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NetApp AFF pros and cons

Vendor: NetApp

4.5 out of 5

311 reviews
98% willing to recommend

4,646 followers

Pros & Cons summary

NetApp AFF enhances transactional workloads with its speed and performance, minimizing latency issues and maximizing storage efficiency through features like deduplication and compression. Scalability and high availability support seamless expansion, though the system is costly. Users praise technical support but seek faster responses and improvements in knowledge. Robust features include MetroCluster for disaster recovery, SnapMirror for backup, and VMware integration requires attention. ONTAP versions need stability and bug fixes to improve cooperation.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

NetApp AFF provides exceptional speed and performance, particularly beneficial for transactional workloads and database applications.

Deduplication and compression features enhance storage efficiency, reducing space requirements significantly.

The scalability offered by NetApp AFF, with the ability to scale up to 24 nodes, supports growing business needs.

Comprehensive backup and data resiliency features, including SnapMirror and SnapVault, are highly valuable for data protection.

The high availability and business continuity capabilities, such as MetroCluster, are critical for maintaining uptime and performance.

CONS

Customers report challenges with restoring applications and application-aware backups.

Technical support is seen as an area needing improvement, with emphasis on response time and efficiency.

There are remarks on the lack of compatibility with upgraded applications, leading to disruptions in usage.

NetApp AFF is criticized for its high cost, affecting total ownership expense and expansion.

Users express the need for better integration and security features, such as ransomware protection.

NetApp AFF Pros review quotes

SG

Storage Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

Oct 29, 2019

The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use.

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Unix Engineer at Epic Systems Corporation

Nov 18, 2019

Things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things.

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MA

Michael Archuleta

Chief Information Officer at Mt. San Rafael Hospital

Oct 21, 2019

Tech support has been absolutely amazing. I think on the technical aspects as well, my staff is able to get great support from the NetApp technical support resources that we have. What I love about NetApp is they have a health care division. At times, it's such an amazing thing because if we have a healthcare-related issue, there's no one better than having prior CIOs from health care organizations that NetApp has hired, and that are part of the health care team, to help out with any of those initiatives and support problems. Support has been absolutely phenomenal.

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Free Report: NetApp AFF Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JL

Sr. storage Administrator at Nationwide Children's Hospital

Sep 24, 2024

The NetApp technology that has delivered the most value to our organization is FabricPool.

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GM

Lead Infrastructure Architect at Fortune Brands Innovations (Moen)

Nov 12, 2023

Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us.

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DR

Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson

Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

Oct 5, 2021

It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case.

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IT Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2017

The ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup.

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Storage Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability.

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reviewer1223547

Data Protection Engineering at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning.

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reviewer1223544

Consulting Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today.

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NetApp AFF Cons review quotes

SG

Storage Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

Oct 29, 2019

I want an interface through ONTAP that look more like what it does for the E-Series with Santricity.

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Unix Engineer at Epic Systems Corporation

Nov 18, 2019

One of the areas that the product can improve is definitely in the user interface. We don't use it for SAN, but we've looked at using it for SAN and the SAN workflows are really problematic for my admins, and they just don't like doing SAN provisioning on that app. That really needs to change if we're going to adopt it and actually consider it to be a strong competitor versus some of the other options out there.

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MA

Michael Archuleta

Chief Information Officer at Mt. San Rafael Hospital

Oct 21, 2019

The total cost of ownership has increased a little.

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Free Report: NetApp AFF Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JL

Sr. storage Administrator at Nationwide Children's Hospital

Sep 24, 2024

One of the challenges we face with NetApp is identifying bottlenecks in the systems they integrate with.

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GM

Lead Infrastructure Architect at Fortune Brands Innovations (Moen)

Nov 12, 2023

The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different, so I had to program something to catch a different error case or something like that. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About, 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different.

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DR

Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson

Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

Oct 5, 2021

I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to.

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IT Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2017

Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now.

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Storage Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

Tech support is a place where there is room to improve the product experience. The response time when they are busy is not very good.

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reviewer1223547

Data Protection Engineering at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

The cost of this solution should be reduced.

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reviewer1223544

Consulting Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 5, 2019

Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 163)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

All-Flash Storage

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Popular Comparisons

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Dell PowerStore vs NetApp AFF

Pure Storage FlashArray vs NetApp AFF

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp AFF

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