We performed a comparison between Huawei OceanStor and NetApp AFF 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 this solution is its ease of use."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"The solution is scalable."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The setup and the price are the most valuable and not the features related."
"Excellent and efficient support, and the product is a good price."
"Stability: The product is designed to have always HA (High Availability) with redundant network and processors."
"The support is excellent."
"It is easy to use, deploy, communicate and manage this solution."
"Huawei OceanStor provides numerous features that are tailored to cater to the requirements of all types of companies."
"If your virtual machine that resides on it completely fills the storage space, thanks to it's built-in function of all-zero data space reclamation, you just have to ask to System Engineer to run a zero-free on hosts (thin provisioned) and you will get more space instantaneously."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things."
"Replication would be one of the most valuable features."
"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."
"Multi-protocol is the most valuable feature for us. It does everything in one system: sifts, EBES, ISCSI, and fiber channel. Other systems don't do all that."
"AFF has improved my organization because we now have better performance. We can scale up and we can create servers a lot faster now. With the storage that we had, it used to take a lot longer, but now we can provide the business what they need a lot faster."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"The upgrading process needs improvement. Deploy it and notify the customers when new versions and stuff comes out. I don't think they're doing that well."
"The solution needs to improve the compression side of the application."
"The solution’s reporting could be improved."
"I would like to see the next generation all-flash, which could be combined."
"Its storage capacity could be better."
"The user interface is not so user friendly."
"Could have a more stable, lighter Metro and better logging system."
"The security could be a bit more robust."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard, because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs. I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right."
"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."
"Technical support is a little lackluster. Some of the issues that we've had were opening up tickets. They seem to be routed in the wrong direction or it takes one or two days to get a call back for simple tasks."
"I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"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."
Huawei OceanStor is ranked 12th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Huawei OceanStor is rated 8.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Huawei OceanStor writes "User-friendly and robust storage solution with good performance and easy setup". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Huawei OceanStor is most compared with Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and Huawei OceanStor Dorado. See our Huawei OceanStor vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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