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 most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"The performance is very good."
"Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."
"With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage."
"NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"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."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"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."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"I need faster Fibre Channel over Ethernet. They top out at 10GBs today and I would like that to go to 40 or 100."
"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."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"There is an easy replication process between distinct data centers via VPLEX and/or RPA. But I hope in the future that EMC/Dell could replicate this with other types of storage."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"Poor connection to FC."
"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."
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 .
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.