We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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.
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"We consume less physical storage because of the solution’s deduplication and compression."
"The scalability options are very nice because you can scale it much better and faster. The scalability was there in the previous environment also, but this is far better than what we had before. It basically helps the user in case they are looking for more storage. We can scale it much faster."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"The scalability is good."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"We are able to provide storage at the right service levels without overmanaging it."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"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."
"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."
"The UI is very easy to use. We can add volumes and manage them easily."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"Going forward, don't complicate things for the customers."
"Some services could be inserted directly into the SAN, so Pure Storage could complete with the HyperFlex."
"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."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"The installation of equipment needed support's help."
"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."
"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."
"The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8. 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 NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, NetApp ASA and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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