We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VNX [EOL] 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 all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"The biggest benefit of NetApp AFF is the performance."
"There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system."
"Technical support is good."
"It's helping to leverage data. The storage is being utilized to implement larger, complex file sizes."
"The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today."
"One of the best features of the VNX is the ability to combine drives of different types into a virtual Storage Pool. By combining small but fast flash drives, SAS drives, and high-capacity but slower NL-SAS drives, the VNX can intelligently move data to the different tiers of storage based on usage."
"Integration with VMware"
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"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."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"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 cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"It would be great if they had a single pane of glass or a single dashboard where all the NetApp ecosystem storages could be viewed and monitored simply. That would help my Operations."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"Stability could be improved."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"The management software used for the VNX is Unicenter. While it is an improvement over Navicenter, used in older EMC SANs, it still feels outdated in comparison to other SAN management software."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"Based on our workloads, we see repeatedly in performance reports that the built-in controller (SP) cache of our VNX model is not sufficiently large, resulting in forced cache flushing."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"It would be very helpful to get an automated report that shows you the size of the checkpoints and get warnings when a checkpoint is reaching either maximum capacity per a file system or hitting the ceiling on the SavVol pool consumption."
"Poor connection to FC."
Earn 20 points
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while VNX [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in All-Flash Storage. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VNX [EOL] is rated 8.0. 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 VNX [EOL] writes "The auto-tiering helps in the speed of data access". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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