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HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
303
Ranking in other categories
NAS (9th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (3rd)
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
312
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 3.0%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.4%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Q&A Highlights

Jan 28, 2016
 

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.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support
I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.
Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage
Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"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 solution is scalable."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"We're hosting virtual infrastructure on the 3PAR storage and it's been very good for that."
"The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments."
"We know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers."
"It is worry-free. I do not have to sit there and tend it."
"I like that it's stable. This is the reason why we're using these products. We work in the broadcast market, and stability is very important. HPE has global services, and that's also important. Dell and HPE are some big companies, and their solutions are robust and stable."
"We never had a blackout and we have never been offline."
"It has allowed us to set up a fully functioning disaster recovery site with replication, which we have been able to configure between our 3PAR systems."
"It is reliable, and it seems like a solid product. It has been working well so far."
"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."
"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"If the AutoSupport is well configured, then you need not to do a monitoring. You will get call and mail when any issue is completed."
"The design has been great."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"I work on the infrastructure engineering side. I usually get to install NetApp appliances, and I like how easy the installation is. It seems to be easier than other technologies that we use."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"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."
 

Cons

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance."
"I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure."
"Integration with some cloud services would be nice... We would like to be able to provision from the 3PAR and decide whether or not we are going to provision onsite or the cloud."
"I would like to see more virtualization: storage virtualization, data virtualization would be very nice."
"It should be mentioned that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries."
"The GUI was a little hard to figure out how to use."
"The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year."
"Would like to see ​some management functions through a web interface.​"
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"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."
"There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications."
"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."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"I would like it to be an IP as our network is mainly IP-based."
"NetApp's price could be improved. All storage is expensive. NetApp is not cheap, but we can't return to anybody else now. We'd lose too much value. We'd be, reinventing ourselves."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"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 support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"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."
"The SSD is a little bit expensive."
"Performance is at least two times, if not three times, what we had previously."
"Our licensing cost are $32,000 annually."
"It's a good price."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"The price of the solution could be reduced for the license and for support."
"This is not an expensive product but every time you add capacity to it, you need to pay for re-balancing."
"The licensing fee is not cheap."
"NetApp AFF is somewhat pricey. If they weren't as pricey, that would be a big deal for us."
"Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down."
"I do not deal with pricing, but the pricing of NetApp and Dell seems pretty close. NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support."
"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."
"NetApp is getting too expensive."
"The list price of AFF is too expensive... they need to be careful with the pricing of the new NVMe disks. They are way too expensive."
"The pricing is good."
"ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 1, 2015
Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR
Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…
 

Answers from the Community

Jan 28, 2016
Jan 28, 2016
The best honest answer really anyone can give is that it depends. Pricing in and of itself has so many variables including the nature of the deal, the technical need (what I'm sure you're after), and quite honestly the competition. These factors all come into play. My advise is that my Solutions Architect who is an SME in both of these brands has already commented on this blog and I'm ...
2 out of 47 answers
Jan 22, 2016
…I am confused – data protection is built in with the implementation of RAID 5+3 and the backups will be down to their current chosen backup strategy?!
it_user331356 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 22, 2016
Hello Ariel, I don't have practical experience with NetApp AFF 8020 so I can tell you only the same thing what you can find on the Internet. Sorry. Best Regards Best Regards Milos Kurtes, System Administrator, Alison Parkmore Technology Park, Galway, EIRCODE: H91 E309, Ireland www.alison.com Free Online Interactive Skills Training & Certification Full Course List [image: ALISON Small Logo]
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
50%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Educational Organization
33%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

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's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...
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
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.