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."Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"Support has been helpful."
"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."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"We had some customers who were running virtualization workloads on classical spinning disks. We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower. Actually, most customers benefit from the improved latency and performance from the AFF systems."
"There are many reports accessing the applications. We receive them very quickly. We used to wait a long time for them. Now, you just need to wait a moment."
"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us."
"High availability"
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"Our AFF 8040 is currently helping us in terms of response time and speed because it is a flash system. Most importantly, it enables our SQL Cluster to respond to database queries and things a lot faster. It minimizes latency."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"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."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"The user interface should be more user-friendly, and the configuration could be more accessible."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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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