We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe 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."For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"It significantly simplifies storage."
"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."
"We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point."
"My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface."
"I am impressed with the tool's reliability since we see a few hardware failures with it. Also, the solution's replication configuration is good."
"The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"It is a true, stable product."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"One of the main features that differentiate AFF from the FAS products, or some other technologies used, is the footprint of these arrays are significantly smaller than the traditional ones. Also, the performance that you get to these new arrays is really significant. You can see a huge difference there. By switching to it, we can achieve more storage performance and efficiency as well as in the long run lower down some of the TCOs due to reducing the footprint."
"We found AFF systems very competitive in terms of performance, storage efficiency, feature richness, and scalability."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"Deduplication"
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS."
"It is a stable solution."
"It needs to improve its price."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that."
"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"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."
"The Bezels need improvement."
"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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