We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and Zadara 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and ROI."We can store more for a cheaper price as opposed to paying for larger devices and larger rack spaces which get outdated sooner and which we'd have to change every two years. It simplifies storage for us."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"We also use VMware integrations developed by Pure, their plugins in our vCenter environment. They help by allowing our non-technical operations teams to deploy new data stores and resize data stores without me having to involve myself all the time to do those simple tasks."
"This solution has improved our organization in the way that we used to see latency but now with this solution we don't. It also has good performance. Latencies have come down for our performance in the SQL databases. We can put a lot more in a lot less in terms of space savings. We also save data center space have good deduplication."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"We found AFF systems very competitive in terms of performance, storage efficiency, feature richness, and scalability."
"High availability"
"My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance."
"The business copy solution has become faster using SnapMirror."
"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."
"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."
"The processing is much faster with this product."
"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."
"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."
"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."
"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."
"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"The file functionality could be better."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"Automation could be simplified."
"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"Technical support could use some improvement."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
"One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options."
"This solution should be made easier to deploy."
"NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves."
"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."
"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."
"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."
"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."
"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while Zadara is ranked 22nd in All-Flash Storage with 9 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Zadara is rated 8.8. 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 Zadara writes "We're able to scale up or down almost instantly, and changes are handled efficiently by their managed services team ". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Zadara is most compared with MinIO, Amazon S3, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Wasabi and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our NetApp AFF vs. Zadara report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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