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."Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"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."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"Technical support is good."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"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."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"Integration with VMware"
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"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."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are."
"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"We have had customers asking about S3 support for a while now. I heard that is coming in one of the next versions. So, I would like to see S3 targeted support on the FAS system."
"NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"The management software used for the VNX is Unicenter. While it is an improvement over Navicenter, used in older EMC SANs, it still feels outdated in comparison to other SAN management software."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"VNX can improve by offering flexible upgrade options. It's not possible to add a single HDD to a current array and there are fixed rules to make upgrades."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
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 NetApp FAS Series, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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