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 solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"We can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us."
"Technical support is good."
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"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."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"Deduplication"
"It has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. These improvements are a result of all-flash, throughput, reliability, compression, etc."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
"Integration with VMware"
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"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."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS."
"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."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"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."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"One of the features that I am looking for, which is already in the works, is to be able to take my code and automatically move it to the cloud."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard, because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs. I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right."
"On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"Poor connection to FC."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"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."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
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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