NetApp AFF vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800 comparison

NetApp AFF and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. NetApp AFF is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.1, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.6. NetApp AFF holds a 20.0% mindshare in N, compared to NetApp NVMe AFF A800’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of NetApp AFF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

NetApp AFF and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 are both designed for high-performance data storage, competing in the enterprise data storage category. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and superior performance, based on user reviews.

Features: NetApp AFF is noted for its easy integration, comprehensive data management features, and reliable performance. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 stands out for its high-speed data access, low latency, and superior throughput, favoring demanding applications.

Room For Improvement: NetApp AFF users suggest scalability improvements and updates in certain functionalities, with NetApp NVMe AFF A800 needing simplified configuration and better documentation. AFF A800 demands more sophisticated insights due to its advanced architecture.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp AFF is often highlighted for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service, minimizing downtime. AFF A800, while offering stellar performance, can be complex to deploy, but users commend its effective customer support.

Pricing and ROI: NetApp AFF is noted for its cost-effectiveness and solid ROI, appealing to budget-conscious buyers. NVMe AFF A800, despite its higher setup cost, is seen as a worthwhile investment due to its exceptional performance and potential for higher long-term ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed NetApp AFF vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800

May 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 June 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.8%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 20.0%, up from 19.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is 2.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

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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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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Tanveer Rahman

Chief Technical Office at Novotel Ltd.

A scalable solution that serves as a storage for the cloud services opted by organizations

My company uses NetApp NVMe AFF A800 as storage for our cloud The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O. The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better. I don't expect to see additional…

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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

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

"The solution is scalable."

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

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

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The most valuable feature is speed."

"It provides simplicity. Previously, there was not any kind of unified structure to our multisite storage infrastructure. We now have multiple sites where we have been able to install NetApp, and through ONTAP and BlueXP, control all of them from one pane of glass, which has been very powerful for us."

"The file-based protocol supports NFS and CIFS."

"One of the main features that differentiate AFF from the FAS products, or some other technologies used, is the footprint of these arrays are significantly smaller than the traditional ones. Also, the performance that you get to these new arrays is really significant. You can see a huge difference there. By switching to it, we can achieve more storage performance and efficiency as well as in the long run lower down some of the TCOs due to reducing the footprint."

"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."

"The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability."

"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."

"We found AFF systems very competitive in terms of performance, storage efficiency, feature richness, and scalability."

More NetApp AFF pros

"Low latency is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."

"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."

"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."

"We find the product to be very flexible."

"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."

"The most valuable features are stability and performance."

"During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best."

More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 pros

Cons

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"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."

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

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

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

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

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"The software layer has to improve."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The support documentation has room for improvement."

"This solution should be made easier to deploy."

"You have a limit in terms of how much you can expand storage. It sounds like a lot. However, over the years, as you grow, it may be smaller than you think."

"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."

"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."

"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."

"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."

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

More NetApp AFF cons

"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."

"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."

"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."

"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."

"The initial setup is complex."

"The product’s UI could be better."

"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."

"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"

More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."

"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'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."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"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."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down."

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

"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"

"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."

"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."

"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."

"The price to performance ratio with NetApp is unmatched by any other vendor right now."

"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."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."

"Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive."

"Considering the requirements and the situation, I don't feel that this is an expensive product."

"There are licenses for the use of this solution, such as commercial licenses."

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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

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

52%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

22%

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Educational Organization

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 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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp NVMe AFF A800?

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp NVMe AFF A800?

Though NetApp NVMe AFF A800 may seem like a highly-priced product, it is not extremely expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp NVMe AFF A800?

The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better. I don't expect to s...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 29% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 18% 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

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Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF

Compared 10% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

NetApp ASA vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800

Compared 27% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800

Compared 22% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp NVMe AFF A800

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp NVMe AFF A800 Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

May 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

May 2025

Download NetApp AFF product report

Buyer's Guide

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

May 2025

Download NetApp NVMe AFF A800 product report

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

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

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

Your data is a gold mine. Get the most out of it - faster - with AFF A800. Designed for NVMe media, further accelerated with NVMe/FC connectivity to the host, AFF A800 all-flash systems deliver an incredible sub-200 microsecond latency. Providing more than 11.4M IOPS and 300GB/s throughput in a single cluster, AFF A800 redefines the limit of what’s possible with artificial intelligence and deep learning.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800

May 2025

Free Report: NetApp AFF vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800

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