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 are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"The solution helps to simplify storage."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"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."
"AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"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."
"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."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"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 replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"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."
"Integration with VMware"
"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."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"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."
"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."
"With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade."
"The initial setup has a lot more steps in it than are probably necessary for a base deployment, unlike other vendors where it's more straightforward. It could be a little bit more streamlined."
"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 administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"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 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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