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."At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"Performance, dedupe, and that it works well with database workloads are its most valuable features."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"The business copy solution has become faster using SnapMirror."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"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."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"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."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different."
"This is an expensive solution that could be cheaper."
"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"Higher communication: I love the professional services and I love everything that everyone's able to offer us, but I find sometimes we're not aware of all the things that NetApp can do."
"Poor connection to FC."
"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."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
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 VAST Data, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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