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 code upgrades are very smooth."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, so we get more out of our storage. The replication is also important."
"The performance of NetApp AFF allows our developers and researches to run models and their tests within a single workday instead of spreading out across multiple workdays."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."
"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."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"Tech support has been absolutely amazing. I think on the technical aspects as well, my staff is able to get great support from the NetApp technical support resources that we have. What I love about NetApp is they have a health care division. At times, it's such an amazing thing because if we have a healthcare-related issue, there's no one better than having prior CIOs from health care organizations that NetApp has hired, and that are part of the health care team, to help out with any of those initiatives and support problems. Support has been absolutely phenomenal."
"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 auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"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."
"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."
"From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"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."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"The cost of this solution should be reduced."
"Its technical support could be better."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"The size of NetApp could be better. They're always about 40 pounds without the hard drives in them, so it would be great if there's a way to make them smaller yet keep the functionality. That would reduce the physical footprint."
"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."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"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."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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."
"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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