We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VMware vSAN 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."The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"It helps us maintain uptime much better than other solutions we've used in the past, and the support is extremely quick and responsive."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good."
"AFF has opened our eyes in a different light of how storage value works. In the past, we looked at it more as just a container where we could just dump our customer dBms and let the customers use it in terms of efficiency. Today, to be able to replicate that data to a different location, use that data to recover your environment or be able to have the flexibility with the solution and data. These are things which piqued our interest. It's something that we're willing to provide as a solution to our customers."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"The tool has lowered latency."
"The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer."
"I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer."
"The solution is quite stable."
"All the features are working great."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"The solution is stable."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"The integration capabilities could be improved."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs."
"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"The dashboard needs improvement. The dashboard needs some uplift"
"Its integration could be improved."
"The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"We would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"It can be very expensive."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, NetApp FAS Series and VAST Data, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Alletra dHCI.
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