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."It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The business copy solution has become faster using SnapMirror."
"Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup."
"We do a lot of financial modeling. We have a large compute cluster that generates a lot of files. It is important for us to get a quick response back for any type of multimillion file accesses across the cluster at one time. So, it's a lot quicker to do that. We found that solid-state performs so much better than than spinning drives, even over multiple clusters."
"I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features."
"In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things."
"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."
"Scalability is excellent. If we need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"The software layer has to improve."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it." It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"They should make these features a little more affordable."
"We would like to have more behavioral reporting."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"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."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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, Pure Storage FlashArray and NetApp FAS Series, 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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