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Huawei OceanStor vs NetApp AFF A-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Huawei OceanStor
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF A-Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
24th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise SAN (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 6.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Huawei OceanStor is 2.5%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF A-Series is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Everpure FlashArray6.4%
Huawei OceanStor2.5%
NetApp AFF A-Series1.0%
Other90.1%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer2507187 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Technology Security at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees
Reliable solution offers good IOPS and energy efficiency
Huawei OceanStor is mainly used as a SAN in our organization's data management process Huawei OceanStor offers good IOPS and is reliable and energy-efficient. It provides a decent device for data scalability. Based on what we were quoted, the stated capacity was not a true reflection of the…
MS
Senior Storage Engineer at Orange Business
Efficient data management leads to significant cost savings through advanced inline deduplication
NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors. With both deduplication and compression inline, we experience no cost in terms of performance on the systems, however, we have huge savings on the storage side. We can turn it on for everyone and save storage space, allowing us to sell more to customers. NetApp also provides us with an interface for VLAN separation that no other vendor can provide, allowing our customers distinct, separated network layers in between.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"While all these products have their own uses, Pure Storage FlashArray is in a market of its own."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"It's just very easy for general block storage."
"If it's financially viable for you and you can afford it, it's worth it."
"When you put all of the features in a box, leverage them and migrate your application to one of these arrays, it will give you a lot of benefits."
"I find the scalability features of OceanStor valuable. Additionally, installation is easy, and it only requires one person to install it. Maintenance is also easy and not a big issue."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The solution is easy to install and configure and it's also very stable."
"Pricing is very fair. It's competitively priced."
"The solution works well for non-critical applications that do not require a heavy workload. The tool's all features are valuable."
"The main selling point of Huawei OceanStor is its ability to handle all storage protocols, including block, file, and object."
"Huawei OceanStor provides numerous features that are tailored to cater to the requirements of all types of companies."
"Generally stable with good technical support."
"MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package."
"NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors."
"We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability."
"NetApp support is fantastic."
"NetApp helps us get the fastest output."
"NetApp AFF A-Series is faster and more robust compared to the all-flash storage of NetApp."
"The deduplication and compression options from NetApp AFF A-Series are good to use for efficient storage capacity."
"The amazing thing is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could do things for us, usually within the next revision of the software."
 

Cons

"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"The solution is expensive."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would prefer that they lower their pricing."
"The main disadvantage of Pure Storage FlashArray is the price."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"The product must improve the local technical support in China."
"I would like to see more iterations and direct integration with other solutions."
"Unfortunately, this product doesn't support Flash Disks, but it's IOPS capacity is a great compromise."
"The solution’s reporting could be improved."
"The speed has room for improvement."
"Technical support could be more helpful."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"Huawei technical support was not needed to fix production issues, but I got in touch with them once, and it wasn't very good because we did not get the solution."
"NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series."
"I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues, however, they've really done a great job of reaching out."
"Regarding tech support for NetApp, once the engineer understands our problem, they provide solutions that suit our environment; however, it is essential for the engineer to understand that our environment may differ from standard setups, which can sometimes cause discrepancies in recommendations."
"It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision."
"Pricing could always be lower."
"We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us."
"NetApp AFF A-Series should work on cost. The solutions, especially enterprise-level storage, should be more affordable to improve their appeal to businesses."
"The solution's ransomware protection could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing. They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Pure Storage has not helped to reduce our HANA licensing costs."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"The tool's pricing is competitive and affordable. It has the best possible pricing that we can get from Huawei. The prices are fixed and there are no additional costs."
"I am satisfied with the tool's pricing, which is in the middle. It is overpriced. I rate it an eight out of ten."
"Huawei's prices are very good compared to those of its competitors."
"Huawei OceanStor is priced very well but is a bit complicated."
"Huawei OceanStor is a cost-effective storage solution."
"Overall, the solution's pricing was cheaper."
"The pricing depends on the features the customer wants, such as storage, RAM, and processors, but in general, Huawei is much cheaper compared to Dell and Cisco."
"The price of the solution could be less expensive. However, there are not any licensing costs."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise8
 

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...
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 ...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Huawei OceanStor?
Huawei OceanStor's pricing is very aggressive, making it highly competitive.
What needs improvement with Huawei OceanStor?
Huawei currently lacks a solution for high-performance AI, unlike other companies like DDN, WekaIO, or IBM BlueStore....
What is your primary use case for Huawei OceanStor?
One of my customers, a car manufacturing company, uses Huawei OceanStor specifically as a backup target. The backup s...
What needs improvement with NetApp AFF A-Series?
NetApp is doing great with cloud integration; however, there may be room for improvement in integrating with existing...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF A-Series?
It would be great to see some automation from NetApp. I rate NetApp AFF A-Series a nine out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp AFF A-Series?
With respect to pricing, NetApp can be competitive but hasn't been explored to a large extent.
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
OceanStor Dorado V3 All-Flash Storage System, OceanStor 18000 V3 Series Storage Systems, OceanStor 6800 V3 Storage System
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Piraeus, Clinique Univeritaires Saint-Luc
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Huawei OceanStor vs. NetApp AFF A-Series and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.