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NetApp AFF vs SolidFire 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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
SolidFire
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
32nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 6.6%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 6.9%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 1.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp AFF6.9%
Everpure FlashArray6.6%
SolidFire1.5%
Other85.0%
All-Flash Storage
 

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.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
Unified storage has delivered efficient AI analytics and low latency for critical workloads
There might be some lag or response time with respect to support cases, but even then I will rate it 8.5 out of 10. All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond. The only reason I rated it 8.5 is because the warehouse for spare parts, when a problem comes, a spare is needed to replace it, for example, a disk. In Pakistan, they have only one warehouse in Karachi. This warehouse manages all the problems when a problem comes. They ship the part based on the customer use case and customer service request. That is the only reason I rate it 8.5 because they have only one warehouse in Pakistan, which is in Karachi. For example, if a problem comes in Islamabad, it will take time to deliver the spare because the part will be shipped from Karachi to Islamabad, which will take around maybe a day. Other OEMs have their warehouses in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi also. In terms of part replacement requirements, they are very efficient in that area because they have warehouses in multiple cities of Pakistan.
Ramil Cerrada - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution lead at Globe Mobile
A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance
The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support from Pure Storage FlashArray is perfect; if we have some trouble or we need to change something, we ask for support and they are helpful and answer immediately."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"The most valuable features I have experienced are the centralized management and redundancy under speed of the right disk."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"The tool has reduced our power consumption."
"From the performance that I've seen, the simplicity of how to use it, the responsiveness, and customer experience, it is one of the best companies that I have worked with so far."
"Everpure FlashArray has positively impacted my organization, particularly in performance and reliability, as we've had good improvements, making our applications run faster and giving us more confidence that they will not crash."
"It's simplified operations because our storage team is so used to managing all of our stores using a single platform and by just adding flash to that same platform – the existing platforms – simplifies our day-to-day operations."
"Out of all the solutions we've looked at, AFF is the best fit for our business requirements so far."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"We have reduced latency from 100 milliseconds to just 1 millisecond."
"Just the fact that it's been rock solid; we haven't had to sit there and baby it, fixing things, tweaking and tuning it – it just works."
"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."
"The stability is excellent, it's highly stable, and we have never really had a failure since we put it in over two years ago."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"It's absolutely a consistently stable solution, with 100% up-time and no data loss at all, not even the slightest, delivering not only stability but also a lot of efficiency with the data storage."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."
"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."
"Overall performance of the solution."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"For us the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are reputation, reliability, support, all these things we have gotten from NetApp."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
 

Cons

"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"It can go down from time to time, but it's been pretty solid so far."
"The price is too high."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"The latest release contains bugs that shouldn't be in a production environment. Two incidents impacted our client, including hardware-related bugs. They need to be more cautious in testing before they release."
"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."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"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."
"Its integration could be improved."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"I would like to see the All-Flash FAS support virtualization better. I find that lacking in some areas; application and for disaster recovery."
"My experience with technical support is, as of late, the amount of expertise and what we're getting out of support has kind of dwindled a little bit. The fact that NetApp's trying to automate the support with Elio is pretty bad, to be honest with you."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."
"In fact, the price is quite high compared to other vendors, but what we really loved about SolidFire was the agility of the team."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."
"I now know their best practices associated with allocating IOPS to your LUNs; I wish that was more apparent to me when actually configuring the system."
"The upcoming release is supposed to have much richer VMware virtual volume (VVOL) support, which is something we're very interested in."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"When I last looked, the prices were reasonable, and we could get an excellent array for about $60,000."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for, as it's not priced for you to buy one off-the-shelf. If you have a use case, heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of noticeable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or need low latency and high throughput, you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage."
"There are no licensing fees or other costs."
"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"I find the pricing to be reasonable, particularly with the recent inclusion of features like snap locking and ransomware protection within the ONTAP license instead of having them as separate licenses."
"NetApp is getting too expensive."
"Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down."
"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."
"The pricing is good."
"Obviously depending on the price point, NetApp is obviously a little more expensive than your generic Dell SAN solution or whatever."
"Our TCO has increased by 15 to 18 percent."
"We have used the solution’s thin provisioning to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning on all of our flash arrays at this point. It gives us the choice to be able to overprovision and take advantage of compression, compaction, and thin provisioning all at the same time. We can get more out of the purchases that we make."
"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."
"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"
"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."
"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."
"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."
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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
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
 

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?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp AFF vs. SolidFire and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,403 professionals have used our research since 2012.