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 most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"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."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"AFF has opened our eyes in a different light of how storage value works. In the past, we looked at it more as just a container where we could just dump our customer dBms and let the customers use it in terms of efficiency. Today, to be able to replicate that data to a different location, use that data to recover your environment or be able to have the flexibility with the solution and data. These are things which piqued our interest. It's something that we're willing to provide as a solution to our customers."
"With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage."
"I think it is a very stable product."
"The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good."
"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."
"Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"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."
"The installation is very easy."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"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."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"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."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"It is on the expensive side."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"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."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"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."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once you've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to."
"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."
"I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and NetApp FAS Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Alletra dHCI.
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