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Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp AFF comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Hitachi Virtual Storage Pla...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
11th
Ranking in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
NAS (5th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (3rd), Frame-Based Disk Arrays (1st)
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
311
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is 3.1%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.3%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
Ozair Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
A robust and dependable product that ensures a 100 percent data availability guarantee
We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products. Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes. The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings. Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand. I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others. There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers. The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues. The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive. Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service. The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions. In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task. Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.
Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency
I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"The active-active option seemed to be working well and overall, it was a solid product."
"The active data management of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, especially with the HOPS Center, makes it easier to work with the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform infrastructure."
"The biggest benefit of the Hitachi platform is 100 percent storage uptime. It's also highly cost-effective."
"The product provides a good storage space."
"The feature I like best is the stability of the hardware."
"I am happy about the storage system and availability."
"The setup is very easy to manage and configure. The initial setup and takes one hour more or less."
"Data optimization, compression, and deduplication are the most important features for us."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"I've combined other NetApp systems into one of our newer platforms, taking other file-sharing solutions native to Windows or Mac and creating file shares, yielding a better return on our investment. At the same time, we are providing better resources and more efficient channels for files."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"​It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"We have a comprehensive solution that could accommodate anything. We can fly it earlier and get them in the air testing and prototyping much faster than they could have with other solutions."
"Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9."
"The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today."
 

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."
"The software layer has to improve."
"We need better data deduplication."
"In terms of what could be improved, it could use a better, faster web console and other consoles. It is so boring waiting, waiting and waiting for it to refresh."
"The user interface should be made simpler because it is difficult to manage."
"There is a drawback related to Hitachi's configuration flexibility. The Hitachi storage platform solution is not flexible. That means that both the Hitachi and the partner presale guys have to do a lot of work to design a solution."
"For the support windows to work, maybe they have to upgrade the firmware of the VSP. They changed the hardware or the disk. I don't know if it was the port blade they changed or a VM for a memory cache. Also, replacing the old target with the processor target would be fine. The old equipment is very easy to manage, and I don't have any bad commentary."
"I would like the fan noise to be automatically adjusted based on the drive's current workload."
"The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, I find the management aspect not as good as their hardware."
"The software has always been lagging a bit compared to the newer features. It usually takes a cycle for it to catch up."
"For mission critical issues the performance is low."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"It has not reduced our data center costs. NetApp charges a pretty penny for their stuff."
"We don't have any challenges with NetApp. We only need to update it on emerging software and versions that are put out or any enhancements that they've included or things that they've deprecated. NetApp's product is superior, so our engineers must stay on top of all the features and things that they've taken away."
"I honestly don't have anything of note on how they can improve."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"We had a lot of issues with two-factor authentication using, for example, Okta."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"One of the features that I am looking for, which is already in the works, is to be able to take my code and automatically move it to the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The product is expensive."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"The price per gigabyte is good and it is low when it comes to terabytes."
"The pricing we get is very competitive when compared to other vendors. Hitachi is working on their licensing model and it is improving but can be irksome when many different items are not bundled or enterprise size."
"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."
"Considering the solution's price, it is very competitive compared to the other competitors in the market. I rate the product price a nine out of ten."
"It is a little expensive."
"I give the price of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform a nine out of ten."
"This is an expensive solution."
"Hitachi VSP's pricing is good compared to other brands."
"The pricing is not a lot considering what you get and it bundles hardware and licensing."
"One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license."
"Our space savings through dedupe and compression is over 50 percent, so we are saving. I think our 8080s has 20TBs. We are saving at least 10TBs and that's over 50 percent of the capacity that we're using."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."
"ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system."
"I am comfortable with the pricing, which is fair compared to others."
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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
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
71%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?
For NVMe storage, the pricing is reasonable compared to competitors in India. However, for entry-level SAN storage or...
What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.
What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?
The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Plat...
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.