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."The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"The reliability is very good."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"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."
"The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy."
"It is a stable solution."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"It is very stable, even during multiple power failures."
"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 replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"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."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"Integration with VMware"
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"It's not so scalable. It's got moderate scaling capabilities right now. The clustering technology needs a bit of work, they need to improve that."
"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."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"The user interface should be more user-friendly, and the configuration could be more accessible."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"Intel Xeon processors with under 2 GHz processing speeds could be replaced with more recent ones."
"Poor connection to FC."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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."
"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."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
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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