We performed a comparison between Dell PowerStore and NetApp FAS Series 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 deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It's actually very stable"
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"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."
"Gives us flexibility, performance, and ease of use. It also has some very good compression capabilities. We were looking for a solution that was easy to install in our VMware environment, that was flexible. PowerStore X is a type of a VMware cluster that you install inside your environment. If you have a VMware environment, like we have in production, it's easy to install and use."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"It is very easy to use. Access is very friendly. It shows you a lot of important information at the first glance. It has been very easy to use."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"Its flexibility is valuable because we have had some moments where we had to adapt, and it has been quite flexible."
"I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system."
"The new FAS series is a good fit for some customers. We have good performance and capacity, even though it is full flash."
"The solution is very stable and reliable"
"The best feature is its ONTAP product line for Ransomware protection. It also has features for file storage and block storage. The solution is stable. We've had no issues with it. The tool is scalable and meets our requirements. The technical support and the supporting partner are great. The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to maintain the product. The feature set is excellent. I recommend the solution."
"The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems."
"The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is the snapshot and the FlexClone for Oracle and Microsoft SQL environments. Additionally, the integration can be done with most all on-premise and cloud providers."
"The product is flexible."
"Compression of the backup Oracle by RMAN on NFS saves space 5:1."
"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."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"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."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"Automation could be simplified."
"The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive."
"While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information."
"The solution only does thin provisioning."
"When you create a case on Dell's support website, you don't always get someone who is experienced in the kind of systems you need help with...making it an area where Dell's support team needs to make improvements."
"Could use some additional automation."
"The upgrades themselves are running fine, but after the upgrade is when we have a problem. With the update to 1.4, we had a head crash. They told us, 'This is a known issue. Please upgrade to 2.' We upgraded to 2 and, one week later they told us, 'Yeah, there are some issues in 2.0.0. You can lose data. Please upgrade to 2.0.1.' Overall, they need to make the system stable."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"The AutoSupport could be improved to be more proactive in certain cases."
"Replication should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle."
"The NetApp FAS Series is not as high-performing and is not as fast. Its speed needs improvement, but this could only be done if it's an all-flash solution."
"The user interface could be improved to have better graphics and the performance analyzer could be better."
"Currently, the newest release is not HCI friendly."
"The one aspect of the solution that's negative for us is also more unique to us due to the fact that we did a MetroCluster. The tiebreaker piece that does the monitoring of the two different locations, and determines if one is not talking to the network normally (or if it's truly down) is a little difficult. It feels like it was not designed from the beginning to fit well into the other pieces. It feels like it was thrown in at the last minute and it is not smooth."
"I would like to see less latency and higher IOPS."
"There is no NetApp infrastructure set up here in Greece."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 46 reviews while NetApp FAS Series is ranked 5th in Deduplication Software with 98 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while NetApp FAS Series is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp AFF, HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and ExaGrid EX Series. See our Dell PowerStore vs. NetApp FAS Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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