We performed a comparison between NetApp FAS Series and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) came out ahead of NetApp FAS Series. Although both products have similar deployment difficulty and quality of support, NetApp FAS Series has fewer valuable features and should move towards adopting more all-flash capabilities.
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"The speed is the most valuable feature, along with the ease of getting it connected. We were able to get it online in less than a day."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"When we move to all-flash, our response times were reduced to microseconds."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"This solution has reduced our data center costs because when we went from the 8000 and 3200 series that took us from 20 racks of storage down to two."
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"We use the NFS and SIP protocols a lot. The NFS is the most valuable feature."
"It's an easy product to use that is stable and has good performance."
"It is very flexible. It integrates well with the public cloud and other components, so everything can be API driven. Therefore, it is very easy to automate it."
"Flexible and reliable storage solution with multiple features such as cloning, replication, and deduplication. Data migration can be done without any performance implications on the production systems."
"The most valuable features are compression and dedupe."
"A reliable and easily managed storage system is a key performance factor. The system also has more features than we require."
"You can use different protocols at the same time. Monitoring is also very easy in NetApp FAS Series. There is a free tool for monitoring."
"The most valuable features are the NAS features and NetApp's excellent support."
"The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"It would be nice to have better integration between SRM and VMware, as I've had some issues with that."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"Its integration could be improved."
"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"Cost is always a factor. Some people choose EMC or Dell because they perceive NetApp as being more expensive."
"Currently, the newest release is not HCI friendly."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"There are some technical limitations, but it would be great to have in-line deduplication and in-line compression for the FAS series as well."
"We no longer have OEM support in South Africa which is not helpful, it can be difficult. They should add an office back to the country because it was better."
"The user interface could be improved."
"They should add new features to the product."
"Replication should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while NetApp FAS Series is ranked 5th in Deduplication Software with 98 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while NetApp FAS Series is rated 8.8. 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 NetApp FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data, whereas NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), IBM FlashSystem and HPE StoreEasy. See our NetApp AFF vs. NetApp FAS Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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