Dell PowerScale vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dell PowerScale
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Dell Technologies presents Dell PowerScale (replacing EMC Isilon) as a scale-out NAS solution and server technology that provides the flexibility of a software-defined architecture with accelerated hardware innovations to harness the value of data. Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC in 2010; some EMC Isilon NAS appliances are still available and supported under the PowerScale brand.N/A
NetApp AFF A-Series
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.N/A
Pricing
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Features
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
Dell PowerScale
-
Ratings
NetApp AFF A-Series
8.3
Ratings
8% below category average
Flash Array Performance00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Flash Array Integration00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Data Compression00 Ratings6.40 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Simplicity00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Power Savings00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

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Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Score 9.9 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Score 9.9 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell PowerScaleNetApp AFF A-Series
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for scale out NAS storage. One can use Rest API calls to get relevant data. It can be used in the product SRM, where one can discover arrays from Isilon/PowerScale and can monitor the reports. One can monitor Capacity and Performance reports of the array.
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Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
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Pros
  • Auto data balancing between nodes while still maintaining great performance
  • Directory snapshots
  • Universal namespace
  • Network load balancing across nodes
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  • Protective multiple project and business data is excellent.
  • Solutions for data storage and data migration.
  • Providing useful and quality data reports is effective.
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Cons
  • In my experience, I have seen a lot of bugs in the oneFS and for remedying it, we need to install patches which requires a node reboot.
  • In old isilon OneFS versions, the nodes need to be rebooted every 250 days which is quite less compared to other storage devices.
  • The operational cost of Isilon is a bit on the higher side.
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  • As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
  • GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
  • Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid
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Alternatives Considered
Isilon is immensely more scalable than Celerra and gave us better control over snapshots and replication. The addition of global deduplication provides a huge space savings benefit as well.
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The IBM All Flash FAS was similar in performance and price, but we were already a NetApp shop. This made the decision easier to go with the NetApp AFF system so it would tie in with our SnapManager architecture, as well as keep the learning curve short.
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Return on Investment
  • We are currently researching other vendors for our Medical imaging archives due to issues with space utilization efficiency on Isilon.
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  • Epic, our EMR providor, has very aggressive guidelines for performance. The Netapp AFF meets those guidlines easily eben in a mixed workload environment. This has helped us meet our business objectives by not having to diversify our storage platforms or vendors.
  • Multi-protocol support (block (ISCSI/FiberChannel) or File (NFS/CIFS)) Allows us to use the Netapp systems to solve all storage requirements regardless of the system needing storage
  • Clustered technologies along with non-disruptive movement of data between nodes on the cluster make hardware refreshes simple and allows the business to keep running without interruption even during massive data moves.
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