We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem 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."The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"The performance is very good."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"The price-performance ratio is most valuable."
"Speed (IOPS/second) – It is most vital for applications that need low latency and high speed for transferring the data."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"IBM FlashSystem has an easy to use GUI, similar to the IBM Storewize family, which make it one of the best flash storage systems in the market."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"We've found the solution to be very stable so far."
"IBM FlashSystem is a flexible solution with plenty of features."
"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."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup."
"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."
"Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features."
"Technical support has been okay."
"The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"The generic functionality of IBM FlashSystem, IBM always dismisses using file share or sharing protocols inside their storage hardware, and they only focus on the block-level storage."
"Cloud file sharing is an area that needs improvement."
"It is slightly more expensive, however, it all depends on your supplier."
"The pricing needs to be more competitive."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
"I think the only thing the developers can look at, is that it is limited to 25 gigabytes currently. In the next release they might want to increase that."
"When you provision a datastore auto-format takes a long time"
"The pricing could be improved, but I think it's getting better and better with each version. IBM needs to implement NAS storage again, as this is a big flaw. Dell EMC is very good at this and if you compared them based on NAS storage, Dell EMC would win right away. IBM's solution for NAS storage is very complicated. We don't have a storage box that provides file sharing from itself, we have to put software on it and go through a whole complicated process. It should be simplified."
"The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited about seeing. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."
"To enhance the already excellent administration, one area for potential improvement could be in terms of integration."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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