


NetApp AFF and Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series are two leading storage solutions that cater to diverse enterprise needs. User reviews suggest that Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series offers advanced features that justify its price, while NetApp AFF is appreciated for its competitive pricing and robust support.
Features: NetApp AFF users value its high performance, seamless scalability, and efficient data management capabilities. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series users highlight its reliability, integrated hybrid cloud support, and superior data protection features.
Room for Improvement: Users of NetApp AFF suggest better integration with third-party applications and simplification of configuration options. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series users seek enhanced reporting capabilities and more intuitive configuration processes.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp AFF is praised for easy deployment and responsive support but users mention occasional complexities in setup. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series receives positive notes for straightforward deployment and robust customer support, though some users experience longer initial setup times.
Pricing and ROI: NetApp AFF is seen as offering good value for money with a relatively lower setup cost and satisfactory ROI. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, although priced higher, is perceived as worth the investment due to its comprehensive features and satisfactory ROI.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
Our current workload, particularly the SQL use case, would not be possible on mechanical storage, and the ease of use for the small team for the array is important for supporting that workload.
Pure Storage FlashArray integrates with APIs and other systems.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
I would rate the technical support an 11 out of 10.
The support from Pure Storage is excellent.
The support for NetApp AFF is comprehensive—not just the documentation for self-guided reading, but for simple questions, spare parts, or urgent needs, you can have a contract that enables delivery the next business day or within four hours, depending on your process requirements.
I have communicated with them, and they are effective and responsive.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
Our customers can scale up or scale out, raise the performance, and expand the storage spaces by investing every year.
The solution is highly scalable, particularly when there is a need to expand capacity.
Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is scalable, and I would rate its scalability as a seven out of ten.
You can add more disks, more disk shelves, or migrate the data seamlessly.
I would assess the scalability of NetApp AFF as excellent in handling massive data volumes.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
We have continuous 99.9% uptime and do not experience any users reporting performance issues due to latency.
The vision Pure Storage FlashArray offers through the GUI is clearer; we can discern the status, what is cabled, and how direct flash is enabled.
If I have sold fifty boxes, about fifty percent of them experienced failure.
They have always been upgrading very fast and implementing patches to resolve these issues.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
Many customers have lost data while configuring it, indicating a need for improvement.
The GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect.
Our backup system, Commvault, has an amazing capacity to do compression and deduplication better than NetApp AFF by itself.
All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
Some smaller organizations may find it slightly expensive, but for enterprises, when considering performance, future hardware investments, and overall benefits, it is a very cost-effective solution for mid and enterprise organizations.
There are extra expenses beyond the standard licensing fee for features such as replication and deduplication, which are available on demand.
NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support.
While it is not cheap, they have introduced a new series of AFF that are more affordable.
The licensing cost of the product is expensive, and when combined with support, it becomes quite costly.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
One of the most valuable features of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is the snapshot feature.
You can even download the ONTAP simulator and deploy it on your virtualization platform and test almost all features.
Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF.
They have 4:1 data reduction techniques, which is really very high. If you have a size of 100 terabytes, you will get 400 terabytes of usable capacity when applying compression, deduplication, or other data reduction technologies.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| NetApp AFF | 8.6% |
| Everpure FlashArray | 7.9% |
| Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series | 1.8% |
| Other | 81.7% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 64 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 36 |
| Large Enterprise | 145 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 2 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 45 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 47 |
| Large Enterprise | 242 |
Everpure Storage FlashArray delivers simplicity, speed, and performance with ease of management and data reduction capabilities. Its resilience and seamless upgrades complement its integration with VMware, while predictive analytics and proactive support enhance reliability.
Everpure Storage FlashArray leverages a flash-based architecture for improved storage efficiency, reduced footprint, and outstanding data management through deduplication and compression. Users appreciate its single pane of glass management and Evergreen model. It supports VMware environments effectively, offering predictive analytics for better operational insights. The system is noted for its user-friendly management and proactive support, ensuring minimal downtime while delivering resilient storage solutions.
What Key Features Does Everpure Storage FlashArray Offer?
What Benefits Should Users Consider?
In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, Everpure Storage FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.
To meet enterprise storage requirements, ThinkSystem All-Flash DM Series systems provide high performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data management. DM Series runs on ONTAP data management software, which gives customers unified storage across block-and-file workloads. It accelerates your business while improving the efficiency, flexibility, and reliability of your IT operations.
The NetApp A-Series and C-Series are AFF storage arrays that deliver high performance, scalability, and simplified data management for a wide range of workloads. They are designed for organizations that need to improve the performance and agility of their applications, while also reducing costs and complexity.
NetApp A-Series and C-Series feature a scale-out architecture that can be scaled to meet the needs of your growing business. They also support a wide range of built-in data protection and data security features, including snapshots, replication, disaster recovery, and autonomous ransomware protection.
AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity.
AFF C-Series systems are suited for large-capacity deployment as an affordable way to modernize your data center to all flash and also connect to the cloud.
NetApp AFF Benefits
NetApp AFF Features
Reviews from Real Users
NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:
PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.
Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”
Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”
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