Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp FAS Series

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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

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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Paweł Jabłoński

IT Infrastructure Manager at Bricoman Wilanów

Used for VMs with replication a feature, but need upgraded SSDs

We use this solution. I configured and updated it. Of course, I was also a user of applications that store data on that storage. We already have an SSD solution. So, rather than planning to go with an SSD solution, we are focusing on expanding it. If a company wants to deploy something new, it should choose a product with SSD, and NVMe disks. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

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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

"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."

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

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"I appreciate the performance."

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

"The latency is good."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"It is robust. It doesn't need too much troubleshooting. It is a good device."

"The product offers high stability."

"The performance is very good."

"In terms of performance and ability, the product can stand up against its competitors since the solution offers two controller systems to users."

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

"Its scalability and performance are the most valuable. It is quite scalable and has a huge capacity."

"The feature I like best is the stability of the hardware."

"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

"The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is the snapshot and the FlexClone for Oracle and Microsoft SQL environments. Additionally, the integration can be done with most all on-premise and cloud providers."

"Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature."

"Has rock solid reliability and is easy to use."

"This solution provides us with easy management and great vendor support."

"It's enabled us to allow admins across the IT organization to more easily manage their own subset of data within our organization."

"It's an easy product to use that is stable and has good performance."

"Ability to use mirroring and SnapVault have made backup no longer necessary."

"One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage."

More NetApp FAS Series pros

Cons

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."

"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."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The pricing is high, but the product is good. Additional features like data duplication might make it even better."

"In terms of ransomware, Pure Storage is probably a couple of steps ahead of Hitachi, but Hitachi does not rush in terms of features. They want to be really sure that the hardware works properly without any kind of problem in new environments, and the implementation or improvement does not affect the customer installation. They really want to make sure that customers are not affected in any way."

"In terms of what could be improved, it could use a better, faster web console and other consoles. It is so boring waiting, waiting and waiting for it to refresh."

"I would like the fan noise to be automatically adjusted based on the drive's current workload."

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

"We've only faced some minor issues. For example, the documentation of some features isn't as detailed as we would like."

"We have not been able to procure more discs for upcoming projects and this has been a problem for us. Not having additional storage is going to be an issue. The solution is at its end of life and will be replaced soon."

"The snapshot and clone operation functions can be made easier."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform cons

"The one aspect of the solution that's negative for us is also more unique to us due to the fact that we did a MetroCluster. The tiebreaker piece that does the monitoring of the two different locations, and determines if one is not talking to the network normally (or if it's truly down) is a little difficult. It feels like it was not designed from the beginning to fit well into the other pieces. It feels like it was thrown in at the last minute and it is not smooth."

"NetApp is costly when compared to Dell."

"It's hard to find in-person training that fits our schedule in our area. They offer a lot of online training, but we need somewhere to go because we can't really get away from the office."

"I would like to see less latency and higher IOPS."

"Installation of the additional switches and ETP could be improved."

"NetApp FAS Series should improve its price, which is expensive."

"The solution's configuration is not flexible."

"When we were going through all the MFA hardening and the anti-ransomware setup, I gave some feedback to our executive. The MFA process for getting that set up on the AFF systems was cumbersome compared to some of our other systems."

More NetApp FAS Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"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."

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

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"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."

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

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"We pay for a support contract agreement."

"It is expensive as compared to other vendors, but its price is good if you are looking for stability, reliability, performance, and security."

"The pricing is very competitive compared to other vendors. It really depends on the type of media we're using, like SaaS, SSP, or NVMe."

"When you are looking for high-end solutions such as this, price is less important than stability and availability."

"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."

"Considering the solution's price, it is very competitive compared to the other competitors in the market. I rate the product price a nine out of ten."

"A drawback of Hitachi storage systems is that they are expensive. The upfront cost is very high compared to others. But when you compare the IOPS at the same price, Hitachi gives you better business value..."

"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series tools are highly specialized, such as management and performance tools and the overall solution is expensive. If customers want to have a lot of data in their hands, they need to purchase several solutions."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

"It is a moderately low-priced platform."

"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."

"When we need to implement a less expensive solution we use Huawei. NetApp FAS Series is a little bit expensive compared to the average of the market."

"Most storage vendors also have software, or licensing bundles, which may offer the required licenses considerably cheaper, but do also maybe offer licenses, which are not needed."

"In general, I find NetApp to be very expensive. That's the main issue I have with them. So it's a drawback in terms of pricing."

"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."

"NetApp FAS Series is a reasonably high-priced solution, partially because we select the configuration that duplicates the entire system."

More NetApp FAS Series pricing and cost advice

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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

62%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software 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.

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.

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

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

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...

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

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

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...

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 do you like most about NetApp FAS Series?

Flexibility in data replication.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?

Cost is a big factor in our decision-making process. When we're buying storage, the first thing we look at is how muc...

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

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

NetApp AFF vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

IBM System Storage DS8000 Series vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 24% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 11% of the time

HPE MSA vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 7% of the time

Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 2% of the time

More NetApp FAS Series Competitors

Product Reports

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Download Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform product report

NetApp FAS Series

Download NetApp FAS Series 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

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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.

NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.

NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.

NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features

NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:

Scalability: NetApp FAS series is easy to scale, allowing organizations to rapidly grow their storage capacity according to demand.

Security: Protect and manage your data with various data protection and data management tools, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication.

Seamless integration: Integrate with other NetApp products and solutions to ensure a unified data management platform across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Reduced costs: Consolidation of multiple storage boxes greatly reduces the data center footprint. From a management point of view, with NetApp FAS you manage a single storage box instead of multiple storage boxes.
Compatibility: Forward and backward compatibility ensures that you don’t have to trade in existing controllers. New controllers can always integrate with previously released controllers.

Multi-protocol support: Support for multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

High performance and availability: The solution has high input and output per second performance and ensures that critical data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure.
Intuitive interface: The FAS series has a user-friendly interface and management dashboard, making it easy to manage your storage systems. With unified management, you can quickly run a single protocol on your entire system
Data cloning and replication: Easily clone databases of any size. Clones occupy a very, very small footprint on the storage until they are severed from the main database. Replications carried out by the system are fast and require very little bandwidth.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.

Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”

Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways

Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs. NetApp FAS Series