We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe 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."We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"It worked flawlessly."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system."
"The performance is very good. Our predominant workloads are all less than 5 milliseconds and it's most common to have a sub-1-millisecond response time for our applications. In terms of efficiency, we've turned on compression and we're able to get as high as two-to-one compression on our workloads, on average."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."
"The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses."
"My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance."
"There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system."
"The performance is the most valuable feature."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"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."
"They could improve the price."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve."
"We would like more documentation, a guide to the features of the PowerMax."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"The main feature that I personally want to see is the possibility to upgrade to the next generation without changing all the components and just change the engine, relying on the compatibility matrices between two different generations. Meaning that we could just keep the enclosure and upgrade the engine, integrating the enclosure to the existing pool, then adding automation tools for orchestration."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"A graphical user interface displaying efficiency metrics, such as compression and deduplication rates, would be a great addition."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"I want an interface through ONTAP that look more like what it does for the E-Series with Santricity."
"It has not reduced our data center costs. NetApp charges a pretty penny for their stuff."
"FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. 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 AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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