Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL] vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Hitachi Vantara and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Additionally, 100% of Hitachi Vantara users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL] and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in All-Flash Storage.

To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

October 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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it_user1205586

Chief Solutions Architect at Science Applications International Corporation

Good price-performance ratio, provides simplified provisioning and management

We use this solution for provisioning and management The most valuable features are simplified provisioning and management, de-duplication, and built-in encryption. The exterior display needs to be improved. Sorry, I like the blue lights the competition has, but maybe we can see green led lights…

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Mir Gulzar Ahmed

IT Manager at Synergy Computers

Unified storage has delivered efficient AI analytics and low latency for critical workloads

There might be some lag or response time with respect to support cases, but even then I will rate it 8.5 out of 10. All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond. The only reason I rated it 8.5 is because the warehouse for spare parts, when a problem comes, a spare is needed to replace it, for example, a disk. In Pakistan, they have only one warehouse in Karachi. This warehouse manages all the problems when a problem comes. They ship the part based on the customer use case and customer service request. That is the only reason I rate it 8.5 because they have only one warehouse in Pakistan, which is in Karachi. For example, if a problem comes in Islamabad, it will take time to deliver the spare because the part will be shipped from Karachi to Islamabad, which will take around maybe a day. Other OEMs have their warehouses in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi also. In terms of part replacement requirements, they are very efficient in that area because they have warehouses in multiple cities of Pakistan.

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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

"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."

"Pure Storage FlashArray provides immediate benefits to our customers with its easy setup process, allowing for instant use and rapid realization of advantages."

"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."

"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."

"The scalability is good."

"For VMware, it has been a humongous savings."

"I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task."

"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."

More Everpure FlashArray pros

"This solution had the best cost and it was easy to work with the Vendor."

"The most valuable features are simplified provisioning and management, de-duplication, and built-in encryption."

"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."

"I increased my capacity 500 percent and reduced my footprint in the data center by 95 percent."

"When I select a vendor such as NetApp to work with, I don’t look just at the performance; I look at reliability, scalability, replication, disaster recovery; to be able to do this all efficiently, plus their SnapMirroring and snapshotting capability."

"With the All Flash FAS, we could see that there are oodles of power, not only from disc utilization figures on the actual storage backend but also from the CPU consumption of the storage controllers."

"The design has been great."

"I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten as it is an excellent solution."

"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."

"The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."

"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."

"The only thing is that we've had to upgrade controllers a few times because we ended up wanting to use more stuff on here."

"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."

"It doesn’t provide enough information on performance analytics. For example, Nimble Storage has Infosight, which provides data; Pure Storage doesn’t have an equivalent."

"One improvement area is the eradication time delay."

"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."

"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."

More Everpure FlashArray cons

"The exterior display needs to be improved."

"I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy."

"I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical."

"We'd like to see improvement in the time to retrieve from the Cloud, whether it's on-prem to cloud and whether it's public or private cloud."

"Pricing can always be improved."

"For us, probably the best feature would be an ONTAP-as-a-whole feature, the fabric pulling directly to cloud with unaccessed blocks over time. It's actually a feature that they're introducing now, it's just not mature."

"The Ilom's graceful shutdown feature is no longer there in the version that I have."

"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."

"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."

More NetApp AFF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage is all-flash, so this sometimes tends to make it a bit more expensive in the beginning."

"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."

"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."

"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."

"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."

"It is a cheaper solution."

"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."

"FlashArray is expensive, but the quality justifies the price."

More Everpure FlashArray pricing and cost advice

"This solution has a good price-performance ratio."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF."

"We don't like the cost. We would like to buy more."

"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."

"NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage."

"Our TCO decreased significantly because we were paying maintenance on nine different arrays throughout the country. We've condensed those down to three arrays, and our maintenance fees from the IBM product dropped by over a half million dollars a year, saving us $500,000 USD."

"Obviously depending on the price point, NetApp is obviously a little more expensive than your generic Dell SAN solution or whatever."

"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

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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

Manufacturing Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

No data available

Manufacturing Company

12%

Outsourcing Company

12%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	73
Midsize Enterprise	38
Large Enterprise	161

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	47
Midsize Enterprise	47
Large Enterprise	242

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?

When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?

The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore 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 6% of the time

VAST Data vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 5% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Everpure FlashArray

Compared 4% of the time

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IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

Tintri VMstore T7000 vs Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

Huawei OceanStor vs Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL]

Compared 14% of the time

NEC iStorage S4900 vs Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL]

Compared 3% of the time

More Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL] Competitors

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 7% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs NetApp AFF

Compared 5% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs NetApp AFF

Compared 4% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp AFF

Compared 4% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Everpure FlashArray

October 2026

Download Everpure FlashArray product report

Buyer's Guide

Frame-Based Disk Arrays

October 2026

Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL] report

Download Hitachi Universal Storage VM [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

October 2026

Download NetApp AFF product report

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray

HUS VM

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS

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)

The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM delivers proven enterprise-class functionality — advanced virtualization of externally attached storage, logical partitioning, thin provisioning and universal replication — in flexible, cost effective service oriented configurations.

Hitachi Vantara

NetApp AFF provides high-performance storage solutions, emphasizing speed and efficiency for demanding applications. Its features include low latency, inline deduplication, and seamless integration, making it ideal for businesses needing reliable storage and data management.

NetApp AFF stands out in offering rapid data access with features designed to meet the demands of high-speed environments. With capabilities such as low latency and inline deduplication, it ensures efficient data management. Data recovery and SnapMirror enhance its appeal for businesses focused on utility and integration with other NetApp systems. The clustered Data ONTAP enriches the user experience, making NetApp AFF a strong choice for those prioritizing usability and performance during migration. However, some users highlight the steep learning curve and high costs, along with the need for better integration, monitoring tools, and technical support. Improvement in migration, scalability, documentation, and automation is also desired, along with more competitive pricing.

What are its standout features?

Speed: Offers rapid data access for high-demand applications.
Low Latency: Ensures quick response times.
Inline Deduplication: Optimizes storage efficiency.
Seamless Integration: Integrates smoothly with NetApp systems.
SnapMirror: Facilitates efficient data recovery.
Clustered Data ONTAP: Enhances user experience.

What benefits should users look for?

High Performance: Supports critical applications with speed.
Reliability: Provides robust data management solutions.
Data Utility: Enhances data access and recovery options.
Efficient Migration: Ensures smooth transitions with minimal disruption.
Integration Support: Works well within existing NetApp environments.

NetApp AFF is commonly utilized in industries such as telecom, healthcare, and insurance that require high-performance storage. Virtualization, database management, file storage, and NFS/CIFS protocols are key use cases. It supports high availability and disaster recovery, serving as the backbone for VM and Hyper-V infrastructures. Organizations also benefit from its low latency and support for AI workloads, optimizing operational efficiencies.

NetApp

Sample Customers

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

Hanergy Global Solar PV Application Pte Ltd

DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: October 2026.

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