We performed a comparison between NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) came out ahead of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. The two solutions have similar deployment difficulty, price range, and support quality, but NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays has fewer valuable features, according to its users.
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"The technical support is very good."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"It gives us capacity planning."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"NetApp is like a one-point central management. For example, one can put everything on the right version and control the whole environment from one software solution."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. It was intuitive to set up storage volumes and get the networking functioning. Their engineer was very helpful. We got the current array on our production site the very same day it was shipped in. We had it up on the network and started to put some storage on it."
"Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features."
"Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"This storage solution is both stable and scalable, and it works for our needs."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I like the performance aspect of EF Series. It basically provides everything that we are looking for as a solution, very low latency and very high performance."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our data bases."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"Having the option of such high-speed storage in the data center is what makes it valuable."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"On a couple of occasions, the waiting time for an upgrade has been pretty substantial."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"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."
"We do have an issue with the vCenter integration. Pure Storage says it has a lot of free space, but vCenter says its completely full. This is because their dedupes are saved as space, but Vcenter still detects the disk as completely full. So, we do have an issue with that."
"A while ago, they performed quite slowly."
"There is no direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access."
"The price of NVMe storage is very expensive."
"Better stability, not releasing features until they are fully functional, or at least giving us a software train that doesn't add them until they are fully functional and proven."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"The cost of this solution should be reduced."
"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."
"A lot of the tools that are built into the stock, ONTAP operating system, instead of having to buy the add-ons and things."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."
"The pricing could be cheaper and it should have documentation in more languages, specifically, Russian."
"There could be better integration with some of our Cisco products."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"We have used IBM previously. We found that the storage from IBM was poor and we chose NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays because it can scale very easily."
More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Pricing and Cost Advice →
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and VAST Data, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, HPE Primera and IBM FlashSystem. See our NetApp AFF vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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