We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage Arrays solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"We find the service level option to provision storage very valuable. The ability to define different service levels for storage groups helps us in prioritizing our workload at the infrastructure level."
"This platform is reliable in supporting our data availability. We now have a higher performing platform and have been able to consolidate our workloads into one single platform."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"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."
"The solution's snapshot capabilities and replication are very good features. Snapshots are allowing us to quickly build analytical models directly from production data. This gives us amazing insights into market trends and allows us to build more effective trading algorithms. Replication offers us unparalleled levels of resilience."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"The most valuable features are stability and performance."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"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."
"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."
"PowerMax Storage needs improvement in the area of monitoring tools. It should have more functions and more complicated analysis options inside the monitoring tools."
"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."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"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."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 7th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 18 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 4 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "CloudIQ ensures that all our arrays are properly communicating so we can see performance and storage capacities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp NVMe AFF A800 writes "Flexible and easy to use with a simple initial setup". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and Pure FlashArray X NVMe, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, Fungible Storage Cluster, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990 and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors, and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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