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's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"The solution is very reliable."
"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."
"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%."
"Thin storage allocation"
"The most valuable features are: complete performance and ease of use."
"Very good IOPS performance"
"It was very easy and straightforward to setup."
"The most valuable features are that it is fast and reliable."
"Linear performance – The XtremIO wasn’t the fastest in all tests against other all flash arrays, but even with a massive workload, the response time and user experience were absolutely predictable with no sharp drop-offs."
"Speed and reliability:"
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp."
"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 benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features."
"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."
"It is easy to manage data through the GUI by using Active IQ and the unified manager."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"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."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"The GUI could be modified more in terms of how the different components are linked to each other."
"One thing that should be improved is the reporting and monitoring tools. It should use real time monitoring for storage, IOPS, latency, etc."
"Scalability is something that can be improved because there is an issue when it comes to mixing versions."
"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."
"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."
"They can improve the product by providing an HTML5-based interface instead of the Java GUI based application."
"XtremIO is coming to its end of life."
"For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful."
"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."
"I think adding more features to make it more cloud enabled will help us with cloud tiering and simplify the whole cloud operations when it's integrating with our on-prem AFF products. That is one area where we would like to see more improvements from NetApp."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
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 PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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