We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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."Technical support has been amazing."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"It has made working with storage as easy and simple as it should be."
"I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"It has good stability for our company."
"The smaller footprint of the device has been really nice. We have gone from eight bays to one bay. Having one floor tile in our data center has been pretty awesome. A lot less power and HVAC cooling is being consumed."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays."
"The most valuable feature is the performance and compression. The most useful tool is CloudIQ."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"For the migration process from the older VMAX arrays to PowerMax, we VMotioned everything. It was easy."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."
"Its performance is most valuable. This solution is much faster than other as well as older storage solutions. The performance of the system is very good. We are getting 50 times better experience than the older storages. We are using AFF 300. It also has native cloud integration and most of the features."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"The benefits are better up-time, better response time."
"The speed is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"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."
"It needs to improve its price."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"The price could be better."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"I hear from people on my team that they would like improved reporting. While there are some decent tools for doing reporting, they would like to see a lot more built-in functionality. This way when they are logged into the interface everyday doing basic management tasks, they could also see some statistics on what is their storage pool usage and will be their projected usage with their current data growth. They want to be able to see more detailed stats on how they are using the system and have forecasting."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"Its pricing should be better. Its price is competitive, but they need to improve the pricing. They have different licensing models, which they need to improve. My expectation was cloud integration, which they have, but it is a different license. Therefore, people cannot enjoy it. If I want to use it, I need to pay extra. There is a cost involved for everything, but it should reach everyone. It is similar to having a Rolls-Royce, but you need to pay extra for the key. If you want the key, you need to pay."
"There could be better integration with some of our Cisco products."
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."
"It needs a better management tool."
"Better integration with other brands is important so we would like to see it easier to integrate."
"We have used IBM previously. We found that the storage from IBM was poor and we chose NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays because it can scale very easily."
"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."
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Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". 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". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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