


NetApp AFF and Dell XtremIO are high-performance storage solutions catering to enterprise needs. Users express greater satisfaction with the features and reliability of NetApp AFF compared to Dell XtremIO.
Features: NetApp AFF users highlight its unified storage, high performance, and seamless integration with various applications. Dell XtremIO users value its scalability, deduplication, and consistently high performance under heavy workloads.
Room for Improvement: NetApp AFF users cite the need for a more intuitive setup process and better support for hybrid cloud deployments. Dell XtremIO users seek improved documentation and enhanced compatibility with third-party applications.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp AFF receives praise for its relatively straightforward deployment and robust customer service, though some users find initial setup cumbersome. Dell XtremIO is commended for its efficient deployment process, but users indicate a need for better initial guidance and support.
Pricing and ROI: NetApp AFF users report better ROI due to lower setup costs and optimal long-term performance. Dell XtremIO, while having higher setup costs, provides significant ROI through its performance and scalability.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Technical support is good at least through vendors, not directly with the principal.
The support for NetApp AFF is comprehensive—not just the documentation for self-guided reading, but for simple questions, spare parts, or urgent needs, you can have a contract that enables delivery the next business day or within four hours, depending on your process requirements.
I have communicated with them, and they are effective and responsive.
It is highly scalable.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
Dell XtremIO provides very good scalability, allowing for cluster configurations that are easy to scale.
Dell XtremIO's scalability is quite easy;
You can add more disks, more disk shelves, or migrate the data seamlessly.
I would assess the scalability of NetApp AFF as excellent in handling massive data volumes.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
My customer has been using Dell XtremIO since 2017 and has not experienced any failures.
They have always been upgrading very fast and implementing patches to resolve these issues.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware.
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.
The interface could be simplified for beginners to ease the configuration of special objects in the system.
There is a significant lack of training, support documents, and forums available for Dell XtremIO, making troubleshooting difficult for third-party individuals.
The API to connect with command line or to see performance very clearly could be enhanced, similar to how NetApp works with Grafana and NetApp monitor, which shows you a comprehensive view of the whole picture.
The GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect.
Our backup system, Commvault, has an amazing capacity to do compression and deduplication better than NetApp AFF by itself.
All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
XtremIO offers features that justify a potentially higher price, however, this varies with configuration.
Dell XtremIO is quite expensive compared to other solutions on the market.
NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support.
While it is not cheap, they have introduced a new series of AFF that are more affordable.
The licensing cost of the product is expensive, and when combined with support, it becomes quite costly.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability.
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed.
The inline data deduplication feature and compression were useful for me because the performance was very good when I needed to read or write from storage, latency was reduced, storage was extended, and volume replication was supported.
Scalability is a significant feature of Dell XtremIO, as it is easy to expand and manage.
The speed and scalability of Dell XtremIO are significant features that improve data storage management.
You can even download the ONTAP simulator and deploy it on your virtualization platform and test almost all features.
Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF.
They have 4:1 data reduction techniques, which is really very high. If you have a size of 100 terabytes, you will get 400 terabytes of usable capacity when applying compression, deduplication, or other data reduction technologies.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| NetApp AFF | 8.8% |
| Pure FlashArray X NVMe | 1.4% |
| Dell XtremIO | 0.9% |
| Other | 88.9% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 12 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 16 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 14 |
| Large Enterprise | 29 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 45 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 47 |
| Large Enterprise | 242 |
Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.
The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.
NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.
AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.
AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.
NetApp AFF Benefits
NetApp AFF Features
Reviews from Real Users
NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:
PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.
Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”
Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”
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