We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"It's actually very stable"
"I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases."
"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."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features."
"It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"If the AutoSupport is well configured, then you need not to do a monitoring. You will get call and mail when any issue is completed."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"We have never had a failure. We can upgrade as we move along with zero downtime."
"The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"All the features are working great."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve by being more secure."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"The price should be lower."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"It is way in excess of what we need. If anything, we could see a bit more speed. I'm just comparing it with what some of my colleagues who are implementing their own systems do."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"I need faster Fibre Channel over Ethernet. They top out at 10GBs today and I would like that to go to 40 or 100."
"Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size."
"The total cost of ownership has increased a little."
"The procurement process could be improved. It takes a long time for us to receive stuff. The product is good. It's not the product, it's just that it takes forever to get it. It's not our reseller's problem; it's usually held up at NetApp."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"A graphical user interface displaying efficiency metrics, such as compression and deduplication rates, would be a great addition."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"It can be very expensive."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, NetApp FAS Series and VAST Data, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Alletra dHCI.
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