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NetApp AFF C-Series vs NetApp FAS 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
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
NetApp AFF C-Series
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
3.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (28th)
NetApp FAS Series
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (4th), NAS (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
 

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.
Shailendra Choudhary - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Reliable flash storage has delivered strong data reduction and secured sensitive information
There is still some room for improvement when it comes to scalability, mainly in the interoperability and integration aspects. Every storage vendor has certain limitations, and this is not limited to NetApp; it applies to everyone in the industry. I do not see any other significant areas for improvement with NetApp AFF C-Series at this time. NetApp is working on their roadmap, which is solid, and they are developing certain features that are yet to be released.
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

"Pure Storage FlashArray provides immediate benefits to our customers with its easy setup process, allowing for instant use and rapid realization of advantages."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"The pricing of the product is very competitive to others in the market for Flash and NVMe storage, and from an ROI standpoint, if you consider compression and de-duplication and all that, you get a pretty good ratio."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"Even if they weren't one of the fastest arrays in the entire industry, I would use them for their support model and ease of use."
"Overall, the best returns on investment have been operational simplicity, reliability, and reduced management overhead."
"NetApp AFF C-Series is a good product for entry-level flash storage, the system is competitive in terms of pricing, and the value proposition is strong."
"NetApp offers a cost-effective solution with very robust hardware."
"The NetApp FAS Series has helped simplify our infrastructure."
"The storage efficiency provided a maximum savings in our storage utilization."
"At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature."
"The best feature is its ONTAP product line for Ransomware protection. It also has features for file storage and block storage. The solution is stable. We've had no issues with it. The tool is scalable and meets our requirements. The technical support and the supporting partner are great. The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to maintain the product. The feature set is excellent. I recommend the solution."
"Compression of the backup Oracle by RMAN on NFS saves space 5:1."
"I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system."
"Flexible and reliable storage solution with multiple features such as cloning, replication, and deduplication. Data migration can be done without any performance implications on the production systems."
"In the past, I used, and still work with, solutions like Fujitsu and Hitachi, but when I have an opportunity to work with a NetApp solution, I don't want to go back."
 

Cons

"It needs to improve its price."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports went down, there was a possibility to highlight that particular port which has gone down."
"For scalability, I rate it a six out of ten. We reach a limit. We never reached this limit, however, the architecture allows you to go until a certain size, and after that, you have to buy another array."
"We have not had a good experience with the IBM device."
"Enhanced documentation and beginner-friendly guidelines would benefit users with less configuration experience."
"It was not proactive communication."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"We faced one bug that impacted our NetApp last month, and it took some time to identify the underlying issue."
"One thing that burned me is that it surprised me how much overhead it uses, like 30% right off the top."
"I'll give technical support a "good" rating because sometimes it's slow in getting people to respond, other times it's okay."
"NetApp systems are somewhat more complex, though not excessively so. If you're transitioning from a Windows server environment to NetApp, get training or education; otherwise, you might struggle with this solution."
"The main area for improvement for NetApp FAS Series is price. Unfortunately, in India, NetApp price clearance takes longer than EMC."
"When getting new hardware, always tell the account manager that you are also considering other brands. They will be forced to adjust the price lower."
"It lacks automatic tiering, When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives."
"As I see it, there could be more interfaces, more cache, etc., but those challenges are solved by just getting some other model."
"NetApp FAS Series should improve its price, which is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"The price of the Pure Storage Flash Array is too high and there needs to be more contact clarity. We went with the Evergreen plan and I don't have clarity on what am I supposed to pay each year or every three years. There was not much contract clarity."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"The pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray is reasonable."
Information not available
"The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They focus on storage only, which is really good; it works."
"It is a moderately low-priced platform."
"It is expensive."
"It is a one-time license charge for NetApp FAS Series to run and we pay annually for upgrades and support."
"The product is on the expensive side."
"The NetApp FAS series price is very competitive compared to other solutions on the market it is a good choice."
"There are products available in market with comparatively lower costs."
"It’s difficult for us to get money, so make sure you get everything in order, because there’s no going back and saying “oh, I missed this or that”, so make sure you plan well and well in advance."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
8%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise58
 

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?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
What needs improvement with NetApp AFF C-Series?
There is still some room for improvement when it comes to scalability, mainly in the interoperability and integration...
What is your primary use case for NetApp AFF C-Series?
I would recommend NetApp AFF C-Series for various types of companies depending on the use case. A small company, an e...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF C-Series?
I recommend Dell PowerStore to some of my customers, but usually the differences are taken care of. I focus primarily...
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.
What needs improvement with NetApp FAS Series?
There is room for improvement when it comes to response time and first-level support quality. If a new feature needs ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Information Not Available
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 Dell Technologies, NetApp, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: May 2026.
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