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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 1.5%, down 2.5% 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

"Mostly, their support is also great at reacting to issues but moreover, proactive to prevent issues."
"This product has good performance."
"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 of this solution are snapshotting and cloning."
"High availability"
"The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers."
"Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use."
 

Cons

"The response time for read requests can be improved."
"InfiniBox, right now, offers only asynchronous replication between two storages."
"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."
"Their customer support can be better. When we have an outage, we need to wait until it is escalated to L3 which takes a lot of time."
"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."
"The dashboard needs improvement. The dashboard needs some uplift"
"I know they're working well with Microsoft and VMware. However, they could integrate with more."
"I just got through the session where it looks like they are going to support Oracle running on Linux with SnapCenter. That is one of the main things that we are hoping to get integrated."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out."
 

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."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range."
"All features are included in the license, whereas with an EMC solution, you have to pay separately for extra terabytes."
"It definitely reduces costs because it simply takes less power to run these systems. While the SSDs don't take power, they are in general very big right now. So, the running cost has decreased for a lot of our customers."
"We would like it to be free."
"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."
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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
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
5%
 

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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