We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VNX [EOL] 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."We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"It's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"Its top-tier performance ranks as the most valuable aspect."
"We do a lot of financial modeling. We have a large compute cluster that generates a lot of files. It is important for us to get a quick response back for any type of multimillion file accesses across the cluster at one time. So, it's a lot quicker to do that. We found that solid-state performs so much better than than spinning drives, even over multiple clusters."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. It was intuitive to set up storage volumes and get the networking functioning. Their engineer was very helpful. We got the current array on our production site the very same day it was shipped in. We had it up on the network and started to put some storage on it."
"The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"From my point of view, the configuration that I can sell is restricted to the EMC best practices. It is hard to make a mistake in a solution. It means the configuration has good performance and scalability options."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"One of the best features of the VNX is the ability to combine drives of different types into a virtual Storage Pool. By combining small but fast flash drives, SAS drives, and high-capacity but slower NL-SAS drives, the VNX can intelligently move data to the different tiers of storage based on usage."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same."
"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."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"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 admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved."
"Higher communication: I love the professional services and I love everything that everyone's able to offer us, but I find sometimes we're not aware of all the things that NetApp can do."
"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."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"There is no easy way to defrag a RAID group. It would be nice to be able to reduce the size of a storage pool if the storage is not needed anymore."
"Based on our workloads, we see repeatedly in performance reports that the built-in controller (SP) cache of our VNX model is not sufficiently large, resulting in forced cache flushing."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"Poor connection to FC."
Earn 20 points
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while VNX [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in All-Flash Storage. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VNX [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VNX [EOL] writes "The auto-tiering helps in the speed of data access". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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