NetApp FAS Series vs VNX [EOL] comparison

NetApp and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category. Additionally, 96% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp FAS Series and VNX [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and others in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network).

To learn more, read our detailed Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

June 2026

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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

Everpure FlashArray

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV

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.

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Srikanth Purushothaman

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.

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Alireza Zabihi

Works at AIT

The Nimble CS-Series has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime

When we started the process of looking for a SAN vendor I had four primary criteria: reliability, performance, cost, and simplicity. We were really looking for a unicorn and were fully expected to have to make compromises in one of those areas. The Nimble CS-Series was recommended by our solutions provider, and we were blown away. Not only was it the most affordable option, but it was the easiest to deploy, had the best performance, and has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability is perfect, the reliability is 100%, and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."

"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."

"Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput."

"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."

"I am satisfied with this solution, and we plan to keep using this solution."

"The most valuable features would be its performance, retrieval, recovery, and backup, and it meets the customer's expectations."

"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."

"It allows engineers to focus on other things rather than doing the more manual tasks. It automates tasks, so the ease of use is extreme. It simplifies the storage."

More Everpure FlashArray pros

"Enables us to handle business critical data with HA."

"The solution is easy to use."

"The most important features are SnapVault, Snapshots, and SnapMirror."

"The most valuable features are the NAS features and NetApp's excellent support."

"Of all storage technologies I work on, it’s the easiest to learn and one of the most powerful."

"Overall I think NetApp are finally in a good place with cDOT and they can now put the 7-Mode platform behind them and focus on innovating."

"Good bang for the buck."

"Compression of the backup Oracle by RMAN on NFS saves space 5:1."

More NetApp FAS Series pros

"Integration with VMware"

"Reliability, excellent support by EMC, and VMware integration High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."

"We moved from CX with FC/SATA to VNX with SSD, SAS, NL-SAS and using SSD as Fast Cache we have seen huge performance gains in certain operations."

"I think it's a good solution; it has many benefits and features that are of interest for many customers."

"It’s amazing, you can add and stack, and add more elements."

"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."

"One thing I would like to explicitly mention here is the EMC support; it is by far one of the best supports you will ever get in comparison with any vendor."

"Not only was it the most affordable option, but it was the easiest to deploy, had the best performance, and has proven to be reliable with 100% uptime."

More VNX [EOL] pros

Cons

"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."

"It is a bit expensive."

"It would be beneficial to have a health check command that can be run from the CLI to ensure that all hardware components are functioning properly rather than having to enable remote access and connect to support for a health check."

"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."

"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."

"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."

"There was some complexity in the initial setup."

"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."

More Everpure FlashArray cons

"No other area for improvement comes to mind other than its price. Making the price more attractive will help this solution have a bigger market share."

"For long term partnership in Myanmar, the local warehouse should be built in Myanmar that's something I'd like to see. We have some issues with supply so there is sometimes a delay in getting the hardware."

"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 not a cheap system. It is very expensive. The pricing has been ridiculous every time that we had to renew the support."

"One thing that burned me is that it surprised me how much overhead it uses, like 30% right off the top."

"I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested."

"Replication should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle."

"Unified Monitoring v6.2 loses a bunch of functionality that previous versions had."

More NetApp FAS Series cons

"EMC products are costly when compared to other vendors such HP, Hitachi, Dell, and NetApp."

"I do not recommend the Gen 1 VNX to anyone in this day and age."

"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."

"We actually had data loss from too many simultaneous drive failures on the 7500."

"The management software used for the VNX is Unicenter. While it is an improvement over Navicenter, used in older EMC SANs, it still feels outdated in comparison to other SAN management software."

"We have had some scalability issues. Scalability options are limited due to the supported SSDs."

"It only supports 10Gb copper, and cannot do 10Gb fiber."

"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."

More VNX [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It could always be lower, but it's okay."

"In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for, as it's not priced for you to buy one off-the-shelf. If you have a use case, heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of noticeable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or need low latency and high throughput, you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage."

"It is cheaper than NetApp."

"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."

"There are no licensing fees or other costs."

"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."

"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray is expensive."

"The pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray is reasonable."

More Everpure FlashArray pricing and cost advice

"NetApp FAS Series is a reasonably high-priced solution, partially because we select the configuration that duplicates the entire system."

"It is expensive."

"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."

"We purchased it for four years, and it wasn't expensive. It was reasonable. Every company has a different agreement with NetApp. We got everything we wanted with all the bells and whistles and all the features and functionalities."

"The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive."

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive. We pay a one-time purchase price."

"The price, compared to competitors, is quite high."

"The product's pricing is reasonable."

More NetApp FAS Series pricing and cost advice

"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive"

"Make sure you understand how the licensing works and that you are getting the right set of licenses if you need array-to-array replication."

"Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead."

"While EMC tends to be on the expensive side, the stability and support of their products are top-notch and I feel are worth the cost."

"Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume."

"The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable. Yearly EMC is more expensive."

"Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Construction Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	71
Midsize Enterprise	38
Large Enterprise	159

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	31
Midsize Enterprise	38
Large Enterprise	59

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	23

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?

I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...

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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...

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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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 11% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 7% of the time

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Dell PowerScale vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 25% of the time

Qumulo vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 5% of the time

HPE MSA vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 4% of the time

HPE StoreOnce vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 4% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 3% of the time

More NetApp FAS Series Competitors

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs VNX [EOL]

Compared 28% of the time

HPE MSA vs VNX [EOL]

Compared 28% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs VNX [EOL]

Compared 18% of the time

Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance vs VNX [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

More VNX [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Everpure FlashArray

July 2026

Download Everpure FlashArray product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp FAS Series

June 2026

Download NetApp FAS Series product report

Buyer's Guide

VNX [EOL]

June 2026

Download VNX [EOL] product report

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray

No data available

VNX

Overview

The FlashArray family delivers consistent, high-performance data services across block, file, and object workloads. As part of the Everpure Platform, it provides the foundation for a unified data plane, enabling applications to reliably access, protect, and manage data across environments with simplicity and predictability. With built-in capabilities such as inline data reduction, snapshots, replication, and ransomware resilience, FlashArray ensures efficient operations, protected data, and consistent application uptime.

As the foundation of the (unified) data plane, FlashArray enables policy-driven automation, monitoring, and centralized management while integrating across cloud and on-premises environments. Built on an Evergreen architecture, it supports non-disruptive upgrades and continuous performance improvements over time while simplifying operations at scale.

What Key Features Does FlashArray Offer?

Simplicity and Speed: Easy management and rapid performance enhancements.
Data Reduction: Effective deduplication and compression.
Flash Architecture: Seamless upgrades and outstanding resilience.
VMware Integration: Excellent compatibility with virtualization platforms.
Predictive Analytics: Strong insights for proactive management.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Reliability: Proactive support with minimal downtime.
Efficiency: Reduced storage footprint and enhanced data management.
Performance: Faster processing speeds and low latency.
User Experience: Simplified management with Evergreen model.

In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage)

NetApp FAS Series offers high availability and seamless protocol integration. Known for its robust features such as data replication and efficient storage architecture, it finds use in challenging enterprise environments and virtualization.

NetApp FAS Series delivers valuable enterprise storage capabilities with an emphasis on unified storage architectures supporting SAN and NAS functionalities. Features like high availability, robust snapshot technology, and seamless protocol integration cater to diverse workloads. Data replication through SnapMirror and reliable performance under heavy loads are appreciated. Deduplication and compression enhance storage efficiency while scalability, resilience, and strong customer support further its appeal. Improvements are desired in flexibility, documentation, speed, and affordability. Additionally, its monitoring capabilities and cloud integration need attention. Organizations employ FAS Series for enterprise storage, SQL Server LUNs, Exchange LUNs, VMware, and corporate file sharing.

What are the most notable features of NetApp FAS Series?

High Availability: Ensures continuous access and reduces downtime.
Snapshot Technology: Offers point-in-time copies for data recovery.
SnapMirror: Provides efficient data replication for disaster recovery.
Storage Efficiency: Deduplication and compression optimize storage use.
Cloud Integration: Enhances flexibility with cloud environments.

What benefits should be examined in reviews?

Scalability: Supports expanding storage needs without performance loss.
Reliability: Maintains robust performance under heavy workloads.
Strong Support: Access to helpful customer service resources.
Cost Efficiency: Consider value in context of feature set and performance.

In industries such as finance and healthcare, NetApp FAS Series is implemented for centralized data management, supporting complex protocols like NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI. This enables efficient handling of virtualization, databases, unified storage tasks, and backup solutions crucial for maintaining unstructured data and redundancy.

NetApp

With EMC VNX you'll have the right blend of flash, capacity, and application-aware software. Scale up storage for midrange workloads, optimized for virtual applications and cloud environments.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas

Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College

Samsonite, Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Kindred Healthcare

Buyer's Guide

Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

June 2026

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