We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe 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."Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"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."
"I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."
"It is easy to manage and upgrade."
"My storage engineers are very happy with PowerMax. They are very pleased with the performance, decreased latency, and dependability. From the team, the RESTful API makes management so much easier for them versus the command line interface."
"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"First, it's an enterprise storage solution. This is very important for us. Another important feature is replication."
"It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime."
"It has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. These improvements are a result of all-flash, throughput, reliability, compression, etc."
"Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
"We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted."
"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."
"It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The software layer has to improve."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We need better data deduplication."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I would like a more informative CloudIQ for iOS. What you can see via the web UI significantly differs from what you can see via the web application."
"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."
"The initial setup was complex, and we had experienced people working on it."
"We had challenges again with the initial setup. I don't know if there was a gap during the requirement-collection phase, but the box was partially delivered to us with missing parts and it delayed the implementation by about 60 days. It was not as smooth as I would have hoped."
"Setting up PowerMax with VMAX is always complex."
"Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"The graphical interface is still heavy and slow. Needs more improvement in this area."
"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."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"Their backup software could be improved."
"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."
"I want an interface through ONTAP that look more like what it does for the E-Series with Santricity."
"I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and Dell VMAX All Flash, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors and best NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
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