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 most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"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."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"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"
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"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."
"The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network"
"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 file-based protocol supports NFS and CIFS."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications."
"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."
"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 need faster Fibre Channel over Ethernet. They top out at 10GBs today and I would like that to go to 40 or 100."
"The certification classes are good, but they don't cover enough of the material, and the exams only test on what is covered in class."
"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."
"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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