a bottleneck and seamlessly migrated to FAS8020's with FlashCache and all performance concerns have been removed, and users have complimented the performance improvement of their desktops!"
"It just works, and when some drives go into failure status, it’s just a prediction of drive failure, letting us know when to get the drives replaced."
 

Cons

"We are not satisfied with the cost of licensing and would like to have a better price to performance ratio."
"Migration from 7-Mode to Clustered Data ONTAP need improvement. It seems NetApp didn't know how to solve the main problem of migrating data from an old OS (7-Mode ) to Clustered."
"The product should include an audit log feature."
"I would like to see an improvement in the licensing on Data Mirroring (SnapMirror) features."
"The current snapshot technology in VMFS is to say the least very poor – best practice is to have no more than 2-3 snapshots in a chain (even though the maximum is 32) and to use no single snapshot for more than 24-72 hours – the reason is simple, storage performance will suffer if you create a snapshot on a VM."
"It's straightforward in 7-mode, but using cDOT, it's terrible."
"Sometimes there are bugs with firmware upgrades."
"I would like to see less latency and higher IOPS."
"The adoption of the cloud in Argentina is very slow. Customers do not move most of their applications to the cloud. Moving applications is a simple task, but the cost is a concern in Argentina. There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"If we want a ransomware solution with the product or other extended features, we need to pay an extra cost."
"The tool is expensive."
"It's not cheap, but at the same time, it's also inexpensive. It's somewhere in between."
"NetApp FAS Series' pricing is competitive."
"The only area that could be improved is to lower prices for their All Flash FAS."
"We are on a perpetual license."
"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."
"The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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?
I do not handle the pricing part of NetApp FAS Series since it is managed by the sales team.
What needs improvement with NetApp FAS Series?
There is room for improvement when it comes to response time and first-level support quality. If a new feature needs to be added, it takes some time because it is altogether a new development; othe...
 

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, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and others in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network). Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.