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 very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"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."
"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 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's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"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."
"Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT.""
"It is easy to manage data through the GUI by using Active IQ and the unified manager."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"The software layer has to improve."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"It is on the expensive side."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"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."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"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."
"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."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"You have a limit in terms of how much you can expand storage. It sounds like a lot. However, over the years, as you grow, it may be smaller than you think."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"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."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"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."
"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."
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 Pure Storage FlashArray, VAST Data and Tintri VMstore T7000, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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