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."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."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"The most valuable feature is its upgradeability."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance."
"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."
"The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"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 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."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"The file functionality could be better."
"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 price of this solution could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"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."
"We have had trouble with restoring applications, and if there is more support for application-aware backups then that would be great."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"We'd like to see improvement in the time to retrieve from the Cloud, whether it's on-prem to cloud and whether it's public or private cloud."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"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."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"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."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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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