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 stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"It worked flawlessly."
"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."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"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."
"Technical support is good."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"Support has been helpful."
"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."
"High availability"
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management."
"The most valuable feature is speed."
"It's very stable. It's always there when we need it. With the Dual Controller, if one drops out, the other one comes right online. We don't use any iSCSI so there is a little bit of a latency break but, over the NFS, we don't notice that switch-on. We can do maintenance in the middle of the day, literally rip a whole controller out of the chassis, and do what we need to do with it."
"I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"NetApp AFF is based on Unix, which makes it secure."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"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 replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"Integration with VMware"
"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 setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"Technical support is a little lackluster. Some of the issues that we've had were opening up tickets. They seem to be routed in the wrong direction or it takes one or two days to get a call back for simple tasks."
"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"Tech support is great with NetApp if you can get past Tier 1. A lot of times when you open a new case or do a direct dial-in with an issue, like with any support, you will definitely reach a Tier 1 level that is not particularly helpful until you get escalated to an expert."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"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."
"The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out."
"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"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."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"There is no easy way to defrag a RAID group. It would be nice to be able to reduce the size of a storage pool if the storage is not needed anymore."
"VNX can improve by offering flexible upgrade options. It's not possible to add a single HDD to a current array and there are fixed rules to make upgrades."
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 PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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