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."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."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The solution is scalable."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"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."
"Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds."
"Deduplication"
"The performance of NetApp AFF allows our developers and researches to run models and their tests within a single workday instead of spreading out across multiple workdays."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"Technical support has been okay."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"We need better data deduplication."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"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."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"I would like there to be a way to break out the 40 gig ports on them. We have a lot of 10 gigs in our environment. It is a big challenge breaking out the 40 gig coming out of the filer. It would be nice to have good old 10 gig ports again, or a card that has just 10 gig ports on it."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"We installed NetSender to test it. I think it could be a good solution. It is very small now, but will probably become bigger in the next few months to years."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"The cost of this solution should be reduced."
"The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options."
"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."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"It can be very expensive."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors."
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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