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."This solution has helped my organization by cutting down on provisioning time. I used to have to provision a VM and it would take ten minutes. Now, it takes thirty seconds."
"What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"Snapshots are valuable because of their seamless nature, as well as the minimal space each snapshot takes."
"The most valuable features are: complete performance and ease of use."
"The performance is good, which is important."
"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%."
"We mostly use it for backup, because we cannot measure anything, and we are afraid to use it for surveillance systems. We were planning to use it for mostly for surveillance systems."
"A valuable feature of XtremIO is that, in terms of administration, it's simple and manageable."
"XtremIO’s capability to run any workload without much in the way of design considerations makes this very easy to use and size."
"The feature I like most about Dell Xtremio is its hardware quality compared to other vendors. It's clear they're continuously improving their research and development."
"Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us."
"The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"Our AFF 8040 is currently helping us in terms of response time and speed because it is a flash system. Most importantly, it enables our SQL Cluster to respond to database queries and things a lot faster. It minimizes latency."
"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."
"NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"Multi-protocol is the most valuable feature for us. It does everything in one system: sifts, EBES, ISCSI, and fiber channel. Other systems don't do all that."
"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."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks."
"I am not too impressed with XtremeIO because we had a major failure."
"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."
"Sometimes we don't get an immediate response from the support team. The initial POC also took a lot of resources."
"It needs a way to determine the deduplication of each LUN and what the impact would be if we were to move data from one LUN to another."
"Get rid of the Java aspect of the GUI console."
"XtremIO needs to be lower priced. It also needs better endpoints and scalability."
"If you are looking at flash storage solutions, XtremIO doesn't offer any unique features. Most of my customers are migrating their workload from XtremIO to other formats because of this."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"This is an expensive solution that could be cheaper."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
Dell XtremIO is ranked 26th 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.
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