We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"It is an SSD array that has awesome performance, low submillisecond latency, and does what it is supposed to do. It just works, which is difficult for things to do anymore."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product."
"We were able to move away from a middleware solution for high availability, going right to snapshots and data replication on arrays."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"For the migration process from the older VMAX arrays to PowerMax, we VMotioned everything. It was easy."
"The benefits are better up-time, better response time."
"Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"The speed is the most valuable feature."
"The management software is very good."
"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."
"This storage solution is both stable and scalable, and it works for our needs."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"We understand that they're thinking about it, but one of the things that would be nice is if they added some basic file-level capabilities to the platform. The idea is that they would run a basic NFS or CIF share from the controllers. FlashBlade is the powerhouse for File and Object storage, but if you don't need all that power, a lightweight file function would make FlashArrays more versatile."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"I'd like to see the dedup and compression improve. Two to one is not very good. We should be getting something like three, four, or five to one."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."
"Better support technicians for CAPP."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"The solution's technical support is not as good as it is supposed to be since you have to push them to get support."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"A little more manageability, a simpler management interface. It's not necessarily that it's way overly complex. It's just that it's not as easy as the FAS series."
"The price of the All Flash solution is very high."
"I’d like to see bigger, faster, better hardware, of course. I think that is the way the hardware is trending anyway; bigger, faster CPU, better software, fewer bugs, all that stuff. T"
"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."
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Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 9th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". 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". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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