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 amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"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."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"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."
"When we move to all-flash, our response times were reduced to microseconds."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"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."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"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."
"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."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"There are no RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols."
"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"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."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"I would like to see an improvement in the high availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"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."
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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