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."My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The top-tier support and reliable storage are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"It's helping to leverage data. The storage is being utilized to implement larger, complex file sizes."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
"Supports file formatting, the main protocols, and the hot swapping of disks and features."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"The most valuable feature is speed."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"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."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"Integration with VMware"
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"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."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"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."
"It was a little costly. The price was ultimately higher than both of the other solutions that we evaluated. I'd say that's the only downside."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"I would like there to be a way to break out the 40 gig ports on them. We have a lot of 10 gigs in our environment. It is a big challenge breaking out the 40 gig coming out of the filer. It would be nice to have good old 10 gig ports again, or a card that has just 10 gig ports on it."
"I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
"The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"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 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."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
Earn 20 points
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 43 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 "It has simplified our operational model by making routine processes easier and less prone to error". On the other hand, 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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