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."It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"It is pretty much just plug and play. There is not that much to do with it. It is very easy to use."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"Technical support is good."
"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."
"Setup was simple and easy."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."
"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."
"It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"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."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once you've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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 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."
"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."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"Poor connection to FC."
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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