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 product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"It's reduced our overhead management time on storage, since it is so simple to get in and just provision a volume, present it to the host, and then you are done."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"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."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"Integration with VMware"
"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."
"Good performance for VM environments"
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services. There are increasingly more and more services coming out from AWS but there are also certain constraints where we can't move everything over to a cloud as well. We would like for things that are on-premise to be easily integrated with AWS."
"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."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"The graphical interface is still heavy and slow. Needs more improvement in this area."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
"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."
"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."
"The initial setup has a lot more steps in it than are probably necessary for a base deployment, unlike other vendors where it's more straightforward. It could be a little bit more streamlined."
"There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications."
"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."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Poor connection to FC."
"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."
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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