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ExaGrid EX Series vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

 

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

ExaGrid EX Series
Ranking in Deduplication Software
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp FAS Series
Ranking in Deduplication Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
NAS (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Deduplication Software category, the mindshare of ExaGrid EX Series is 6.1%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 3.8%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Deduplication Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp FAS Series3.8%
ExaGrid EX Series6.1%
Other90.1%
Deduplication Software
 

Featured Reviews

DG
Information Technology advisor at Lotus Consulting
Improvements in data storage efficiency and customer support experience
ExaGrid EX Series and Veeam was easy to set up, and it worked seamlessly. It was very simple to use. We rarely needed to touch the ExaGrid boxes, except for upgrades. With the systems engineer from ExaGrid, and with our common knowledge of backup software, it was very easy to use. The performance was good, the interface was good, and the GUI was good. When ExaGrid introduced the air gapped feature, it was almost complete. Almost every hardware vendor has an air gapped feature, but they were significantly ahead of other vendors. The air gapped and immutable storage are very nice features. The price compared to other competitors was good with better features. It is not a cheap product, but compared to the features, it is a good competitor.
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

"The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the process is fast, ensuring smooth backup and recovery operations at high speeds. However, the process becomes slower for long-term backups moved to the retention zone due to fragmentation. So, if the data is older than a few days, the speed may be limited, especially for non-deduplicated data in the landing zone."
"It is a solid and a quite simple solution, which is a good combination. The customers like the simplicity and its scale-out capacity. They like the support pricing, and even the extension capacity pricing, a fixed price, which the executive is offering in Czech market."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and data deduplication. It's extremely easy to use and does a very good job of data deduplication and compression."
"One of the main features is the landing zone, it is a particular space where the information is not duplicated."
"The most valuable features of the solution are deduplication and landing zone."
"ExaGrid EX Series and Veeam was easy to set up, and it worked seamlessly."
"The solution easily integrates with the backup targets, such as Veeam."
"The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems."
"NetApp FAS Series is simple to set up."
"You can use different protocols at the same time. Monitoring is also very easy in NetApp FAS Series. There is a free tool for monitoring."
"The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage."
"Saves space with deduplication"
"Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature for us is the combining of HA and SnapMirror."
"I would definitely recommend NetApp FAS Series to other users because it's stable and really handy for IT personnel who manage it."
 

Cons

"I would like for them to develop direct cloud integration with a third-party cloud. Direct integration with AWS and other cloud providers."
"When speaking about a scale-out, you want to have better equipment. You cannot just add a disc to the foreign equipment. You have to buy another one and put it together, like parallel."
"The product's documentation can be made more precise."
"The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against ransomware attacks. As a result, the retention zone with duplicated data is experiencing more demand, leading to space constraints. This necessitates using higher-end, more expensive models to address the issue."
"The one place where we are sometimes losing the opportunity with ExaGrid is that a few customers still require a fiber channel connectivity, which is not always possible."
"The solution could improve by switching to a flash-type solution rather than the spinning drives that they currently use. However, we have not had any failure with the spinning drives. The flash-type drives are more up-to-date and are something that is in their roadmap."
"Currently, the newest release is not HCI friendly."
"There is room for improvement in deployment and configuration processes."
"The only downside is in ease in management; it is not easy to use."
"Dedicated storage efficiency accelerators could improve the overall performance of the system."
"It could be more flexible in terms of configuration."
"It's not a cheap system. It is very expensive. The pricing has been ridiculous every time that we had to renew the support."
"It was not possible to have a custom user inside ONTAP without the delete permission to delete the volume. We wanted others to be able to create a SnapMirror and volume, but have no volume deletion permission. In the newest version, it seems to already be in place, but there was a bug enabling this one in older versions 9.11, 9.10, or earlier."
"NetApp FAS Series should improve its price, which is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The previous solutions I have used both included the Backup Software and the Appliance making it hard to compare to this solution. However, overall the solution is reasonably priced for the features you receive. ExaGrid EX Series is priced better than HP, Dell, and possibly Commvault which I have compared in the past."
"My company had to pay 1,60,000 EUR for the system we use, and the payment was made just once for the system and five years of full support."
"I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten."
"The current agreement has 21 terabytes of free space and it cost approximately $35,000."
"In comparison to other solutions, it's affordable. They're all too expensive."
"The product is on the expensive side."
"The solution’s cost is reasonable."
"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 are on a perpetual license."
"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 price, compared to competitors, is quite high."
"The solution is more expensive than other vendors."
"The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ExaGrid EX Series?
The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ExaGrid EX Series?
I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with ExaGrid EX Series?
Everything can always be better, so I would give it a nine.
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?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They fo...
 

Also Known As

EX Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NCI Group, North Attleborough Public School, North Kingstown School Department, NPS Pharmaceuticals, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Rathbone Brothers PLC, Rio Hondo College, Ruder Finn, Sarah Lawrence College
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 ExaGrid EX Series vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,821 professionals have used our research since 2012.