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."For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"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."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."
"The performance is the most valuable feature."
"I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it."
"The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy."
"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"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."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"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."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"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."
"A lot of the tools that are built into the stock, ONTAP operating system, instead of having to buy the add-ons and things."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions."
"We have had trouble with restoring applications, and if there is more support for application-aware backups then that would be great."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 28th in All-Flash Storage with 1 review while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 43 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "A unified flash storage solution with poor performance, support, and features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "It has simplified our operational model by making routine processes easier and less prone to error". 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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