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INFINIDAT InfiniBox vs NetApp AFF comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

INFINIDAT InfiniBox
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise SAN (11th)
NetApp AFF
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
312
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. INFINIDAT InfiniBox is designed for Enterprise SAN and holds a mindshare of 1.4%, down 2.7% compared to last year.
NetApp AFF, on the other hand, focuses on All-Flash Storage, holds 9.4% mindshare, down 9.8% since last year.
Enterprise SAN
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

GM
Good performance, suitable for big data, but the response time could be improved
The primary use case for this product is high-performance storage This product has good performance. It is similar to the Dell PowerMax and Pure Storage FlashArray. The InfiniBox has three active controllers. The response time for read requests can be improved. It is not as good as the solution…
Ian Rousom - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible with great support and high-speed multi-protocol storage
Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident. We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability. It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time. We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product has good performance."
"Mostly, their support is also great at reacting to issues but moreover, proactive to prevent issues."
"We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero."
"Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good."
"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."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process"
"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."
"The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency."
"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."
 

Cons

"InfiniBox, right now, offers only asynchronous replication between two storages."
"The response time for read requests can be improved."
"NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan."
"We only had a few upgrade issues."
"We don't have it in production yet."
"The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"I honestly don't have anything of note on how they can improve."
"When you look at the competitors, they have some features available, for example on the deduplication side.​"
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"The license covers any feature and also, the future features are already included. It is as easy as a 1, 2 and 3."
"I think the pricing and licensing are a little high, but compared to those of other storage vendors, it's within reason. After the three-year prepay, the extended warranty is a little expensive."
"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
"Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."
"The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent."
"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."
"Our total cost of ownership (TCO) has decreased by 40 percent."
"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."
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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
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
33%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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 the same volume that features is difficult to find in other Storage but the flexi...
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 cost is decisively based on the Gartner magic quadrant storage 2020 Net app compa...
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 matters more than IOPS for your needs, Netapp AFF is the right choice. You can appro...
 

Also Known As

No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TriCore Solutions
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
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