We performed a comparison between Kaminario K2 [EOL] and NetApp AFF 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 sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market... My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure... It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"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."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration."
"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 tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"Latency is definitely the big key for us."
"The capacity that we're saving by using Kaminario's K2 is giving us a four-to-one ratio for our deduplication."
"Implementation of the solution is very simple."
"Inline compression"
"The ratio between the physical storage and the storage we use is very high."
"Built-in snapshot support gives us SAN-side functionality most other platforms would have had us license separately."
"The speed and, for us in particular in what we're doing, the data de-duplication."
"Scale out is a differentiator for them, especially in the enterprise market. It's key for a lot of customers."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files."
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup."
"If you need a replacement part, they will provide it."
"We had some customers who were running virtualization workloads on classical spinning disks. We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower. Actually, most customers benefit from the improved latency and performance from the AFF systems."
"NetApp AFF is based on Unix, which makes it secure."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"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."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"The front panel of the drive shelf doesn't always seat firmly."
"I think it should have better performance with small files. With big data, its performance is top notch, but it is difficult to load small files."
"The system currently has a 15TB LUN size limit and that snapshots need to be scheduled through script API instead of the GUI."
"I'm hoping to see Active Directory integration. Right now, you still have to use a local admin account to log in and manage everything."
"The interface look and feel could be improved."
"I would like them to improve the look of the product’s external casing and shelves."
"I would like to see them work with Cisco, so it comes off the FIs, instead of having to go through my 10-gig network."
"I would love to see capacity on its DRAM. I know it's not cost effective for them to do it, but I think that it could be a big differentiator and was a big differentiator from the beginning."
"I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"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."
"The graphical interface is still heavy and slow. Needs more improvement in this area."
"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."
"Implementation needs to be improved."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
Earn 20 points
Kaminario K2 [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in All-Flash Storage while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Kaminario K2 [EOL] is rated 8.8, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Kaminario K2 [EOL] writes "Built-in snapshot support gives us SAN-side functionality most other platforms license separately". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Kaminario K2 [EOL] is most compared with , whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series.
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