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."One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"Technical support is good."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"It has good stability for our company."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features."
"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."
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"When we move to all-flash, our response times were reduced to microseconds."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful."
"Its integration could be improved."
"We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups."
"Stability could be improved."
"I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"There is an easy replication process between distinct data centers via VPLEX and/or RPA. But I hope in the future that EMC/Dell could replicate this with other types of storage."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"Poor connection to FC."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"It would be very helpful to get an automated report that shows you the size of the checkpoints and get warnings when a checkpoint is reaching either maximum capacity per a file system or hitting the ceiling on the SavVol pool consumption."
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 .
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.