We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"The compression and deduplication features help to make the best use of the capacity."
"It worked flawlessly."
"Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."
"No queuing and high ops, speed, and performance."
"Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly."
"The most valuable features are flexibility and performance."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"FlashSystem offers proven technology in a compact package."
"The compression and deduplication features are the most valuable."
"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."
"The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments."
"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"The most valuable feature is speed."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"Customization features must be improved."
"Sometimes the performance is effective but it gets resolved in the process."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"In the next release having the next level of high-speed performance would be great."
"GUI interface should be enhanced more as there is some issues in copy services."
"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."
"The interface of this solution could be improved."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, HPE Nimble Storage and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp ASA. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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