We performed a comparison between DDN IntelliFlash 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."It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"Before we implemented AFF, Oracle was running on a traditional storage spindle and at a very low speed with high latency, and the database was not running very well. After we converted from the spinning disk to the all-flash array, it was at least four times faster to access the volume than before."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"Batch times went from approximately seven hours down to about two and a half. Functionality during the day, such as taking or removing snapshots and cloning instances, is higher than it has ever been."
"NetApp is like a one-point central management. For example, one can put everything on the right version and control the whole environment from one software solution."
"AFF has opened our eyes in a different light of how storage value works. In the past, we looked at it more as just a container where we could just dump our customer dBms and let the customers use it in terms of efficiency. Today, to be able to replicate that data to a different location, use that data to recover your environment or be able to have the flexibility with the solution and data. These are things which piqued our interest. It's something that we're willing to provide as a solution to our customers."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"It is a bit expensive."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different."
"Technical support is a little lackluster. Some of the issues that we've had were opening up tickets. They seem to be routed in the wrong direction or it takes one or two days to get a call back for simple tasks."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data and Tintri VMstore, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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