We performed a comparison between Dell XtremIO 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."It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"Very stable; no worries about how much it can handle."
"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 mobile app is very helpful."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%."
"XtremIO’s capability to run any workload without much in the way of design considerations makes this very easy to use and size."
"Xtrem10's features are more simple to implement. The integration and interface are also good."
"The most valuable features are: complete performance and ease of use."
"I like the deduplication and auto-tiering features."
"The performance is good, which is important."
"It was very easy and straightforward to setup."
"The speed is extremely valuable."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"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."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"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."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"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."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"I would like to see the ease of deployment and built-in Metro clustering."
"In some cases where we don’t need the flexibility of the virtualization layer, we could free up resources on the VPLEX by using the storage replication."
"The solution needs to be simplified. When you integrate your storage with other systems, could use a little bit of automation."
"Ease of use is key in the converged and hyper-converged world that requires administrators to have both hypervisor and storage skills."
"Sometimes we don't get an immediate response from the support team. The initial POC also took a lot of resources."
"The implementation isn't exactly complex, but the solution should have some enhancements in it to make the process more centralized."
"XtremIO needs to be lower priced. It also needs better endpoints and scalability."
"This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive."
"I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better."
"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."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"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."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"Its technical support could be better."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
"The cost of this solution should be reduced."
Dell XtremIO is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell XtremIO is rated 7.6, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell XtremIO writes "Suitable for high IOPS and helps get backup in ten minutes ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell Unity XT, INFINIDAT InfiniBox and VMware vSAN, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF report.
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