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."The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"Very efficient storage"
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"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."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT.""
"We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great."
"The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"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."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"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."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"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."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Stability could be improved."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."
"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."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 28th 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, Tintri VMstore, Dell Unity XT and DDN SFA7990X, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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