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Kaminario K2 [EOL] vs NetApp AFF comparison

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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

Everpure FlashArray X NVMe
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (17th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Kaminario K2 [EOL]
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp AFF
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
314
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Jaehoon Oh - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Lambda256
Supports efficient storage management through volume snapshots and offers reliable non-disruptive upgrades
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could be enhanced. I can see the performance statistics in the Pure Storage console, but it does not show the performance by 4K byte unit. It displays IOPS and bandwidth, but IOPS is about real use, and I want to know how many IOPS are currently running in 4K byte units. I cannot see that IOPS because most storage systems report their performance by 4K byte unit. I want to see Pure Storage performance by 4K byte unit to compare with other storage or other internal NVMe SSD.
Engineerdb78 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
A solution with a simple configuration and good stability but it's quite expensive
Access to technical support should be improved for our region. Technical support is good, but they're very hard to access. When we have a problem with this storage, it's usually related to a very bad configuration. All-Flash Storage is very, very expensive. They are important solutions so I don't really have any ideas about how to rectify this. The device could use better monitoring tools.
KennethEtsula - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager at Spartec
Offers seamless installation and efficient data handling with robust support
NetApp AFF provides an all-flash storage solution for unified SAN solutions, supporting both SAN and NAS functionalities. Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF. With the storage efficiency from a NetApp AFF installation, users can manage substantial data running on all-flash. The features such as compaction and compression provide storage efficiency guarantees in an all-flash environment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Speed has definitely been a big improvement for us; we were running a bunch of iSCSI to EMC VNX and that had a gigabyte bottleneck, and now, since we're running through a true fiber channel to the Pure array, we're getting 32-gigabyte bandwidth, which means the speed and accessibility for our users and our customers have definitely improved."
"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."
"It has good, reliable, and fast storage."
"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."
"We generally always advise people to make the choice to go with Pure Storage because they won't regret it."
"We were able to save a ton of data center space with density ratios we've never seen before with hardware, and with Pure, we immediately saw value in the density ratios that we would be able to achieve, the performance, the scalability, and the support."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"It is consistently stable; haven't had a single issue with it."
"So coupled with the simplicity, performance, and just absolute ease of use of the management of it, I don't know why anyone wouldn't buy it."
"Scale out is a differentiator for them, especially in the enterprise market. It's key for a lot of customers."
"The stability of the solution is very good."
"The K2 has basically removed storage as a bottleneck in our datacenter."
"It provides a full feature set without separate licensing (deduplication, compression, snapshot, asynchronous replication, stable performance, etc.)."
"Provisioning large numbers of virtual desktops has sped up considerably."
"The ratio between the physical storage and the storage we use is very high."
"NetApp's features are easier, and the capabilities are a lot more advanced than Hitachi and other vendors that we look at."
"The solution is great; the company is fantastic to work with."
"We found AFF systems very competitive in terms of performance, storage efficiency, feature richness, and scalability."
"This solution has allowed us to move very large amounts of data without affecting IT operations."
"We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage based on our experience with AFF."
"All of the Oracle applications have been improved a lot since we began using All Flash and all of the processing and ETL, for instance, used to take 25 hours, now it is taking three, which improves a lot of parts of the price of applications and decreases TCO."
"NetApp AFF is very good at cleaning up your storage."
"The ability to recover your data really fast is valuable, as is the availability and accessibility of the data."
 

Cons

"It is on the expensive side."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"There are a few areas where the system could be improved. Examples would be that the system currently has a 15TB LUN size limit and that snapshots need to be scheduled through script API instead of the GUI."
"I would like to see LDAP for the management panel; I've been notified they might be currently working on it."
"Some of the nice to haves for us, in terms of today, would be VVols but again, it’s not a critical feature."
"There are some mid-market SMB customers that it may not fit the best for from a pricing perspective, but for the vast majority of our customers, once we aware of it and learned about the technology which it performed with, it fits a very useful metric."
"I would like to see LDAP for the management panel; I've been notified they might be currently working on it."
"I would like to see them work with Cisco, so it comes off the FIs, instead of having to go through my 10-gig network."
"The system currently has a 15TB LUN size limit and that snapshots need to be scheduled through script API instead of the GUI."
"I think it should have better performance with small files. With big data, its performance is top notch, but it is difficult to load small files."
"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"We don't have it in production yet."
"Scalability is difficult. The number of shelves is limited to 2 or 4, and the number of terabytes we potentially have doesn't match to this limit."
"For other issues, NetApp support is not as good as it used to be."
"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 the way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system."
"In terms of improvement, IO performance could use some enhancement."
"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."
"Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."
"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"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."
"The "extra" costs associated with features and options that are available off the shelf with Kaminario, make their value proposition extremely competitive."
"I would like them to come down in price. It is as expensive as EMC, Hitachi, and other major vendors."
"All features are provided in the licensing. The cost of Kaminario was less than the cost of a hybrid array."
"Kaminario is very competitive on price. They also have a pay per TB model."
"The licensing is all-inclusive."
"The Kaminario setup is simple and there are no hidden licensing fees so this area is a relief."
"Licensing is very straightforward. The cost was considerably lower than other products we looked at."
"The list price of AFF is too expensive... they need to be careful with the pricing of the new NVMe disks. They are way too expensive."
"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."
"It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors."
"I understand the cost is less than many other storages of same/similar performance benchmark."
"Our TCO has increased by 15 to 18 percent."
"We have used the solution’s thin provisioning to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning on all of our flash arrays at this point. It gives us the choice to be able to overprovision and take advantage of compression, compaction, and thin provisioning all at the same time. We can get more out of the purchases that we make."
"NetApp AFF is an expensive solution."
"With other options, you need to buy a couple of different products to achieve the same outcome."
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Comparison Review

it_user186357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees
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
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise47
Large Enterprise242
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
The price of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is very expensive, though I do not know the actual price because I am using the E...
What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
I have no specific improvements to suggest for Pure FlashArray X NVMe at this time. The performance statistics could ...
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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 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, Pure FlashArray X NVMe
No data available
NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
Wargaming.net, El Rio Community Health Center, ECN, SpotOption, Ashkelon College, Clearwater Analytics, Intigua, Cobb EMC Customer Case Study
DreamWorks Animation, FICO, Yahoo! Japan
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