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 support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"The solution is very reliable."
"The performance is very good."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"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 Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"Before we implemented AFF, Oracle was running on a traditional storage spindle and at a very low speed with high latency, and the database was not running very well. After we converted from the spinning disk to the all-flash array, it was at least four times faster to access the volume than before."
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"Technical support has been okay."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"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"
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"Integration with VMware"
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"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."
"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."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are."
"We would like to have more behavioral reporting."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"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."
"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."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"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."
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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