Dell PowerScale vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Auto data balancing between nodes while still maintaining great performance
• Directory snapshots
• Universal namespace
• Network load balancing across nodes

Incentivized

• Protective multiple project and business data is excellent.
• Solutions for data storage and data migration.
• Providing useful and quality data reports is effective.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We are currently researching other vendors for our Medical imaging archives due to issues with space utilization efficiency on Isilon.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized