We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VAST Data based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"The stability is perfect. The reliability is 100% and the latency is always lower than 1 millisecond."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"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."
"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."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"Scalability is excellent. If we need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself."
"The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization."
"There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system."
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"We do a lot of financial modeling. We have a large compute cluster that generates a lot of files. It is important for us to get a quick response back for any type of multimillion file accesses across the cluster at one time. So, it's a lot quicker to do that. We found that solid-state performs so much better than than spinning drives, even over multiple clusters."
"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."
"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"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."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"Had some issues with Purity not being entirely compatible with VMware ESXi."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"We would like more extended historical data to help with some of the capacity planning. This is something that we are asking for all the time. E.g., what was the historical performance of this particular volume? So, we would like more historicals."
"The size of NetApp could be better. They're always about 40 pounds without the hard drives in them, so it would be great if there's a way to make them smaller yet keep the functionality. That would reduce the physical footprint."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"The upgrade process could be a lot quicker, but it's still good as it is. The failovers and things like that are harder than expected."
"I would like to see an improvement in the high availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."
"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while VAST Data is ranked 18th in All-Flash Storage with 2 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VAST Data is rated 10.0. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VAST Data writes "Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and IBM FlashSystem, whereas VAST Data is most compared with Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo, Dell PowerScale (Isilon), DDN SFA7990X and DDN Storage Fusion Architecture NVMe.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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