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IBM XIV vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

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

IBM XIV
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp FAS Series
Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (4th), NAS (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of IBM XIV is 3.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 12.3%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp FAS Series12.3%
IBM XIV3.2%
Other84.5%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
 

Featured Reviews

Ajith Kandaramage - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operation Engineer at HNB
Good value for money but issues with modular scaling
IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness I've been using IBM XIV for two and a half years. IBM XIV is stable. IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger…
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

"XIV setup is very straightforward and easy to configure."
"The performance and robustness of the systems are very good."
"For us, the XIV is pretty much set-it-and-forget-it storage."
"Very easy to produce reporting data (Snaps). Very easy and fast for provisioning devices and Remote mirroring."
"The product is exceptionally reliable and very easy to manage."
"Hands down, this is the easiest storage platform on the market to manage."
"Installation is amazingly easy."
"The XIVs here are only being used for non-production and dev systems, but still the performance and robustness of the systems are very good."
"It’s a High Availability environment in which I haven’t had problems."
"One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments."
"It gives us the performance we need and the reliability we need to make sure that our systems have the uptime that our internal customers demand."
"Saves space with deduplication"
"A customer was running legacy FAS3140's, 5+ years old, and began deploying VDI clients on their 10GbE network, their storage became a bottleneck and seamlessly migrated to FAS8020's with FlashCache and all performance concerns have been removed, and users have complimented the performance improvement of their desktops!"
"Better performance and lower costs."
"The input and output per second performance are satisfactory."
"It was very straightforward with OpenStack, very well-documented, and supported."
 

Cons

"I guess we'd like to see the XIV keep pace with how storage is going in terms of speed and latency."
"I encountered stability (performance) issues during enclosure or disk rebuild. Also some power supply issues due to malfunctions of circuits. Sometimes "internal" Snap sessions hang and consume pool capacity."
"IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger requirements."
"Until the drive is replaced, the pool_resizing is locked."
"Until the drive is replaced, the pool_resizing is locked. This has been an issue a lot of times, especially when the contract says IBM will not replace disks until three drives fail."
"This product was not a good fit for our organization as we have a ton of latency sensitive applications and XIV was not able to keep up with IO + latency demand."
"I would rather have a web GUI served directly from the unit, and a CLI accessible directly through SSH."
"Management accessibility. Both the GUI and the CLI require installation of a Java-based thick client, which is ridiculous, plus a drain on resources."
"One of the issues that we have had with NetApp in upgrading over the years is that migrating data from one system to another is one-way only."
"It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"We’ve hit some bugs in the ONTAP code that’s caused it to crash."
"If our customer needs a high-performance storage solution then we don't recommend this product."
"There are some technical limitations, but it would be great to have in-line deduplication and in-line compression for the FAS series as well."
"We are not able to connect to the support of NetApp from Sudan. We have to go through many agents for support, which makes it difficult."
"As I see it, there could be more interfaces, more cache, etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is straightforward."
"We have a five-year total cost of ownership where we pay an initial amount and then annually for maintenance."
"If you are going to use the product behind an SVC, IBM will price the units lower, since you are likely not to use any of the advanced copy services."
"No-license-required policy, unlike others where you need a license for everything. Just pay once and forget about licenses."
"The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive."
"Cost effective storage for all performance levels (including all-flash)."
"The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is reasonable for its performance."
"It is a one-time license charge for NetApp FAS Series to run and we pay annually for upgrades and support."
"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."
"It's not cheap, but at the same time, it's also inexpensive. It's somewhere in between."
"NetApp FAS Series could be less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
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
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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?
I do not handle the pricing part of NetApp FAS Series since it is managed by the sales team.
 

Also Known As

XIV
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Celero, NaviSite, Technische Universit_t Mªnchen, Netflix Inc., Muhr und Bender KG, Pelephone Communications
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 IBM XIV vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.