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Dell VMAX All Flash vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (7th)
Dell VMAX All Flash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
310
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson - PeerSpot reviewer
Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities
We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades. It's a very simple implementation. They have a good tool to analyze upgrades. The stability is good. Technical support has been excellent.
BrijeshKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR
The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.
Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency
I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."
"It works very well."
"The product's initial setup phase was good."
"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."
"The design has been great."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support."
"Having it separate and having a dedicated storage area network or a dedicated network attached storage, for us, just worked better. It's been faster."
"I've combined other NetApp systems into one of our newer platforms, taking other file-sharing solutions native to Windows or Mac and creating file shares, yielding a better return on our investment. At the same time, we are providing better resources and more efficient channels for files."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
 

Cons

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."
"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."
"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."
"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."
"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."
"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."
"We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"One of the challenges we face with NetApp is identifying bottlenecks in the systems they integrate with."
"I've had a few cases where support wasn't able to answer the question or they took quite a while."
"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."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"There are no pNFS with VMware VVOLs."
"Stability could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"It is not a cheap product."
"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."
"NetApp AFF is somewhat pricey. If they weren't as pricey, that would be a big deal for us."
"If you go for Replication, Vault, and NAS, please ensure that the license has been ordered at the very beginning. However, licenses can been added or modified without rebooting the system at any time."
"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."
"Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."
"It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."
"ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system."
"Our space savings through dedupe and compression is over 50 percent, so we are saving. I think our 8080s has 20TBs. We are saving at least 10TBs and that's over 50 percent of the capacity that we're using."
"The pricing is good."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Retailer
6%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
63%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive.
What do you like most about Dell EMC VMax?
The product's initial setup phase was good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC VMax?
It is not a cheap product. As the tool is expensive, I am looking at the market for some products with better prices ...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?
There is room for improvement in the centralized administration. There could be better centralizing the administratio...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell VMAX All Flash vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
825,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.