We performed a comparison between NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) came out ahead of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. The two solutions have similar deployment difficulty, price range, and support quality, but NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays has fewer valuable features, according to its users.
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The solution is scalable."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"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."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"Replication would be one of the most valuable features."
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment."
"The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse."
"Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical."
"The total cost of ownership has increased a little."
"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."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups."
"Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
"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."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"I’d like to see bigger, faster, better hardware, of course. I think that is the way the hardware is trending anyway; bigger, faster CPU, better software, fewer bugs, all that stuff. T"
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"The management interface, while very reliable, it seems a little old now and could maybe use a little modernization."
"It needs a better management tool."
"It was difficult to implement and lacks some additional features that would be useful, but as a solution fits a particular need for our organization."
"The price of the All Flash solution is very high."
More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Pricing and Cost Advice →
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, HPE Primera and IBM FlashSystem. See our NetApp AFF vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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