We performed a comparison between Dell XtremIO 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."Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"Deduplication and cloning capability"
"XtremIO’s capability to run any workload without much in the way of design considerations makes this very easy to use and size."
"I like the deduplication and auto-tiering features."
"The program is very stable."
"The performance is good, which is important."
"We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%."
"A valuable feature of XtremIO is that, in terms of administration, it's simple and manageable."
"The speed is extremely valuable."
"Setup was simple and easy."
"It's very stable. It's always there when we need it. With the Dual Controller, if one drops out, the other one comes right online. We don't use any iSCSI so there is a little bit of a latency break but, over the NFS, we don't notice that switch-on. We can do maintenance in the middle of the day, literally rip a whole controller out of the chassis, and do what we need to do with it."
"There are many reports accessing the applications. We receive them very quickly. We used to wait a long time for them. Now, you just need to wait a moment."
"The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer."
"The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features."
"It is easy to manage data through the GUI by using Active IQ and the unified manager."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"Batch times went from approximately seven hours down to about two and a half. Functionality during the day, such as taking or removing snapshots and cloning instances, is higher than it has ever been."
"It was not proactive communication."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Sometimes we don't get an immediate response from the support team. The initial POC also took a lot of resources."
"One thing that should be improved is the reporting and monitoring tools. It should use real time monitoring for storage, IOPS, latency, etc."
"In the next release, the solution could have better integration and if we can host assets on the cloud, such as NetApp has the NetApp volumes, which we can host on the cloud directly called NetApp CVO (cloud volume ONTAP). Dell EMC should come up with something purely on the cloud rather than manage services."
"The implementation isn't exactly complex, but the solution should have some enhancements in it to make the process more centralized."
"Ease of use is key in the converged and hyper-converged world that requires administrators to have both hypervisor and storage skills."
"XtremIO needs to be lower priced. It also needs better endpoints and scalability."
"Management and reporting need improvement."
"I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks."
"We have had customers asking about S3 support for a while now. I heard that is coming in one of the next versions. So, I would like to see S3 targeted support on the FAS system."
"The graphical interface is still heavy and slow. Needs more improvement in this area."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there."
"The user interface should be more user-friendly, and the configuration could be more accessible."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now."
Dell XtremIO is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell XtremIO is rated 7.6, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell XtremIO writes "Suitable for high IOPS and helps get backup in ten minutes ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell XtremIO is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell PowerMax NVMe, Dell Unity XT, INFINIDAT InfiniBox and VMware vSAN, 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 XtremIO vs. NetApp AFF report.
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