Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp AFF comparison

Hitachi Vantara and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Hitachi Vantara is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.1, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.0. Hitachi Vantara holds a 3.4% mindshare in AFS, compared to NetApp’s 10.7% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Hitachi Vantara users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and NetApp AFF are both high-performing storage solutions. NetApp AFF stands out due to its advanced features, while Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is more competitive in pricing and support.

Features:Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is noted for reliability, maintaining critical workloads, and robust performance. NetApp AFF excels in data management capabilities, integration with cloud platforms, and versatile data management.

Room for Improvement: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform needs enhanced scalability, easier updates, and better system integration. NetApp AFF could improve cost efficiency, backup integration, and reduce total maintenance expenses.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform faces challenges in initial setup yet offers commendable customer service. NetApp AFF has simpler deployment processes and efficient customer service, offering a more seamless experience.

Pricing and ROI: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is more economical with lower setup costs, providing a good return on investment. NetApp AFF, although pricier, offers significant ROI because of its advanced features and high performance.

To learn more, read our detailed Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF

January 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 10.7%, up from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

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.

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Ozair Amin

Sales Manager - Infrastructure at Synergy Computers

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.

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Anna Sofo

Commercial adviser at Personal Data S.r.l. Gruppo Project

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.

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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."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"I appreciate the performance."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"We have many different types of replication, such as remote and drop local replication. All these features and licenses are already available. These are basic features available in the current model. Additionally, the performance has been good in our experience."

"The product provides a good storage space."

"The most valuable feature of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is the platform and overall usage has been good. We have not had very many issues."

"The customer service and support are reasonably good. The environment I work in, there always remains an element of surprise, and there are restrictions. But Hitachi has good technical people."

"What I like best about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is that it's a fast storage solution. It also has reliable models. The sales support is also good for this product. Even the pricing for it is good."

"The active-active option seemed to be working well and overall, it was a solid product."

"This is a good product with high capabilities and high reliability."

"The most valuable feature is that you can use it with all deployment models."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."

"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."

"The performance of NetApp AFF allows our developers and researches to run models and their tests within a single workday instead of spreading out across multiple workdays."

"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."

"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support."

"The AFF series SSDs delivered the most value to our business."

"Scalability is excellent. If we need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself."

More NetApp AFF pros

Cons

"The software layer has to improve."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The embedded management for installation feature has neither simplified nor complicated the management process, therefore, there is room for improvement."

"Not just anyone can do the deployment. So, the person needs a basic understanding and work experience."

"Its usability can be improved. It can have more management features. Its management tools lack features."

"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform needs to improve its scalability options where there are a few shortcomings."

"The life-cycle of the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is too short. We only had approximately four or five years out of the solution before it was rendered its end of life."

"The solution is stable. However, there have been some software crashes where we had to restart the system. They could improve the hardware to prevent this type of issue."

"The admin tools in the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform definitely have certain shortcomings that require improvement."

"The distributor needs more knowledgeable resources for technical support. It would be better to connect directly to the vendor in case of queries."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform cons

"The graphical interface is still heavy and slow. Needs more improvement in this area."

"NetApp can help in these endeavours by focusing more on security."

"I would like to improve the ransomware aspect. We get a lot of false positives, and there are no details of what is happening. This seems to be already fixed in the new version."

"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."

"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."

"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."

"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."

"NetApp could improve its security and AI features. In the latest version, I would like to see some ransomware protection."

More NetApp AFF cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

"The product is expensive."

"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."

"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 licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Hitachi VSP's pricing is good compared to other brands."

"Our main issue with the Hitachi G-Series is what we consider to be an archaic software licensing scheme and high maintenance costs."

"The solution is expensive."

"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."

"I find Hitachi to be cheaper by five to ten percent when compared to Dell and HP's costs, but the features in Dell are better than Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform."

"Architecture-wise, it's actually at a competitive price point. It is not cheap."

"The price of the solution is reasonable compared to others, such as Dell EMC."

"The product is reasonably priced."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

"It's expensive. it's in the hundreds of thousands. It's beneficial, but at times, I feel compared to other vendors, we are paying a premium for the licensing that other vendors include."

"Our total cost of ownership (TCO) has decreased by 40 percent."

"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."

"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."

"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."

"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 is room for improvement when it comes to the cost. The cost is very high compared to other devices."

"In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF."

More NetApp AFF pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

64%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive.

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

Hitachi should work on unified storage for the SMB market and entry-level NAS storage, similar to what HP or Dell off...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 38% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Compared 15% of the time

NetApp ASA vs NetApp AFF

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

Compared 10% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs NetApp AFF

Compared 8% of the time

Huawei OceanStor vs NetApp AFF

Compared 3% of the time

More NetApp AFF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

January 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

January 2025

Download Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp AFF

January 2025

Download NetApp AFF product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform N Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series

NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS

Learn More

Pure Storage

Hitachi Vantara

NetApp

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

RETHINK YOUR DEFINITION OF SPEED AND PERFORMANCE

With adaptive, guaranteed data reduction and a 100% data-availability guarantee, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F series helps you tackle complicated business challenges. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) VSP F series delivers up to 4.8M IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.
Featuring legendary Hitachi reliability, VSP F series arrays are backed by the industries only 100% availability guarantee. For these reasons, 80% of the Fortune 500 choose Hitachi all-flash arrays to accelerate the performance of mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Virtualization, Microsoft apps etc. With over 350 patents in flash technology, Hitachi’s innovative mix of flash hardware and software accelerates ROI with enterprise-class reliability and performance.

The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

NetApp AFF Benefits

Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

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

Buyer's Guide

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF

January 2025

Free Report: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF

Find out what your peers are saying about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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