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NetApp AFF vs NetApp E-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 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 NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (12th)
NetApp AFF
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
314
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
NetApp E-Series
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 3.6%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 17.0%, down from 20.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp E-Series is 3.0%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp AFF17.0%
Pure FlashArray X NVMe3.6%
NetApp E-Series3.0%
Other76.4%
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
KennethEtsula - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager at Spartec
Offers seamless installation and efficient data handling with robust support
NetApp AFF provides an all-flash storage solution for unified SAN solutions, supporting both SAN and NAS functionalities. Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF. With the storage efficiency from a NetApp AFF installation, users can manage substantial data running on all-flash. The features such as compaction and compression provide storage efficiency guarantees in an all-flash environment.
MB
IT-Techniker at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Have struggled with timely expert support and faced communication challenges during critical maintenance tasks
As an AZ3 technician with experience in that direction, when I call them, I do not call the first-level support as it is something I do not need. I call them because I am not able to resolve that mistake or when the behavior of the machine is not normal. If you need an auto support message from the customer machine, you can get them from the first level, but most of the time, they do not know what an auto support message is, and everything stops there. You have a few of them when you call, and when we are replacing something in NetApp E-Series. StorageGRID is different, but with NetApp E-Series, you need to grab information from the node that is actually down; in most cases, the node is not in loader. It is entirely gone. You can try to reseat it, maybe boot it up, but in most cases, when it is down, it stays down. You call support for that, and that is when you lose two or three hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The solution is scalable."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"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."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"The latency is good."
"Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT.""
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away."
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"The Snapshot feature is actually widely used; it is a feature that only NetApp E-Series has and it is quite good."
"If we select the best use case for NetApp E-Series based on its intended purpose, I would rate it a ten."
"My customers are satisfied with the performance."
"The overall experience has been positive."
"Customers go for the E Series if they need backup storage because it is cheap."
"The product is easy to use."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"The licensing cost of the product is expensive, and when combined with support, it becomes quite costly."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"Stability could be improved."
"I honestly don't have anything of note on how they can improve."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better."
"The solution must provide more training courses."
"With NetApp E-Series, when we are running active-active NAS4, sometimes due to either an issue or a bug, we experience failures. At least twice yearly, we have seen this issue. When it occurs, we lose critical systems such as MQ."
"Getting through first level to second level takes two hours minimum."
"NetApp should add more production lines to the E series so we can make flexible solutions more easily."
"Regarding error handling in NetApp E-Series, because it is a cost-effective but not an intelligent storage solution, the error handling is not sufficient."
"Though the performance is there, if NetApp wants to be competitive with the others, it must improve their business continuity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"The product is expensive."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down."
"Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%."
"I do not deal with pricing, but the pricing of NetApp and Dell seems pretty close. NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support."
"I am able to store two times more data than what I'm purchasing, which affects the way funds are being utilized."
"The price to performance ratio with NetApp is unmatched by any other vendor right now."
"Obviously depending on the price point, NetApp is obviously a little more expensive than your generic Dell SAN solution or whatever."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable for what we get. But if you have to buy any more disk space, it can be quite expensive."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive product, although not compared to other vendors."
"The price is reasonable for NetApp E-Series."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
5%
Manufacturing Company
21%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
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...
What needs improvement with NetApp E-Series?
Regarding scalability, I think there is no problem. While there is always room for improvement in any product, to my ...
What is your primary use case for NetApp E-Series?
We sell NetApp E-Series as engineered machines like FlexPod, which is used where high throughput and native storage p...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp AFF vs. NetApp E-Series and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.