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Lenovo ThinkSystem DE 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
7.4
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (22nd)
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.
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…
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

"I would recommend Pure Storage, as it is well-established."
"Manageability is its most valuable feature; it is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good, and we can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product."
"Both the ease of setup and the reliability of the array makes it quite simple to manage for the customer."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"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 support from Pure Storage Flash Array is amazing."
"Now, with Pure Storage, we have totally eliminated that problem."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"This solution is good for virtualization and meets the need for CPU and RAM requirements."
"Its initial setup process is easy."
"My advice to others is that this is a straightforward, detailed documented, and supported solution."
"This solution is good for virtualization and meets the need for CPU and RAM requirements."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series are the dual controllers, available installation documentation, and the option of multiple host bus adapter interfaces."
"ThinkSystem's storage performs well, and the price per gigabyte is good, especially on SSD solutions, and it's also easy to use."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is highly reliable, especially for block-level storage. It is stable, with minimal downtime and no issues beyond user errors."
"I would rate the stability of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series as a ten."
"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!"
"Reliability performance level, great history with it, and over the last two and a half years, it's been better than others."
"The tool's most valuable features are ease of use, ease of access, expandability, availability, and performance. NVMe drives have improved their performance."
"It was very straightforward with OpenStack, very well-documented, and supported."
"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."
"The input and output per second performance are satisfactory."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We can manage our applications from a single dashboard."
 

Cons

"If I need to change or troubleshoot the dashboard, I cannot do it without calling support. If I want to move something critical, I cannot do it by myself. The dashboard blocks me from changing those critical things."
"It would be beneficial to have a health check command that can be run from the CLI to ensure that all hardware components are functioning properly rather than having to enable remote access and connect to support for a health check."
"I would recommend improvements in the graphical user interface, specifically a detailed hardware view that would allow us to see the individual drives and individual controllers more easily, as currently, they are presenting only a higher-level view."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"They need to find another way of doing data protection, RAID is not working very well."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"ThinkSystem could be better integrated with backup software like Commvault, Veritas, or Symantec."
"Improvements can be made to the product's performance."
"The product could support advanced software integrations."
"While it is a reliable product, it could be improved. It would be useful to have structured solutions replicated to other sites."
"The difficult part comes when dealing with the host. You have to enable multi-pathing and other aspects that are needed for proper configuration."
"The solution could be more scalable, although it suits our present needs."
"Improvements can be made to the product's performance."
"In the next release, I would like to see more functionality. But, again, it is an entry-level product."
"NetApp FAS Series should improve its price, which is expensive."
"NetApp is costly when compared to Dell."
"If our customer needs a high-performance storage solution then we don't recommend this product."
"We'd like to get more access to level-two engineers. Sometimes its been a difficult time explaining the problem to level-one people."
"NetApp FAS Series should introduce an FTP application for the broadcast and post-production market."
"There was a bug when creating new custom roles that automatically gave volume deletion permission, which was a problem, but they finally fixed it."
"I would like to see an improvement in the licensing on Data Mirroring (SnapMirror) features."
"They should add new features to the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."
"For pricing, you have to take into account their performance on deduplication and compression in a $/GB comparison."
"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership."
"The pricing for this solution is good compared to HP or Dell EMC."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The best thing about this solution is its price, which reduces our costs."
"All of the features are bundled together, and you can renew the bundle with all of the features included."
"We have a five-year contract for providing support."
"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."
"The pricing is fair and low compared to other products in this category."
"For an all-flash setup, the cost is around $20,000 for a decent configuration."
"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."
"The licensing cost is on yearly basis."
"The price, compared to competitors, is quite high."
"NetApp FAS Series is a reasonably high-priced solution, partially because we select the configuration that duplicates the entire system."
"The product is on the expensive side."
"The process for going to cluster mode is expensive."
"NetApp FAS Series could be less expensive."
"The only area that could be improved is to lower prices for their All Flash FAS."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise145
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
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 don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
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...
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

Pure Storage FlashArray
ThinkSystem DE Series
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 Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp FAS Series and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
889,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.