We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) 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."The most valuable feature of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its ability to store data well."
"Last year, I did a DM Series installation with my colleague, and this installation was effortless because we had Lenovo support on the phone, so it was easy to get help if we had any problems."
"The most valuable feature of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its capability to tier to the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. Additionally, the integration is good and they are user-friendly."
"Scalable and stable storage array."
"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 Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"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."
"Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid."
"I would rate the support of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series a four out of five."
"The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series was very hard to configure. Installation of the product was very hard. These are its areas for improvement."
"I would like Lenovo to add a feature like IBM Easy Tier to DM Series. This is a crucial feature for the customers."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series could improve by having a snapshot feature. Additionally, there can be other features added to help restore the data faster."
"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."
"The initial setup has a lot more steps in it than are probably necessary for a base deployment, unlike other vendors where it's more straightforward. It could be a little bit more streamlined."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 4 reviews while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 25 reviews. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is rated 6.0, while NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series writes "It's a scalable all-in-one system with unified block and file storage and cloud tiering. ". 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 DM Series is most compared with Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage and IBM FlashSystem. See our Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series vs. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) report.
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