HPE Alletra vs NetApp AFF comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Pure Storage Logo
1,952 views|1,181 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Logo
421 views|381 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
NetApp Logo
20,078 views|10,686 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE Alletra and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage.
To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,127 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
"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.""The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature.""Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution.""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.""Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates.""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.""It has good, reliable, fast storage.""Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Pros →

"The tool's notable feature is that we don't need to log a case directly with the vendor. The tool has access to all the logs on-premises. This is an on-premises solution. Additionally, we can provision data as thick or thin provisioned. Moreover, it includes data grid duplication and compression features.""It offers rich features and high speed for transferring data."

More HPE Alletra Pros →

"The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe.""I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product.""The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive.""Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability.""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.""The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great.""It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time.""NetApp AFF is based on Unix, which makes it secure."

More NetApp AFF Pros →

Cons
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services.""It is on the expensive side.""The tool's pricing is higher than competitors.""It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking.""I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware.""In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models.""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.""The software layer has to improve."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Cons →

"It would be better if there were an option to incorporate the NVMe feature alongside other storage tiers. Currently, the system operates on Autotier but can manually peer and mix different types of drives, such as SAS and SATA drives.""We had some issues while installing it on our servers. It required more resources while cross-checking. So, the initial setup process could be better."

More HPE Alletra Cons →

"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion.""When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance.""Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes.""It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products.""There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same.""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.""We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."

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 solution is expensive and can cost around five lakhs."
  • "There is a license. HPE Alletra uses a cloud-based model."
  • More HPE Alletra 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 →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which All-Flash Storage solutions are best for your needs.
    772,127 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    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: It offers rich features and high speed for transferring data.
    Top Answer:There is a license. HPE Alletra uses a cloud-based model. This means I'm focused on procuring on-demand resources for… more »
    Top Answer:We had some issues while installing it on our servers. It required more resources while cross-checking. So, the initial… more »
    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
    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.

    HPE Alletra offers high-performance storage solutions for enterprise environments, ideal for mission-critical applications like data analytics, AI/ML workloads, VDI, and cloud-native applications. 

    Users praise its exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and ease of use, highlighting its ability to enhance storage efficiency and improve data center performance. It has proven to increase efficiency, productivity, sales, and customer satisfaction for organizations.

    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
    1. Accenture 2. Aetna 3. AIG 4. Airbus 5. Allianz 6. American Express 7. ATT 8. Bank of America 9. Barclays 10. BASF 11. Bayer 12. Berkshire Hathaway 13. Boeing 14. BNP Paribas 15. Citigroup 16. Coca Cola 17. Comcast 18. Credit Suisse 19. Dell 20. Deutsche Bank 21. Eni 22. ExxonMobil 23. Ford Motor Company 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. HSBC 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. JPMorgan Chase 30. Kroger 31. L'Oreal 32. Merck
    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 Company20%
    Government14%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company15%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization61%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Financial Services Firm4%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise37%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise73%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise66%
    Large Enterprise25%
    Buyer's Guide
    All-Flash Storage
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: May 2024.
    772,127 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HPE Alletra is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 2 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. HPE Alletra is rated 9.0, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra writes "Offers high-intensity IOPS for data operations and delivers extremely low latency for disk operations". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". HPE Alletra is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN.

    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.