"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."
"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 initial setup is very simple."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"Technical support has been okay."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"It performs well and it is also very fast."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."
"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."
"The main feature I have found to be product replication."
"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."
"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."
"It's very easy-to-use."
"The product is scalable and easy to expand."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"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."
"Their backup software could be improved."
"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."
"Its integration could be improved."
"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 some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."
"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."
"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."
"The solution is expensive."
"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."
"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."
NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 21 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 10th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 10 reviews. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) writes "Provides us with quick options when restoring things for customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "Immutable snapshots, great performance, and simple and easy replication". NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, Qumulo, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and VAST Data. See our NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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