"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things."
"The newest version of ONTAP has a bit of a learning curve because you need to learn where things are to find them. It is not impossible, but when you are accustomed to the older version of ONTAP, it just takes a bit getting used to it, but it is about the same as before."
"It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good."
"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"From my perspective, everything works well. They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment."
"When comparing with Pure for example, with Pure you have no maintenance anymore and with NetApp, you still need maintenance."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity."
"It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system."
"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 21 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 21st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 4 reviews. NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is rated 9.0, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) writes "Provides us with quick options when restoring things for customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolidFire writes "Simple to deploy and has good stability ". NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is most compared with Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT and Dell PowerStore, whereas SolidFire is most compared with VMware vSAN, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays and Dell Unity XT. See our NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) vs. SolidFire report.
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