We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem 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."One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."
"It has good stability for our company."
"Support has been helpful."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"We have tons of capacity on it."
"The all-flash storage has tier replication capabilities."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"Installing FlashSystem is very easy. It takes less than half an hour, and I can handle it all myself."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression."
"IBM FlashSystem is flexible, quick, and has a solid design."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"The speed is important; no more problems caused by high latency."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment."
"MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup."
"The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
"The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"I would love to see a true one click upgrade solution. Right now, you have to click and schedule an appointment with Pure Storage to be able to upgrade. I would love for it to automatically download, install, and fall-over every controller as it updates."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"The credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"It has room for improvement in the area of stability."
"Cloud file sharing is an area that needs improvement."
"Their technical support needs improvement in terms of reachability for the clients and response times. They should be more responsive and have more online platforms for support. They should make more technical information available online. There could be some kind of documentation community."
"This solution could be improved by offering greater amounts of storage."
"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."
"In IBM FlashSystem, data reduction is an area with shortcomings where improvements can be made in the future."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
"IBM FlashSystems is lagging in optimizing storage technologies."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"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."
"There are no pNFS with VMware VVOLs."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"Technical support is a little lackluster. Some of the issues that we've had were opening up tickets. They seem to be routed in the wrong direction or it takes one or two days to get a call back for simple tasks."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, HPE Nimble Storage and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp ASA. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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