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."Performance is the most valuable feature."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"The most valuable feature of HP Primera is that you don't have to buy an additional product for application replication. It's a stable product. The tool is scalable. I recommend HPE Primera because it's one of HP's most stable product."
"In my opinion, HPE is making good progress and moving ahead with InfoSight, which is predictive analytics and artificial intelligence."
"The high availability was most valuable because they come with what's called 100% data availability. With special terms, they license and guarantee 100% data availability. That was probably one of the key features or components that HPE was offering with that model."
"It is a stable and scalable solution with quick and efficient storage capability."
"The interface is simplified."
"We sold Primera to a public university, and they're happy with it. They have been using it for about four months with no significant problems."
"The product has better replication features than the previous products."
"The performance of the solution is good."
"Deduplication"
"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."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"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."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"The speed is important; no more problems caused by high latency."
"Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT.""
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"The price of the product is an area of concern. From an improvement perspective, the solution should be made more affordable in terms of price."
"The solution could improve by having seamless migration from other storage systems. The process should be made easier."
"Increasing the IOPS and throughput values would make the product even better. Improving the scalability of HPE Primera is also recommended."
"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 pricing is very high."
"One of the drawbacks of the model we purchased is that it is not running NVMe drives. Even though they say that it is NVMe-ready, it is still on the SSD drives. The model that we purchased has only eight hard drives, and only the ones on the top could work on NVMe. The rest of them are still on the SSD. Its competitors, such as EMC and Pure Storage, are moving or have already moved to NVMe. HPE should improve this solution for NVMe. HPE should also improve IOs in this solution. IOs in HPE are weaker than Hitachi and Pure Storage."
"There are certain shortcomings in the technical support offered by HPE where improvements are required."
"Some application solutions can be more acceptable on the HPE Primera site."
"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."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace."
"Sometimes, NetApp support could be better. When the customers escalate, it can feel like everything's starting from scratch. These are rare cases. I'm not directly involved in support, but that's what I hear when something doesn't work."
"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."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
HPE Primera is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 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, IBM FlashSystem and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. See our HPE Primera vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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