topic A-Series vs. EF-Series Performance in AFF

A-Series vs. EF-Series Performance

DirkE — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:47:36 GMT

Hello Community,

we are currently looking at two storage systems, but can't really decide yet. Our workloads are MSSQL, MySQL, Microsoft Dynamics AX, VMWare (vSphere) ESXi with about 100 VMs, RIP software and virtual client systems. We currently require 120 terabytes of storage. All systems are to be operated centrally on one storage.

It is important to us that all the different workloads run performantly. Maybe someone of you can give an approximate information if the A-series or EF-series are more suitable for us.

Many greetings

Re: A-Series vs. EF-Series Performance

SpindleNinja — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:43:07 GMT

The workloads you describe are typically very random read/write. In that case, ONTAP / AFF A or C series would be the better bet. ONTAP also offers a lot more functionality than what an eseries can offer.

eseries does sequential writes and reads very well.

I've had customers running both in the environments. for Example.. VMware and various databases would be on ONTAP and their video surveillance system would use the eseries.

Work with your account team to size everything correctly.

Re: A-Series vs. EF-Series Performance

elementx — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:09:48 GMT

It's hard to find slow all-flash storage these days.

I suggest to think about it this way: whichever you buy, it will be fast enough. But ONTAP gives you more options to manage your data and workloads.

If you had 1 or 2 high perf workloads, I'd probably suggest EF (lower cost of performance, given that your other requirements aren't many). But you have 5 different workloads, relatively many disks and VMs to manage. In that situation I think you'd benefit from the management features you will find on ONTAP.