We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and VMware vSAN 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."The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"The scalability is good."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"The most valuable feature of the Pure Storage Flash Array is the blazing fast monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares."
"NetApp is like a one-point central management. For example, one can put everything on the right version and control the whole environment from one software solution."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance."
"One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love."
"It is a stable solution."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"Self-backup is the only feature lacking in this solution."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve some aspects. There are certain features that are good and there are some features that I see some issues with at the technical level. Those issues are related to replication. They need to resolve those issues, which I have already highlighted to the Pure team. Additionally, there are some issues in the active cluster that could improve."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"Offering the ability to actively write data on a single volume spanning multiple clusters is significant."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"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."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"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."
"To enhance the already excellent administration, one area for potential improvement could be in terms of integration."
"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 NetApp support could be better."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
NetApp AFF is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 42 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "It has simplified our operational model by making routine processes easier and less prone to error". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
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