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 worked flawlessly."
"I use all the features of this solution and I find them to be easy to use and functional, such as the compression and capacity to expand."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"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."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"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 has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It is a stable solution."
"It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out."
"I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
"The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy."
"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."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"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."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"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."
"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."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
"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 size of NetApp could be better. They're always about 40 pounds without the hard drives in them, so it would be great if there's a way to make them smaller yet keep the functionality. That would reduce the physical footprint."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash."
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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