NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) Pros
DR
Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson
Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.
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.
View full review »MR
MohanReddy
Sr. Technology Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »HM
Harish Manukonda
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS)
March 2023

Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
685,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RA
reviewer1764327
Director, IT Infrastructure Services at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »MD
reviewer1724082
AWS Solutions Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time. Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love.
View full review »SA
Swann Adjemian
Director of the Projects Department at ALPIX
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.
View full review »SJ
Subodh Jaiswar
AIX and Storage Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »KD
reviewer2039343
Storage Engineer at a religious institution with 10,001+ employees
The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more.
View full review »JG
reviewer1001976
Vice President Data Protection Strategy at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10.
View full review »NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) Cons
DR
Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson
Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.
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.
View full review »MR
MohanReddy
Sr. Technology Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »HM
Harish Manukonda
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS)
March 2023

Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
685,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.
MD
reviewer1724082
AWS Solutions Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful.
View full review »When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated.
View full review »SA
Swann Adjemian
Director of the Projects Department at ALPIX
Another issue is that for smaller customers, NetApp doesn't have enough disk sizes. You begin with a 980-gigabyte disk and the next size is 3.8 terabytes. There aren't any disk sizes in between. Competitors have more choices in disk sizes.
View full review »SJ
Subodh Jaiswar
AIX and Storage Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good.
View full review »KD
reviewer2039343
Storage Engineer at a religious institution with 10,001+ employees
In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that.
View full review »JG
reviewer1001976
Vice President Data Protection Strategy at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »AH
reviewer1232994
Systems Management Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees
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.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS)
March 2023

Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2023.
685,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.