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 first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"The technical support is very good."
"The speed is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support."
"The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp."
"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."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"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."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"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."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The dashboard needs improvement. The dashboard needs some uplift"
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"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 great with NetApp if you can get past Tier 1. A lot of times when you open a new case or do a direct dial-in with an issue, like with any support, you will definitely reach a Tier 1 level that is not particularly helpful until you get escalated to an expert."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"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."
"I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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 administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"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."
"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."
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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