We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VMware vSAN 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."The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The latency is good."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support."
"Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9."
"The business copy solution has become faster using SnapMirror."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"The technical support is good."
"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"On the fiber channel side, there is a limit of sixteen terabytes on each line, and we would like to see this raised because we are having to use some other products."
"I would like to see an improvement in the high availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime."
"I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and NetApp FAS Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Alletra dHCI.
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