"Fewer features is not necessarily a negative as it leads to simpler operation and lower price."
"We have been working with the solution for around a year and so far it has shown itself to be stable."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is simple to use"
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is quite an elementary box, no frills. It does not have all the functionality of the DM but it is acceptable, it does its task. It integrates pretty well."
"ThinkSystem's storage performs well, and the price per gigabyte is good, especially on SSD solutions. It's also easy to use."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things."
"ThinkSystem could be better integrated with backup software like Commvault, Veritas, or Symantec."
"The features are limited."
"It would be useful to have structured solutions replicated to other sites."
"In the next release, I would like to see more functionality. But, again, it is an entry-level product."
"The solution could be more scalable, although it suits our present needs."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"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 would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 5 reviews while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 21 reviews. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is rated 8.4, while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series writes "Mostly typical of production storage for virtual machines but with fewer features and a lower price". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) writes "Provides us with quick options when restoring things for customers". Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, HPE Nimble Storage, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore and IBM FlashSystem. See our Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) report.
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