Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp AFF Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.""The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone.""The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability.""FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle.""The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature.""The latency is good.""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.""Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pros →

"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""The solution is very easy to set up.""Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is quite an elementary box, no frills. It does not have all the functionality of the DM but it is acceptable, it does its task. It integrates pretty well.""We have been working with the solution for around a year and so far it has shown itself to be stable.""This solution is good for virtualization and meets the need for CPU and RAM requirements.""ThinkSystem's storage performs well, and the price per gigabyte is good, especially on SSD solutions. It's also easy to use.""The solution's initial setup process is easy."

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"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio.""NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with.""The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments.""The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability.""The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more.""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.""We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there.""The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."

More NetApp AFF Pros →

Cons
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors.""In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified.""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.""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.""Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe.""Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better.""Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient.""We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Cons →

"Its performance could be faster.""It would be useful to have structured solutions replicated to other sites.""ThinkSystem could be better integrated with backup software like Commvault, Veritas, or Symantec.""Improvements can be made to the product's performance.""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.""The solution could be more scalable, although it suits our present needs.""In the next release, I would like to see more functionality. But, again, it is an entry-level product.""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."

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"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to.""In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense.""​A lot of the tools that are built into the stock, ONTAP operating system, instead of having to buy the add-ons and things.​""AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform.""The support documentation has room for improvement.""I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal.""I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace.""There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications."

More NetApp AFF Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "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."
  • "We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
  • "With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
  • "Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
  • "As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
  • "They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
  • "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."
  • More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "We have a five-year contract for providing support."
  • "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 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."
  • "The solution's price could be better."
  • More Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."
  • "Once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought."
  • "Obviously depending on the price point, NetApp is obviously a little more expensive than your generic Dell SAN solution or whatever."
  • "Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."
  • "The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down."
  • "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 is getting too expensive."
  • "ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system."
  • More NetApp AFF Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    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 Operations. As a benchmark let’s compare FAS to EMC’s solutions – I fully appreciate that EMC has taken a best of breed approach, but my feeling is that for most non-enterprise customers this is not a sustainable strategy – customers want simplicity and ease of use, and you are not going to get that by deploying four different storage platforms to meet your needs. I have chosen EMC because they are the overall market share leader and they have the broadest set of storage products available – so let’s compare FAS with VNX, VPLEX, XtremIO, Isilon and Data Domain: NetApp FAS supports All-Disk, Hybrid Flash and All-Flash data stores - that meet the needs of any kind of application workload The VNX is a very good All-Disk and Hybrid Flash array and XtremIO is a very good All-Flash array, but you need two completely different products to provide the functionality. NetApp FAS eliminates silos and provides seamless scalability - to address Server Virtualisation, Virtual Desktop, Database and File storage needs in one scale-up and scale-out solution, that can start small and grow large VNX is optimal for general Server Virtualisation and Databases and XtremIO excels when it comes to large scale… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
    Top Answer:The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it… more »
    Top Answer:The tool's pricing is higher than competitors.
    Top Answer:Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in the… more »
    Top Answer:This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended cost… more »
    Top Answer:The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matters… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
    ThinkSystem DE Series
    NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
    Learn More
    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.

    The DE All-Flash Series delivers the performance of more than 2,000 15k rpm HDDs, yet requires only 2% of the rack space, power, and cooling. Because it consumes 98% less space and power, DE Series can significantly improve the overall efficiency of your IT operations while continuing to meet your performance requirements.

    The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.

    NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.

    AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.

    AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.

    NetApp AFF Benefits

    • Speed up your critical applications with lightning-fast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays.
    • Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
    • Save up to 95% of rack space and up to 85% of power and cooling cost over hybrid flash storage.
    • Reduce cost with guaranteed storage efficiency.
    • Realize even greater savings by tiering cold data to the cloud easily.
    • Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.

    NetApp AFF Features

    • Expand capacity with nondisruptive scaling in a cluster without silos or data migration.
    • Manage data with the ultimate flexibility of unified support across different storage media and protocols, on premises or in the cloud.
    • Scale performance with technology innovations of NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP connectivity.
    • Safeguard your data with best-in-class data security, ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
    • Simplify backup and recovery with built-in application-consistent data protection.
    • Achieve business continuity and fast disaster recovery with zero data loss and zero downtime.
    • Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

    Reviews from Real Users

    NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

    Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

    Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

    Sample Customers
    Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
    Information Not Available
    DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company15%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization61%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Financial Services Firm3%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business73%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise73%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise66%
    Large Enterprise25%
    Buyer's Guide
    Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp AFF
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is rated 8.6, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series writes "Provides good stability and is reliable in terms of performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and HPE Primera. See our Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series 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.