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."We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has neat features like protection from device removal. Moreover, you can undo the deletes. The solution is easy to work with and not as complicated as CAC"
"This solution is very scalable."
"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS."
"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."
"Batch times went from approximately seven hours down to about two and a half. Functionality during the day, such as taking or removing snapshots and cloning instances, is higher than it has ever been."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"Most of our business-critical systems are provisioned from the NetApp AFF system. Compared to others, we have a minimal latency. Configuring the DR for high availability or migrating the volumes from one box to another is pretty easy with NetApp AFF."
"The speed is important; no more problems caused by high latency."
"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 feature is the ease of management."
"High availability including non-disruptive updates: We cannot afford downtime windows."
"The replication feature provides another functionality to protect your data."
"Integration with VMware"
"I really value deduplication and compression to save space."
"It is very stable even during multiple power failures."
"FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."
"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages."
"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."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"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."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"I would like it to be an IP as our network is mainly IP-based."
"Customer service is one area of the product line where I would love to see improvement. I have had several vendor experiences with NetApp where I faced challenges in the initial call trying to navigate the requirements of the service level expectation. Their response could be better improved. However, the final result is great. It is just the initial support level where improvement would help to effectively solve problems."
"Sometimes, NetApp support could be better. When the customers escalate, it can feel like everything's starting from scratch. These are rare cases. I'm not directly involved in support, but that's what I hear when something doesn't work."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."
"EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this."
"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."
"If the VNX had embedded encryption, that would be great."
"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 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."
"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 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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