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Dell VMAX All Flash vs NetApp AFF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell VMAX All Flash
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
311
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell VMAX All Flash is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp AFF is 9.3%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature
One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.
BrijeshKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy initial setup phase, the tool is useful for multi-site replication and DR
The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. If the product is up and running after, if it goes down, my company has observed that there are multiple failures that occur in the tool, so it needs to be reinstalled from scratch. The tool should have an automated feature or an automated option to handle the aforementioned scenario, which one can simply go and reset, after which the tool should be reinstalled with the same configuration.
Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency
I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"I appreciate the performance."
"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 database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."
"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."
"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"The snapshot feature has been precious for our testing processes, application development, and managing testing environments due to its efficiency and ease of use."
"The most valuable features of VMAX are its performance and GUI interface."
"The ransomware protection feature is housed in a separate unit, specifically addressing the top twenty most critical threats."
"We haven't experienced any outages or core-level issues in the last ten years, making us comfortable with the storage solution."
"The product's initial setup phase was good."
"It works very well."
"The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"NetApp AFF's flash technology offers great performance. This feature has been my go-to for managing data and ensuring speed and reliability."
"I work on the infrastructure engineering side. I usually get to install NetApp appliances, and I like how easy the installation is. It seems to be easier than other technologies that we use."
"It is a stable solution."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there."
 

Cons

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"It is on the expensive side."
"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."
"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."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Improvements are needed in both partition recovery and scalability."
"The configuration part of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability."
"There is room for improvement in the centralized administration."
"The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additional engines to address this limitation."
"We encountered some challenges during large data migrations that could be addressed for smoother transitions."
"The initial setup has a lot more steps in it than are probably necessary for a base deployment, unlike other vendors where it's more straightforward. It could be a little bit more streamlined."
"A graphical user interface displaying efficiency metrics, such as compression and deduplication rates, would be a great addition."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"I think adding more features to make it more cloud enabled will help us with cloud tiering and simplify the whole cloud operations when it's integrating with our on-prem AFF products. That is one area where we would like to see more improvements from NetApp."
"In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense."
"They could help with knowledge transfer. I'm working on sitting down and getting familiar with the different storage solutions and technologies that are already available and just need to keep myself abreast of what's coming up."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"The product is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"The price falls within the mid-range, neither inexpensive nor high-priced."
"It is not a cheap product."
"The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down."
"Our total cost of ownership (TCO) has decreased by 40 percent."
"Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down."
"It consolidates a lot of our storage into one or two chassis, which makes money savings in our data center."
"From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage."
"NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage."
"The licensing and pricing are fine. As a reseller for the product, we need to make the differentiation in the minds of the customer. They are not just buying some tool that does only one thing, e.g., showing a LAN for a customer. The pricing is fair for what it is."
"When we bought NetApp, it was very reasonably priced. When you factor in the time savings, it's highly cost-effective."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 28, 2015
NetApp vs. XtremIO
Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS? I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
71%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
What do you like most about Dell EMC VMax?
The product's initial setup phase was good.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC VMax?
The scalability of VMAX is somewhat limited, especially in terms of cache scalability. We've had to procure additiona...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
Well, Is one thing NetApp Storage has vs other brand is the mix of protocol CIFS with NFS booth working together in t...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
This question is very dependent on your requirements. Both are among the best in the field. Of course, the intended c...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?
The answer depends on your needs and budget. If you want high performance (who doesn't) or let's say the latency matt...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Information Not Available
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell VMAX All Flash vs. NetApp AFF and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.