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NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
NetApp EF-Series All Flash ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (29th)
NetApp FAS Series
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (4th), NAS (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Tayo Olubanke - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at GCET
Offers flexibility and top-notch technology
You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.
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

"It has good stability for our company."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K, and the product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage, and from an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio."
"We have seen a good reduction in the amount of total storage space that we're using because of the deduplication."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"I have never experienced an outage with the product or had any support that was below excellent."
"The solution is very good; it offers very good performance and very good data services to customers."
"The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our databases, and what's great about this solution is that it speeds up our data store because it is a cheap solution for flash performances."
"I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse."
"The product's initial setup phase can be managed easily and completed in 20 to 30 minutes. It is one of the fastest storage tools that you can implement."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
"The deployment is very quick and very simple to use."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"For anyone who has critical workloads like Oracle databases or DB2, NetApp All-Flash Arrays will suit their needs, as long as it fits within their budget."
"It has been pretty stable, and when we have issues, the support has been great as well."
"The data management features of Data ONTAP are highly valuable for my organization in terms of data security and compliance, and with SnapMirror, Snapshot, and SnapVault in place I have not experienced data loss or unavailability, which has helped prevent escalations and allowed me to resolve issues within one to two hours while maintaining data integrity."
"NetApp FAS is highly stable and reliable, especially under a heavy load. That is what I like most about the NetApp."
"Snap mirror as it gives us a way to snap to our two disaster recovery sites to instantaneously bring up VMs Dedupe helps us to save a lot on OS files for VMs"
"It helps us meet all customer requirements. Customers have been using NetApp for many years. They are very satisfied with NetApp and continue to use NetApp and upgrade to new solutions."
"Good solution architects and deployment guys are available."
"NetApp's cloud-based PaaS has been a massive help for unstructured data."
"I like that the NetApp FAS Series can use both SAN and NAS at the same time, and that's what most customers are looking for."
 

Cons

"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"The negative aspect of Everpure FlashArray is that migrations can be somewhat complicated."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The only major drawback is the replication between EF-Series units."
"Here in Egypt, we do not have an official office or central point of support."
"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."
"The price of the All Flash solution is very high."
"If you're not using DDP, it is a little tedious to configure."
"Nonetheless, there are a couple of other things that NetApp hasn't done right."
"The EF-Series is not the most scalable solution."
"The pricing could be cheaper and it should have documentation in more languages, specifically, Russian."
"The NetApp FAS Series is not as high-performing and is not as fast. Its speed needs improvement, but this could only be done if it's an all-flash solution."
"We'd like to get more access to level-two engineers. Sometimes its been a difficult time explaining the problem to level-one people."
"It's hard to find in-person training that fits our schedule in our area. They offer a lot of online training, but we need somewhere to go because we can't really get away from the office."
"The product should include an audit log feature."
"One area that needs improvement is the hyper-converged solution. Although NetApp has a solution, compared to Nutanix, it falls short."
"I'll give technical support a "good" rating because sometimes it's slow in getting people to respond, other times it's okay."
"With scalability, we feel the system is limited."
"Unified Monitoring v6.2 loses a bunch of functionality that previous versions had."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"It's priced higher than the market."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"We have 16 or 18 arrays. We like to do the three-year support model so that we get Evergreen and therefore, we get free upgrades. We pay around more than 1.5 million dollars."
"The pricing of the solution is expensive, considering the initial investment required...At the end of the product's life cycle, it could get cheaper, but the initial investment in NetApp makes it one of the most expensive solutions."
"he price point that we're getting is very competitive in the market. Since we are buying in such a large quantity, they gave us a huge discount."
"It's a lot cheaper than what the other vendors have for the same type of environment. It saves us money."
"The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs."
"Cheaper pricing is always good. NetApp has been doing everything the right way. They've been figuring out things really well, going in the right direction."
"NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is an expensive product."
"The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt."
"Price-wise, NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is costlier than Dell. You have to buy a lot of licenses separately."
"Low-priced product, but pricing could still be made more attractive."
"It's not cheap, but at the same time, it's also inexpensive. It's somewhere in between."
"Most storage vendors also have software, or licensing bundles, which may offer the required licenses considerably cheaper, but do also maybe offer licenses, which are not needed."
"The price it not low, but comparing features to other vendors, the price can be balanced."
"it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer."
"The process for going to cluster mode is expensive."
"It is a one-time license charge for NetApp FAS Series to run and we pay annually for upgrades and support."
"In general, I find NetApp to be very expensive. That's the main issue I have with them. So it's a drawback in terms of pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise59
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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?
Regarding its pricing, I believe it is high. I utilize both HDD and SSD, where SSDs are more cost-friendly, yet HDDs ...
What needs improvement with NetApp FAS Series?
Regarding improvements for NetApp FAS Series, I think everything is generally good. If there is a need to improve som...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation
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 Dell Technologies, NetApp, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.