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."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"Very efficient storage"
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"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."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"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."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization."
"I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer."
"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."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"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."
"Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
"Its top-tier performance ranks as the most valuable aspect."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"It was not proactive communication."
"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."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"The price should be lower."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"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."
"I come tech support with difficulty because I installed NetApp for many years I know what to expect when I call. When I don't get their support tech that I'm expecting and I'm trying to get to the right one, it can get very frustrating for me personally, trying to all-flash push my way into the right person. NetApp has the right people, it's just a matter of getting to them."
"The total cost of ownership has increased a little."
"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 response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
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 PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, 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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