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."My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"One of the main features that differentiate AFF from the FAS products, or some other technologies used, is the footprint of these arrays are significantly smaller than the traditional ones. Also, the performance that you get to these new arrays is really significant. You can see a huge difference there. By switching to it, we can achieve more storage performance and efficiency as well as in the long run lower down some of the TCOs due to reducing the footprint."
"The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"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"
"The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency."
"Technical support has been okay."
"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."
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access."
"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 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."
"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."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"They could improve the price."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"In the next release of the solution I would like to see Vormetric native block encryption."
"The data reduction that we had initially anticipated when we bought Pure and we move over, is way lower than the expected reduction. It depends on the workloads, of course. But that has been a challenge at times."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"Its technical support could be better."
"I would like to see the ability to include more applications from applications to managed storage. If we can have more applications or more interface in more applications, that would be great."
"With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade."
"The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions."
"We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations."
"The CLI could be better documented, like with VMAX."
"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."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"The administrative console (Navisphere/Unisphere) needs some improvement, especially on their Java-based GUI. The updated version of Java is not compatible."
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 PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .
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