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Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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 X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
22nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
314
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is 1.7%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 8.6%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp AFF8.6%
Everpure FlashArray X NVMe2.0%
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series1.7%
Other87.7%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
GP
System Administrator at PORTGUARDIAN.COM SRL
Performance and cost-effectiveness are maximized with seamless setup and significant ROI
I use Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series to replace the old storage in our infrastructure. Additionally, I use it in customer infrastructures to migrate from the old storage to the new one On the M storage, I find the best features to be deduplication and compression. On the DE storage, the most…
KennethEtsula - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager at Spartec
Offers seamless installation and efficient data handling with robust support
NetApp AFF provides an all-flash storage solution for unified SAN solutions, supporting both SAN and NAS functionalities. Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF. With the storage efficiency from a NetApp AFF installation, users can manage substantial data running on all-flash. The features such as compaction and compression provide storage efficiency guarantees in an all-flash environment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"After the testing, it was clear to us that the Pure FlashArray X NVMe was the easiest to manage and configure and had the best performance that we had seen in all the arrays."
"I appreciate the performance."
"Everything works well, and it is very fast."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"If a company is looking for an All-Flash Tier and they need extreme performance for individual workloads, Pure's the way to go, over something like a SolidFire."
"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"We have been working with the solution for around a year and so far it has shown itself to be stable."
"ThinkSystem is a good offer and can work out well if you can work with it to fit the use cases that you have."
"The solution is very easy to troubleshoot. It's one of the most valuable features. It also doesn't take long to deploy and normally it comes with a three-year warranty."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is simple to use"
"This solution is good for virtualization and meets the need for CPU and RAM requirements."
"We have been working with the solution for around a year and so far it has shown itself to be stable."
"The solution is very easy to troubleshoot, it doesn't take long to deploy, normally comes with a three-year warranty, and has the most features if you compare it to other models."
"My advice to others is that this is a straightforward, detailed documented, and supported solution."
"It's very stable. It's always there when we need it. With the Dual Controller, if one drops out, the other one comes right online. We don't use any iSCSI so there is a little bit of a latency break but, over the NFS, we don't notice that switch-on. We can do maintenance in the middle of the day, literally rip a whole controller out of the chassis, and do what we need to do with it."
"Setting up storage for an application (storage provisioning) is quick and easy. Maybe a quarter of the time is now spent getting the application up and running, or even less."
"What used to take us thirty minutes, now takes us five minutes."
"The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network"
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The stability is solid; it doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want, and we have been dependent on NetApp for almost a decade now."
"NetApp has been excellent, performance has improved significantly, and because it has been used to deploy the virtualization solution, the consolidation helped optimize its center space in terms of power and cooling, so we have had significant optimizations across the board."
"We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage systems in light of our experience with AFF because of the reliability, the ease of the failovers, and the high availability of the system."
 

Cons

"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."
"Its price is a little high right now. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"The solution should improve its logon requirements."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"It is really entry-level. In the next release, I would like to see more functionality."
"The difficult part comes when dealing with the host. You have to enable multi-pathing and other aspects that are needed for proper configuration."
"Usually, when a part fails, we have to replace it and it takes a while. It would be better if the part could be available locally here in Kenya so we don't have to wait so long to repair the solution."
"Its performance could be faster."
"The difficult part comes when dealing with the host. You have to enable multi-pathing and other aspects that are needed for proper configuration. I don't know if there is room for a more hyper-conversion structure to work with, but this would be easier."
"Usually, when a part fails, we have to replace it and it takes a while."
"It would be useful to have structured solutions replicated to other sites."
"The solution could be more scalable, although it suits our present needs."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"Better stability, not releasing features until they are fully functional, or at least giving us a software train that doesn't add them until they are fully functional and proven."
"The certification classes are good, but they don't cover enough of the material, and the exams only test on what is covered in class."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"The process for initial setup could be streamlined."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The product is expensive."
"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 licensing is on a yearly basis."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"The price of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is a one-time purchase. There is a global price list available to find the price of the solution."
"It is an expensive solution."
"For an all-flash setup, the cost is around $20,000 for a decent configuration."
"The solution's price could be better."
"All of the features are bundled together, and you can renew the bundle with all of the features included."
"The best thing about this solution is its price, which reduces our costs."
"The pricing for this solution is good compared to HP or Dell EMC."
"The pricing is fair and low compared to other products in this category."
"I am able to store two times more data than what I'm purchasing, which affects the way funds are being utilized."
"It consolidates a lot of our storage into one or two chassis, which makes money savings in our data center."
"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."
"It is pretty expensive compared to other solutions. I would give it a seven or eight out of 10 in price (where 10 is expensive) compared to similar solutions."
"NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage."
"Look at the different options that NetApp offers. Look for a model and option which fits your needs correctly. Don't buy a low-end product for a high-end job."
"I am comfortable with the pricing, which is fair compared to others."
"We have been able to utilize and leverage equipment which was purchased a decade ago up until this past year. So, we were running disk shells for 13 years and all we were doing was upgrading the filings and controllers, and using the same disk shells. Therefore, we were able to do something where we didn't have to invest that much. Recently, we had to upgrade all our disk shells, but it was a lot less because the technology had changed a lot since those times. It is faster now, and we have SSDs. We have larger drives that are 4TBs and 6TBs. Everything can condense so we are saving disk shell space and rack space. We are paying less now than we did at that time"
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
 

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?
The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series?
The price of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is very good. We chose this type of storage for the performance and the price.
What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series?
The type of connection that is used in Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series should be improved.
What is your primary use case for Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series?
I use Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series to replace the old storage in our infrastructure. Additionally, I use it in custom...
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X, Pure FlashArray X NVMe
ThinkSystem DE Series
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.