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NetApp AFF vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.7
NetApp AFF enhances performance and storage efficiency with cost savings, better response times, and reduced downtime, proving ROI.
Sentiment score
1.0
Organizations reduced costs and improved performance with Pure FlashArray X NVMe, achieving quick ROI and efficient resource management.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.2
NetApp AFF's customer service is praised for responsiveness and resolution speed, though response times and consistency can vary.
Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe's technical support is praised for responsiveness, despite occasional follow-up issues, earning high customer satisfaction.
The support for NetApp AFF is comprehensive—not just the documentation for self-guided reading, but for simple questions, spare parts, or urgent needs, you can have a contract that enables delivery the next business day or within four hours, depending on your process requirements.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
NetApp AFF offers scalable, adaptable storage solutions, easily expanding without disruption, though cost and physical limits present challenges.
Sentiment score
7.1
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers scalable storage with low latency, easy upgrades, though capacity customization and high costs are noted.
You can add more disks, more disk shelves, or migrate the data seamlessly.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
NetApp AFF is highly stable, reliable, and handles tasks without disruption, with minor bugs resolved quickly.
Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage offers exceptional stability and reliability with outstanding support, consistently achieving high user ratings for performance and service.
They have always been upgrading very fast and implementing patches to resolve these issues.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

NetApp AFF users seek easier setup, enhanced management, lower latency, better support, improved documentation, and cost-effective, scalable solutions.
Pure FlashArray X requires cost-effective improvements in UI, integration, cloud features, multitenancy, analytics, backup, AI, and scalability.
The GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect.
Our backup system, Commvault, has an amazing capacity to do compression and deduplication better than NetApp AFF by itself.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
 

Setup Cost

NetApp AFF pricing varies widely, viewed as expensive yet cost-effective, with negotiation impacting affordability and overall value justifying costs.
Enterprise buyers see Pure FlashArray X NVMe as a justified premium investment due to performance and comprehensive licensing.
NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support.
While it is not cheap, they have introduced a new series of AFF that are more affordable.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
 

Valuable Features

NetApp AFF excels with efficiency, seamless ONTAP integration, ease of use, high availability, low latency, and real-time replication.
Pure FlashArray X NVMe offers exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and seamless VMware integration, enhancing workload efficiency and user experience.
You can even download the ONTAP simulator and deploy it on your virtualization platform and test almost all features.
Two important features that NetApp AFF has are the performance and the capacity to save data against attacks in general or hardware failure.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
 

Categories and Ranking

NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
312
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of NetApp AFF is 19.7%, down from 20.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.9%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
 

Featured Reviews

Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 the same volume that features is difficult to find in other Storage but the flexi...
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 cost is decisively based on the Gartner magic quadrant storage 2020 Net app compa...
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 matters more than IOPS for your needs, Netapp AFF is the right choice. You can appro...
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 Evergreen monthly payment. I do not know the exact device price, but I think the ...
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 be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, b...
 

Also Known As

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp AFF vs. Pure FlashArray X NVMe and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.