NetApp AFF A-Series Reviews

It has given us a stable, consistent, high-performance platform to run our enterprise software, including file shares and just about anything else. We're a VMware vSphere shop and run this solution for that entire system. It's really given us a leg up for general production purposes. 

We also own a disaster recovery site. We use SnapMirror to get all of our important volumes moved over there. It's been a very good fit.

The amazing aspect is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could add it within the next revision of the software. We've had several iterations of the solution's hardware. We're on our second generation of FlexPod. 

Ten years ago, we had to update our SQL servers. Moving LUNs from an old version to a new one was quite a process. However, recently, we just did something similar. We moved from AFF a 200 to a 250. Since they've updated the ONTAP software, this time around, it was non-disruptive, and it took less than a weekend.

NetApp delivers higher performance for our applications, which do a lot of database calls. All our database volumes run on NetApp. Adopting the solution reduces latency, and high throughput enables our applications to respond to customers faster.

It's hard to say how much faster because we've gone through generations of NetApp hardware, from spinning disk to SSD and flash. This may have reduced our response times by 2-5 seconds during peak times. The AFF is loaded, so perceived latency makes a huge difference.

We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability. 

I don't know that AI has affected our business in particular so far. We have various cybersecurity controls in place, and we're using some of NetApp's built-in ransomware attack prevention measures. We're currently keeping up pace with the applications and forthcoming AI. We haven't delved too much into AI yet, but it's coming. I'm trying to keep up with the performance demand for those technologies. We'll stay with NetApp to accomplish those goals.

We have 400 Series, providing AFF. The clustering of all those nodes and the flexibility to move volumes around within a cluster have given us an opportunity to respond to growth and fix the latency problems we've received.

We are a storage service provider, and our main business case is to implement different types of customer workloads on NetApp AFF A-Series in a hotel setup. Our primary users of A-Series tend to be latency-sensitive web applications.

NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors. With both deduplication and compression inline, we experience no cost in terms of performance on the systems, however, we have huge savings on the storage side. We can turn it on for everyone and save storage space, allowing us to sell more to customers. NetApp also provides us with an interface for VLAN separation that no other vendor can provide, allowing our customers distinct, separated network layers in between.

The NetApp solution has made our business more efficient. NetApp is much faster, and management is more effective than with the previous vendor. Infrastructure is a technical department where data must be available to our applications and customers quickly and smoothly with high availability. The NetApp solution provides that.

The cost factor is an important challenge, and NetApp provides us with a positive business case because of the implementation and setup of their solutions. 

NetApp offers a complete environment, but we need to automate more processes. We have Ansible and VMware vSphere to automate certain aspects

NetApp's hot and cold storage are its most valuable features. We currently use the A series. Immutable snapshots are another advanced security feature that is positive.

Our primary use case is for media infrastructure. NetApp is our backbone. It's the primary storage we use. 

NetApp helps us get the fastest output. It's a work in progress. We plan to use NetApp for primary storage and as a global file system. 

NetApp's MetroClusters are a critical technology that helps us achieve high performance and a high-availability system. It has a huge impact on our customers and our company. NetApp systems are always on. 

It's a smooth system. Governance, compliance, and high availability are critical. FabricPool reduces the cost of taking so many snapshots, which are expensive to store. We can store them on the flash, storage grid, or FabricPool. It has brought our costs down by 30 percent. 

We are thinking about expanding to other NetApp systems. We currently only use NetApp for Sys, NFS, and then S Query. We will maybe use AFF. We need to upgrade our network to address latency issues. Our future technological investments will prioritize data storage and optimization. 

MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package. 

StorageKit is a critical technology introduced in the last four years. We use NetApp's all-flash storage, but we still use disk storage for some systems. NetApp's AFF systems really work. We bring them to the customer and let them try them. NetApp is excellent.