We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and NetApp AFF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"They have a feature called Live Migrate; it's been very, very useful."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"With federation, you can have multiple systems across sites. You can treat them as one, and with a live migration, volumes don't go down. You can move them from site to site, doing maintenance, and keep your environment up."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it."
"The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool."
"The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe."
"The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup."
"The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful."
"One option I would like to see is, when you're up on the view-screen, to be able to incorporate getting to what HPE call the iLO, the Integrated Lights-Out. To be able to get that instead of having to go back and trying to find IP addresses and re-institute those would be good. It would be good to be able to that put on the initial splash screen."
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"The price could be improved."
"I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"To enhance the already excellent administration, one area for potential improvement could be in terms of integration."
"The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"The certification classes are good, but they don't cover enough of the material, and the exams only test on what is covered in class."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN. See our Dell SC Series vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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