We performed a comparison between NetApp FAS Series 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 FAS Series. Although both products have similar deployment difficulty and quality of support, NetApp FAS Series has fewer valuable features and should move towards adopting more all-flash capabilities.
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."
"Switching to AFF has improved the performance of a lot of our virtual machines in a VMware environment. The number of support tickets that we receive has fallen to almost zero because of this, so it's been a real help for our virtual server support team."
"Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The performance is the most valuable feature."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"The product is flexible."
"It is very easy to expand disks and manage CIFS."
"The most valuable feature for us is the combining of HA and SnapMirror."
"It's an easy product to use that is stable and has good performance."
"It allows our Windows and Unix teams to have a centralized point to share data between the two."
"It's a stable product. No issues there."
"Better performance and lower costs."
"The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is its stability."
"I would like some form of QoS implemented. As a service provider, it would be beneficial to have it."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"The GUI is simplistic and basic. I feel like it's explanatory, but not enough, it needs a little more to it."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"The file functionality could be better."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"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."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment."
"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."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"Technical support needs to be improved, as there are no longer partners in our country."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"The biggest issue we face is parts delivery. There's no local warehouse in Myanmar, so if a customer encounters a technical problem like an IMEI issue, they have to wait a long time for replacement parts."
"The adoption of flash by NetApp has also been lagging behind the trendsetters, like TMS, Nimble, and others."
"Installation of the additional switches and ETP could be improved."
"We would like to have further integration with some backup products. They have some of them already, but there could be more."
"With scalability, we feel the system is limited."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while NetApp FAS Series is ranked 5th in Deduplication Software with 98 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while NetApp FAS Series is rated 8.8. 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 FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data, whereas NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), IBM FlashSystem and HPE StoreEasy. See our NetApp AFF vs. NetApp FAS Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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