We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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."The mobile app is very helpful."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"It's actually very stable"
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"It is a true, stable product."
"The number one most valuable feature is reliability. I want to go home at the end of the day and come in the next day knowing it works, especially since we have storage offshore."
"Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model."
"We use ESRS for our call-home, and a lot of times, Dell EMC will respond to the issue before we even know it."
"The storage features are valuable."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."
"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."
"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."
"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8. 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 NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, NetApp ASA and NetApp AFF. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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