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 sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market... My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure... It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage."
"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"It is fast and reliable. It works."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"It's actually very stable"
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"Supports file formatting, the main protocols, and the hot swapping of disks and features."
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management."
"The biggest benefit of NetApp AFF is the performance."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"Integration with VMware"
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"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."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"The file functionality could be better."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"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 just got through the session where it looks like they are going to support Oracle running on Linux with SnapCenter. That is one of the main things that we are hoping to get integrated."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"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."
"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."
"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 SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"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 VAST Data, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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