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."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..."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"The tool has lowered latency."
"The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool."
"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."
"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."
"NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"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."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"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."
"Integration with VMware"
"Good performance for VM environments"
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"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 only downside to NetApp AFF is its price."
"The quality of technical support has dwindled over time and needs to be improved."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"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."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"One of the features that I am looking for, which is already in the works, is to be able to take my code and automatically move it to the cloud."
"The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out."
"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 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."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"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 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."
"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."
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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