We performed a comparison between IBM FlashSystem 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."It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"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 most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"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 most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The solution is very easy to configure and use."
"FlashSystem offers proven technology in a compact package."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"The price-performance ratio is most valuable."
"The all-flash storage has tier replication capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"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."
"AFF works well for VMware storage."
"The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp."
"The benefits of being on AFF are the phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it, and the IOPS."
"It has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. These improvements are a result of all-flash, throughput, reliability, compression, etc."
"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 most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"The software layer has to improve."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Replication features need improvement. Currently, they are there in the product, but I'm not sure as to how it works exactly."
"We had issues when attempting to do a flash, we hope to resolve it soon."
"In the next release having the next level of high-speed performance would be great."
"The data reduction pool feature sucks and is not recommended for use with heavy workloads."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
"The technical support in my region is satisfactory but it could improve. Support is very important for customers and downtime is very critical for us. We would like onsite or complete technical support which can help us to minimize our downtime or if problems occur."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable."
"It would be nice to have better integration between SRM and VMware, as I've had some issues with that."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"We'd like to see improvement in the time to retrieve from the Cloud, whether it's on-prem to cloud and whether it's public or private cloud."
"The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"Their backup software could be improved."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
IBM FlashSystem is ranked 6th in All-Flash Storage with 106 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 reviews. IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series. See our IBM FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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