We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp AFF 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."It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The amount of data that I have moved to it from legacy storage has enabled us to retire units that are three or four times the physical size."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"It's just very easy for general block storage."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"They're basically tanks. You could take a baseball bat to the thing, and it's still going to keep running and doing what it's supposed to do. We've had a couple of part failures, and you can pretty much replace any part on that thing at any time during the day in the middle of production without worrying about anything happening."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"It is a true, stable product."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes."
"We use the NFS and SIP protocols a lot. The NFS is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. It was intuitive to set up storage volumes and get the networking functioning. Their engineer was very helpful. We got the current array on our production site the very same day it was shipped in. We had it up on the network and started to put some storage on it."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
"We are using the AQoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems."
"NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"In the next release of this solution, we would like to see automated copy data management for SQL Server."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."
"I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."
"The technical support is lacking. We are working with Dell EMC to get some better understanding of this."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."
"They should provide easier integration with multiple systems."
"There are some bugs with the solution which need to be fixed."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved."
"It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. 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 AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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