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."FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"Pure gives us better compression, it's easier to manage, a lot less hands-on."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"Cost, racial per terabyte, and speed is why we chose PureStorage. It was no brainer."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"It's actually very stable"
"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe has good scalability and performance."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"The compression and deduplication are always on. We get more than 4:1 capacity savings using them. The efficiency benefits from compression and deduplication are through a specialized hardware module within the storage itself, and that means there is no overhead to the compression and dedupe."
"It is very stable. We expect superior performance and reliability from this particular storage system."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"There is no management overhead involved in optimizing performance. It does it so well on its own. We don't have to manage much at all. It really is like a set it and forget it solution. My storage engineers love the system. It is a lot less work than our previous systems, which weren't bad by any means. There is not nearly as much management as before. So, we are saving dozens of hours per month for our storage team, and that is a real cost in our business."
"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."
"This storage solution is both stable and scalable, and it works for our needs."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"The hardware and software of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy for us to use."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its speed."
"I like the performance aspect of EF Series. It basically provides everything that we are looking for as a solution, very low latency and very high performance."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"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."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"We brought up this question to the implementation engineer. We were comparing use cases where a customer is using RecoverPoint, then goes to PowerMax. In our previous setup with XtremIO, we were using RecpverPoint and keeping snapshots for 30 days, every few seconds. With PowerMax, I requested this for every 15 minutes, keeping it for a week. The engineer's answer was, "There will be too many snapshots. It might slow down the system." This is specifically for the use cases where there is RecoverPoint. While PowerMax works with RecoverPoint, and you can use it, there should be some way where you can have even more snapshots and not to worry about performance and system cache."
"There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ."
"We are very interested in NVMe over Fibre Channel, which I understand is on the horizon. We would like to see that come to fruition."
"The tool is costly compared to other similar products. The product's pricing needs to be improved. I would like the product to include the replication feature in its future releases."
"Dell can improve the Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Sometimes, when we need to replace a component, the SLA says four hours, but for some reason, the technician doesn't arrive until the next business day or even six to eight hours later before the case is placed. So, focusing on respecting the SLA is where Dell could improve."
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."
"The only major drawback is the replication between EF-Series units."
"I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better."
"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 initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"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"
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Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th 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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