We performed a comparison between HPE Primera and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"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 performance of the solution is good."
"It serves as the primary storage in my production environment."
"HPE provides good support through their customer service."
"In my opinion, HPE is making good progress and moving ahead with InfoSight, which is predictive analytics and artificial intelligence."
"Primera's main advantage is its support for NVM drives and normal flash drives. It has some sort of AI analysis that automatically tells us how to optimize the performance."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of deployment."
"HPE Primera is an all-flash storage product that's very stable and has a higher storage capacity. It can also give better ROI compared to NetApp."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"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."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer."
"We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"We need better data deduplication."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"This solution would be expensive for small business and it could be priced more competitively for that market."
"We've encountered issues in the past where maintaining a read-only state is essential to prevent data encryption when VPN access is impacted."
"The solution could prove the reporting."
"Primera should be more user-friendly."
"Increasing the IOPS and throughput values would make the product even better. Improving the scalability of HPE Primera is also recommended."
"The file server embedded in Pure, the GUI, and the tracking and reporting features are better with Pure Storage."
"We cannot use this storage for critical applications and data."
"There are certain shortcomings in the technical support offered by HPE where improvements are required."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
"The quality of technical support has dwindled over time and needs to be improved."
"I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"In terms of what needs improvement, I would like to see more consistency with the UI. It seems to change every few versions. The menus can be in a completely different place."
HPE Primera is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. HPE Primera is rated 8.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of HPE Primera writes "A highly stable and easy-to-configure solution that provides excellent features that enable smooth migration". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". HPE Primera is most compared with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, HPE Nimble Storage, Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and HPE Nimble Storage. See our HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
