We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem 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."Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The latency is good."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"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."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."
"The storage system is one of the best in the world."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market."
"The most valuable feature in demand is virtualization and its support storage of virtualization features."
"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."
"The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"NetApp AFF's flash technology offers great performance. This feature has been my go-to for managing data and ensuring speed and reliability."
"Technical support has been okay."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"NetApp AFF is based on Unix, which makes it secure."
"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."
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"The solution's infrastructure technology level could be PCI Express 5 instead of PCI Express 4 for the next version."
"The Data Reduction Pools (DRP) support could be better."
"Enterprise data storage needs improvement. They should create a feature for data and file storage."
"The solution is quite expensive. That's one of the downsides to using it."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
"The technical support in my region is satisfactory but it could improve. Support is very important for customers and downtime is very critical for us. We would like onsite or complete technical support which can help us to minimize our downtime or if problems occur."
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"NetApp AFF is a highly expensive solution, and its pricing should be reduced."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"A graphical user interface displaying efficiency metrics, such as compression and deduplication rates, would be a great addition."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series. See our IBM FlashSystem 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.
