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 management and administration user-friendliness, provisioning, and performance."
"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."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage."
"The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses."
"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"Replication would be one of the most valuable features."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"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."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"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."
"Integration with VMware"
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"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."
"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 price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"It would be great if they had a single pane of glass or a single dashboard where all the NetApp ecosystem storages could be viewed and monitored simply. That would help my Operations."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
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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