IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) vs. NetApp AFF A-Series

IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)

NetApp AFF A-Series

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	Score 7.0 out of 10	N/A	IBM Storwize is a family of recognized all-flash and hybrid storage solutions designed to support the virtualization needs and application workloads of mid-sized enterprises.	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

IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)

NetApp AFF A-Series

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	NetApp AFF A-Series
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	NetApp AFF A-Series
Considered Both Products	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) UK Utkarsh Khandelwal System Administrator Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Dell EMC Unity Incentivized Helpful? BS Bhawani Shankar Satapathy AIX Administrator Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? MK Mushtaqu Khan Regional Business Manager Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM Storewize is the best among other products available in the market. Many features such as scalability, data configuration, and data security show this system are best for our business. We can't compare it with others. Incentivized Helpful? SS Srishti Shukla Territory Business Manager Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Dell EMC Unity and IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? DB Debopriya Bhattacharya AIX Administrator Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Simpler to use. Storwize is reliable and is using IBM technology and not some unknown application. Proven performance and easy to stack and configure. Sizing is simple and the options are more than I need for my business. Rack compatibility is something you may not realize … Incentivized Helpful? TC Tom Corrado Storage Specialist Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Storwize does not have the performance of FlashSystem, but it’s low cost and high capacity options make it competitive as an option for point-in-time copies and backups. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) We prefer IBM over other solutions because IBM just seems to be more resilient, easy to use, and simple to deploy. Other products may have a steep learning curve, or may be start ups with not so much reliability. Incentivized Helpful? FG fredy garcia Presale Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM Storwize is a part of a family that is complemented by the products listed. In many negotiations, involving storage is our workhorse to ensure several businesses thanks to its balanced cost and all the benefits that we offer. Incentivized Helpful? Kenneth Ditmar Hansen Senior Storage Specialist Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) We are using IBM Storwize storage arrays underneath IBM Spectrum Scale, they are easy to interact together, and can scale to our requirement. Easy administration as the GUI are designed equally so it's easy to find administrative features and the easy single pane of glass GUI … Incentivized Helpful? Peter Sachs Storage Infrastructure Engineer Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) More choice and better price. Incentivized Helpful? Rusty Beard Storage Architect Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) HPE and Hitachi. I recommend IBM Storwize to my customers because it's an industry-proven, flexible platform with award-winning ease-of-use and high performance. Incentivized Helpful? Bill Raines Technology Sales Specialist Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) With the latest announcements of v5K and v7K, IBM is on target with the competition out there on the market. The only [thing] missing is a great marketing campaign to sustain a 12-24 month period to whet the client's appetite. We as a partner are doing what we can to educate … Incentivized Helpful? Keith Thuerk Storage Engineer Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM SVC (ran for several years) ESS E & F models (yeah those are old) Since Storwize is based upon SVC it was a no brainer and saved us $$$$. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) We use both frequently. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) IBM Storwize is a solid product, and we will continue to use it. Incentivized Helpful? RE Roberto Etcheverry Solution Architect Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) We used the old DS4xxxx series of storages and have worked with most brands of storage and I will always pick Storwize over the rest. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) It is an alternate platform, so having multiple vendors reduces risk. Incentivized Helpful?	NetApp AFF A-Series Verified User Anonymous Chose NetApp AFF A-Series Yes A900 stack up well against these products and have provided more flexibility in terms of management and expansion. Adding new nodes or additional storage shelves is easy and can be quick to get the additional stoarge requirements within our Org. So definitely a better … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose NetApp AFF A-Series We have only used NetApp since 2011, either FAS or AFF devices. I have researched Pure and they actually are very impressive and couple probably give NetApp AFF A-Series a run for their money, but I keep returning to NetApp AFF A-Series because they appear slightly stronger in … Incentivized Helpful? AG Amit Gupta AIX Administrator Chose NetApp AFF A-Series Dell EMC Unity and IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? KR Kaushal Rawat AIX Adminsitrator Chose NetApp AFF A-Series IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? JB Jacob Bradley Infrastructure Engineer Chose NetApp AFF A-Series 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 Helpful? Paul Lemmons Lead Systems Software Engineer Chose NetApp AFF A-Series I have been an IBM and EMC storage customer. I used EMC CX and VMX series SANs. I have used IBM Shark SANs before that. Much has changed over the years. It is my experience that Netapp has shown a great deal more innovation with large leaps in technology, ease of use and an … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose NetApp AFF A-Series We looked at Pure, Nimble, XtremIO and NetApp. Although all the arrays did really well, the ability to support all protocols sets NetApp apart. Each vendor had its own pluses and minuses and we bought the array that best suited our business needs and budget. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)

NetApp AFF A-Series

Enterprise Flash Array Storage

Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) - Ratings	NetApp AFF A-Series 8.3 Ratings 8% below category average
Flash Array Performance	00 Ratings	9.10 Ratings
Flash Array Integration	00 Ratings	9.10 Ratings
Data Compression	00 Ratings	6.30 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades	00 Ratings	8.20 Ratings
Simplicity	00 Ratings	8.90 Ratings
Power Savings	00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	NetApp AFF A-Series
Small Businesses	DiskStation Score 8.8 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Medium-sized Companies	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage Score 10.0 out of 10	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage Score 10.0 out of 10	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	NetApp AFF A-Series
Likelihood to Recommend	9.9 (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems)	NetApp AFF A-Series
Likelihood to Recommend	IBM Storewize is widely used in organizations for on-premises with a lot of facilities that are given by this IBM Storewize. Data accessibility is very good and fast in this system. This system is available with different data services such as scalability and flexibility in data even providing security to our data. Incentivized MK Mushtaqu Khan Regional Business Manager Read full review	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 Cedeno Amanda .NET Software Engineer Read full review
Pros	Data processing and IO. The Storwize devices are very resilient in how they process data and do not have a drop in IO when errors occur (common errors such as disk failures and lost paths). Storage efficiency management. We are able to use multiple efficiency techniques such as thin provisioning and data reduction to reduce our budget footprint. Easy to use interfaces. Creating a volume and mapping to a host has proven to be a very easy process and makes onboarding less stressful for our team. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Protective multiple project and business data is excellent. Solutions for data storage and data migration. Providing useful and quality data reports is effective. Incentivized Annette Gilmour Senior Project Manager Read full review
Cons	As a business partner looking to provide services to keep the uptime of the Storwize, I would like to have the capability to pull reports from IBM Storage Insights to assist my clients in managing their system through it's lifecycle. More knowledge out there for partners to best integrate IBM Storwize with IBM Power i. This seems to be lacking in communication from IBM. Incentivized Bill Raines Technology Sales Specialist Read full review	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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 Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Simpler to use. Storwize is reliable and is using IBM technology and not some unknown application. Proven performance and easy to stack and configure. Sizing is simple and the options are more than I need for my business. Rack compatibility is something you may not realize until you install one or more of the units. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 JB Jacob Bradley Infrastructure Engineer Read full review
Return on Investment	I would like to highlight the most positive aspect I have seen in the products of the IBM Storwize family, and it is the ROI that we can choose when we offer real-time compression with the IBM V7000 family. In truth, this feature is excellent, and we have seen how customers save storage resources, rack space, power and management. Incentivized FG fredy garcia Presale Read full review	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 Paul Lemmons Lead Systems Software Engineer Read full review
ScreenShots	IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Screenshots