NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

NetApp AFF series is the best use case for when you are using a new era of technology, when you need artificial intelligence or extreme performance, even for transactional workloads. NetApp AFF series comes with two variations: one is Capacity NVMe and the other is Performance NVMe. If you need capacity with performance, select the C-series, which is very cost-effective with respect to the technology. If you need very high performance and extreme performance with challenges of power, cooling, and rack space, and also performance, and use cases such as banking sector or service providers with many tenants and cloud compatibility requirements, I will recommend NetApp AFF series. It all depends on the use case.

FAS series is for those customers who want NVMe, SAS, and NL-SAS. They also need unified protocols, all NAS protocols, and all SAN protocols. FAS series is best if they want to add NVMe shelf later on. If they need only All-Flash, they have two variations: one is Capacity NVMe and the other is Performance NVMe. In the performance world, I rate NetApp AFF series a nine because it is very costly with respect to the other options. Performance NVMe is expensive compared to others, but the business value they provide justifies the cost. For C-series, those are for capacity NVMe, and they are very cost-effective. For the high-performance series, I rated it nine. For the capacity series, it is a ten because it is very cost-effective.

Regarding the use of NetApp AFF AI-driven analytics and automation tools, NetApp C-series should be selected because it is cost-effective and it is built for AI. In AI workloads, you can also use E-series, but for the particular use case when we are talking about AI, specifically when there are GPUs involved, such as ChatGPT use cases, it is not a transactional workload but a graphical GPU workload when you need to respond very quickly. In that case, I will recommend for mid-range customers NetApp AFF C-series. If the customer is in the telco sector or a service provider wanting to provide AI analytics services or GPU services to their customers, I will recommend them to use NetApp AFF Performance series. It depends on the use case.

Regarding low latency and massive data volume, if low latency or massive data volume is required, NetApp AFF is acceptable. However, it depends on how much data volume or how many files you are handling. If you are handling millions of files, NetApp AFF, C-series, or E-series are not fit for that particular use case. If you are handling millions or billions of files, you need to shift your product selection from NetApp AFF to NetApp StorageGRID because StorageGRID is the best for that particular use case. Specifically when you are dealing with large volumes of petabytes or millions to billions of files you need to handle, NetApp StorageGRID is the correct product. Overall, with respect to unified storage systems and performance in relation to customer requirements and specific use cases, they are best in providing low latency. They support low latency requirements because in banks, low latency storage is needed. Regarding video and surveillance, E-series is good for low latency when timestamp is critical for the customer.

For the performance series, the model is NetApp AFF A-series. For the capacity series, NetApp AFF C-series is the capacity series. For cheaper environments and AI workload for customers, C-series is good. For telco or service provider environments, I will recommend NetApp AFF A-series because they have to serve many other tenants and customers. In that case, I will recommend NetApp AFF A-series. If a customer is a bank where transactional workload is required for that particular use case, I will recommend NetApp AFF A-series. NetApp AFF A-series in that particular use case is a little bit more expensive than other storage providers.

Positive

For the FAS series, there are many models. If I pick up one or two lines for that particular question, if there is a use case where you have a heterogeneous environment and you need NAS and SAN, this is the only unified box that I believe is an efficient and reliable unified box in the world of unified storage systems. Others in the market are not as reliable as NetApp FAS series because it is a built-in feature. You do not need any kind of filer to attach to make NAS protocols possible. All the NAS protocols are built-in with the storage software. This is very efficient, very easy to manage, and many analytics are provided because data management software is built with the FAS series. Very good monitoring and management tools are built with the FAS series. I rate it 9.5 out of 10.

When it comes to performance, I am satisfied with NetApp AFF. They have 4:1 data reduction techniques, which is really very high. If you have a size of 100 terabytes, you will get 400 terabytes of usable capacity when applying compression, deduplication, or other data reduction technologies. The most important aspect is that there is no performance degradation when you activate compression, deduplication, or compaction in NetApp AFF series. This is very unique to NetApp AFF series. Others may have performance degradation when applying compression and deduplication. The reason is that compression, deduplication, and data compaction technologies are built with the storage OS. Other OEMs do not have this feature within their storage software. They have to add additional applications, which reduce their performance when applying compression, deduplication, or data compaction technology.

Regarding the impact of NetApp's support for advanced NVMe protocols and flash storage, support is very good. Both of the storage systems are really very mature products across all ranges. The problem frequency or rate of problems or events is very less than other storage systems. I am supporting many storage models in Pakistan. They have maintenance agreements, and in years I could not get any severe level calls. Sometimes a disk fails, which is normal. When I compare with other OEMs such as Huawei and EMC, their problem rate is very high. Whenever there is a problem in NetApp storage, I get really very efficient support from NetApp. In the support area, they are also very good.

Positive

There might be some lag or response time with respect to support cases, but even then I will rate it 8.5 out of 10.

All of this is the same for all product ranges, whether E-series, NetApp AFF, or FAS series, because they are very efficient to respond. The only reason I rated it 8.5 is because the warehouse for spare parts, when a problem comes, a spare is needed to replace it, for example, a disk. In Pakistan, they have only one warehouse in Karachi. This warehouse manages all the problems when a problem comes. They ship the part based on the customer use case and customer service request. That is the only reason I rate it 8.5 because they have only one warehouse in Pakistan, which is in Karachi. For example, if a problem comes in Islamabad, it will take time to deliver the spare because the part will be shipped from Karachi to Islamabad, which will take around maybe a day. Other OEMs have their warehouses in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi also. In terms of part replacement requirements, they are very efficient in that area because they have warehouses in multiple cities of Pakistan.

My overall review rating for this solution is 9.5 out of 10.

NetApp AFF serves as the main storage platform for MySQL, SQL, and SAP HANA databases in my organization where low latency and high IOPS are required, and it is particularly valuable for storage in VMware and Hyper-V environments.

NetApp AFF supports these workloads by functioning as a centralized storage platform, enabling VM migration, high availability, and rapid provisioning of new workloads due to its low latency and rapid provisioning capabilities, which are especially beneficial when the company runs virtualization workloads.

NetApp AFF provides low latency for database files while snapshots and replication support backup and disaster recovery operations.

I find the snapshot and data protection features particularly valuable in NetApp AFF, which offers near-instant snapshots, space-efficient point-in-time recovery, and replication between sites using SnapMirror, along with faster recovery and backup of workloads.

NetApp AFF has impacted my organization positively by reducing database redundancy, accelerating VM provisioning, and significantly shortening backup and recovery times, with its snapshot capability enabling us to restore data in minutes instead of hours.

There is limited room for improvement with NetApp AFF, though one potential area is the licensing and product packaging, which could be simplified.

I rate NetApp AFF 9 out of 10 because I feel the licensing and product portfolio is somewhat complex, and it sometimes costs higher compared to competing solutions, along with the learning curve for new administrators being somewhat steep.

I have been working in my current field for the last seven to eight years.

NetApp AFF is very stable.

NetApp AFF has strong scalability, especially for enterprise workloads, as I can start with a small cluster and then add more controllers as demand grows.

Customer support for NetApp AFF is very good, and I have never faced any issues with it; it is among the best in the enterprise environment.

Previously, I used SAN storage before switching to NetApp AFF due to performance limitations, higher operational overhead, and slower recovery.

I have seen a return on investment with NetApp AFF, as the storage footprint has been reduced significantly due to deduplication and compression, leading to substantial cost savings.

The pricing of NetApp AFF is generally viewed as premium or enterprise-tier with a higher upfront cost compared to mid-range or commodity storage arrays.

Before choosing NetApp AFF, I evaluated other options such as Dell EMC PowerStore or Unity, HPE Alletra or 3PAR storage, and Pure Storage FlashArray, but I selected NetApp AFF for its strong balance of performance and storage efficiency.

NetApp AFF provides a strong foundation for AI governance and security through its data protection, access control, ransomware protection, and data management capabilities.

NetApp AFF has been reliable in supporting my AI workloads by providing consistent data availability, high performance, and low latency access to training and inference databases.

One of the features I value most about NetApp AFF is the enterprise availability, as it is designed for mission-critical applications with non-disruptive upgrades, high availability, and site-to-site replications, and I believe the 99% availability that has been claimed by NetApp is accurate.

My advice for others looking into NetApp AFF is to clearly define their work environments, particularly regarding performance, availability, and data protection requirements.

I have already mentioned most of the important aspects about NetApp AFF; it is a very balanced, high-value product that addresses practical considerations effectively. I give NetApp AFF an overall review rating of 9 out of 10.

We invested in NetApp technology to address our scalability and modernization requirements. Another platform we manage and aim to enhance with NetApp technologies is backups, currently residing on NetApp E Series. Each site has five to seven E Series systems handling backups. 

Compared to NetApp AFF or C Series, E Series is extremely reliable but lacks features, offering basic connectivity and performance but limited capabilities. For backups, we're looking to modernize our approach and leverage features like SnapLock for rapid recovery, increasing our capacity for mass restores in case of ransomware or other incidents. We're exploring the C Series with QLC drives, seeking the optimal fit and cost-effective solution. We anticipate the C Series ASAs will likely be the answer, providing the right balance of features and efficiency for our backup needs in the coming months.

NetApp technology has significantly improved how we operate and serve our customers. We were attempting to migrate from several legacy appliances that functioned adequately, but planning our next steps was challenging. Many vendors we worked with took a scattered approach. We would ask for a replacement block solution with specific features and a NAS solution with other specific features, both performing exceptionally well. 

One vendor offered nine different ways to achieve this, unable to clearly identify the best fit for us. This may not seem significant until we realize their largest competitor couldn't narrow it down to two options when we asked them to. It was almost a paralysis of choice within their own offerings. So, we switched to two or three other vendors who offered seemingly decent solutions, but it felt like a technological step backward. Their solutions were monolithic, difficult to scale, and challenging to work with in the future. My manager and I had prior NetApp experience at another organization, but our current location had no NetApp presence. It was a significant mindset shift for my colleagues and me. 

NetApp allowed us to move from a monolithic approach, where an array served a single purpose and was impossible to grow without spending millions to replace it, to a more flexible model. We initially purchased the AFF 8200 and A300 lines, which have served us well for several years. We've been able to scale horizontally with new projects and products requiring hundreds of terabytes of storage. Instead of buying entirely new systems, we can simply add more gear to the existing cluster and expand it. This approach has benefited not just a few specific products but the entire organization. It has enabled us to scale horizontally within days instead of months spent onboarding a new vendor, installing, configuring, and learning a new appliance, only to find it doesn't meet our needs. NetApp has made us more agile in implementing new solutions and has reduced stress significantly. We've moved from constantly planning new purchases and integrations to simply deciding if we need more and, if so, adding it to the existing cluster. It's been an amazing shift from being reactive to proactive, empowering us to focus on other tasks. What used to be a full-time job for one person is now easily manageable for our three-person team.

The ever-changing cybersecurity landscape and the rise of AI have significantly impacted our technology infrastructure. We've isolated a few nodes from a former cluster, leaving them to function independently - they're like the forgotten stepchildren, enduring hardship without complaint. Thanks to extensive automation, we never have to log into them. These nodes support SnapLock, which provides peace of mind knowing the data is undeletable - even by admins or support staff. Only the passage of time, specifically the expiration of compliance timers, allows for deletion. Ironically, I designed a system so secure that it's now impeding my own migration efforts. An audit volume with a 90-day compliance timer remains on an old cluster, and I'm forced to wait for it to expire before proceeding. This underscores the effectiveness of the security measures, even if they cause minor inconveniences. Cybersecurity and autonomous ransomware protection have significantly improved management's peace of mind. Previously, fine-tuning access controls were necessary to prevent unauthorized actions. Now, additional safeguards protect end users from unintentional mistakes caused by external influences. These safeguards act like bumpers in a bowling alley, preventing significant harm unless we make a mistake and allow it. This reassurance lets us focus on our work without worrying about phishing attacks or other security breaches.

The NetApp technology that has delivered the most value to our organization is FabricPool. FabricPool was a game-changer for us because we previously had a large investment in Nearline SaaS drives on the PaaS 8200 platform. This platform was good at scaling horizontally and working as a hybrid storage model with flash fronting and flash pools for reads and writes, tearing down to disk afterward as needed. FabricPool on the A-series platform allowed us to consolidate six cabinets of gear into two. 

With the NAS itself, we have our block array that cascades everything down to the FabricPool, which we've distributed throughout the data center. This means it doesn't have to live in the same dedicated cabinets or even the same row. Our data center operations team is happy because I told them they can put it anywhere as long as it has the necessary connectivity and power. This flexibility allows us to distribute storage more equitably and evenly. Everything gets prioritized on our flash tier. After 30 days of being cold which is common in a hospital setting, data gets deprioritized down to cheaper storage, going from dollars per gig to pennies per gig. The initial investment in power was significant, but where previously it was a premium for us to offer flash to our end-users, now I can offer it to everyone. FabricPool tears off data after users are done editing in their scratch space, and after 30 days, it moves to the cold tier, saving the organization money. We've gone from maybe 60 terabytes of flash to over 400, and half of it sits available for scalable storage. Previously, storage allocation was rigid, but now everyone gets flash unless their workload has absolutely no need for it. 

This has made everyone happier because they no longer have to complain about slow home directories or other performance issues.

One of the challenges we face with NetApp is identifying bottlenecks in the systems they integrate with. For example, we had a persistent issue with buffer credits, where a card in a UCSFI was causing slowdowns due to its design limitations. This microphone analogy illustrates how a single component can hinder the system even with fast storage and computing. We are generating two billion buffer credit issues every 12 hours. Identifying and resolving this took nine months and involved replacing seven cards. While NetApp's Cloud Insights initially identified the issue, its high $150,000 per year cost made it unsustainable. This highlights the need for a more affordable solution to monitor the entire ecosystem, as relying on vendor analysis for isolated incidents is time-consuming. Ultimately, having comprehensive and cost-effective monitoring would save significant time and resources.

I have been using NetApp products for almost 15 years.

When we first invested in NAS workloads around six or seven years ago, we were hiring a lot of people. We had considered pairing NAS and Block in one purchase and looked at HP and 3PAR who isn't a player anymore. We made a small investment in Nimble. Before Dell's acquisition, we were a large EMC shop, but they were monolithic, hard to scale, and slow. Extreme IO caused us panic when we realized we couldn't upgrade the small nodes, forcing complete replacements for capacity increases. It felt like a trap. My prior NetApp experience and my manager's knowledge contrasted this; with NetApp, we could add more until reaching system limits, not forcing a complete repurchase. It allowed organic growth and scaling. This has proven true, winning over skeptical colleagues who now agree it's a no-brainer.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. It's a product that keeps us coming back, and I've been managing NetApp products on and off for almost 15 years. It's grown and matured significantly but has never lost its core fundamentals: ease of management, support, and flexibility within our data center. While other products might offer bleeding-edge speed, they can be challenging to manage or incredibly expensive. NetApp AFF remains manageable and relatively affordable. The first company I worked for chose NetApp because it was cost-effective and reliable and served them well. In my experience, NetApp AFF has always been a dependable and high-functioning solution.

We plan to expand our use of the solution in the future. We're currently considering NetApp to support our backup solution. We use Commvault for backup for VMware and most other systems not on the NAS. As a result, we're investigating new E series deployments for their stability and hardening them significantly or using NetApp C series ASAs and backing up Commvault with those. We expect these changes to result in greater resiliency, reliability, and scalability, especially with the C series. It's not just about backing up data; almost every backup vendor can do that well. The focus is on how quickly you can restore data in a crisis. We want to be confident that our backup suite won't be the bottleneck in a rapid recovery, even if we need to restore 600 virtual machines at once. It's good if the landing zone or VMware is the limiting factor. While it's a game of moving the bottleneck, previous backups were fast, but restoration took days. Now, being able to restore 100 or 200 virtual machines within an hour is a significant achievement, something unheard of five or ten years ago or prohibitively expensive. Our goal is to restore 1,000 virtual machines within a day, which is challenging but achievable when our environment has 1,500 virtual machines. Restoring three-quarters of them within 24 hours without relying on SnapRestore or similar native array capabilities is a major accomplishment. Being able to recover data from our last resort within a day is the ultimate goal.

For our next investment, we aim to increase security, scalability, and speed. While we typically prioritize two of these three factors, our current goal is to achieve all three.

Our immediate purchases will focus on cybersecurity and optimization. Within the next one to two years, we plan to develop an internal AI framework and transition to become a service provider for our clinics, customers, business units, and data analysts. We aim to offer a standardized framework to prevent them from independently procuring AI solutions that may be incompatible with our systems. By providing a supported framework, we can ensure compatibility and maintain our standards, avoiding the need to support potentially inadequate external solutions.

I mostly work with on-premises solutions from NetApp AFF, and what we've done is with on-premises solutions.

I also work with storage devices from this vendor, NetApp AFF, and I have experience with specific models.

NetApp AFF provides an all-flash storage solution for unified SAN solutions, supporting both SAN and NAS functionalities.

Data reduction capabilities such as deduplication, compression, and compaction are standard features included with the license in NetApp AFF.

With the storage efficiency from a NetApp AFF installation, users can manage substantial data running on all-flash. The features such as compaction and compression provide storage efficiency guarantees in an all-flash environment.

There are no improvements needed at the moment because they are working on integrations with the cloud and AI. These features are currently available, though I have not explored them extensively.

I have been familiar with this solution for almost three years.

I faced no complications during the deployment process of NetApp AFF. It was a very easy and simple deployment.

The process was seamless, smooth, and straightforward.

I have experienced no issues so far, as it works flawlessly.

It is a good product. I would assess the scalability of NetApp AFF as excellent in handling massive data volumes, and it can provide a ratio of 4:1.

The NetApp support team is good. I have communicated with them, and they are effective and responsive.

Positive

The process was seamless, smooth, and straightforward.

The whole deployment takes about one day because it involves registering the box with NetApp support, downloading the license, IP configurations, FC integration, and related tasks.

Currently, we have two people doing the installation so that one can learn from the other.

There are cost savings after the installation of NetApp AFF if users are able to deploy the solution quickly, allowing customers to utilize the box as soon as possible.

The licensing cost of the product is expensive, and when combined with support, it becomes quite costly. Compared to other storage devices such as Huawei, which are gaining market presence, NetApp AFF can be on the higher side.

I do not deploy Huawei products, but I am aware of their cost.

The ONTAP one license includes numerous features, making the licensing quite comprehensive.

We are using cloud integration capabilities of NetApp, such as tiering to public clouds.

With BlueXP integration, users can get about 500 terabytes for hybrid architecture implementation, though most customers are not utilizing this feature.

I have not yet employed NetApp AFF's AI-driven analytics and automation tool.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate NetApp AFF an 8.

I am working at a tech company where we use NetApp AFF to store our developers' data.

Two important features that NetApp AFF has are the performance and the capacity to save data against attacks in general or hardware failure.

The deduplication and compression of NetApp AFF are excellent. When you have a peering environment where you have multiple machines that are basically the same, all the blocks that are repetitive from one to another will save space. That is a really good feature.

The analytics help to check the movement of a deleted or moved folder. Once a month, we have this kind of situation where we have to look into it.

Our backup system, Commvault, has an amazing capacity to do compression and deduplication better than NetApp AFF by itself. If they can spend some time improving deduplication and compression, it would be great because it has been proven that some commercial features can do it.

I have been using NetApp AFF for about 10 years.

With NetApp AFF, I see some security reports that indicate bugs or BHP that could crash the system. They have always been upgrading very fast and implementing patches to resolve these issues.

I am typically looking for latency under five milliseconds for NetApp AFF operation. When something goes up, you can add more disks, more disk shelves, or migrate the data seamlessly. The client does not notice when you move it to another unit with more CPU, and the performance will be better.

I have contacted NetApp AFF technical support and customer support regularly. They have all the documentation and expertise.

The support for NetApp AFF is comprehensive—not just the documentation for self-guided reading, but for simple questions, spare parts, or urgent needs, you can have a contract that enables delivery the next business day or within four hours, depending on your process requirements. They have multiple options available. The service representatives are experts who know what they are doing.

Positive

I have used alternatives to NetApp AFF, including Dell storage, HPE storage, and IBM storage. For the amount of data we are using, NetApp AFF is better. The performance and number of tools that NetApp AFF offers are significantly better. The main limitation could be budget if you are starting with a small office and do not want to spend the amount that NetApp AFF requires as an enterprise solution. You can start with NAS, which is free, or spend more to use proper Dell or IBM storage, depending on your company's environment.

The process is simple, but you have to have some knowledge. It's not for a beginner. 

With NetApp AFF, I handle everything, including upgrades, hardware replacement, and all maintenance tasks. The Snap technology in NetApp AFF is really good, though you have to invest in it.

Planning of all the lifecycle storage with NetApp AFF is part of the solution. While it is not cheap, they have introduced a new series of AFF that are more affordable, providing options for more users.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten as it is an excellent solution.

NetApp has impacted us pretty dramatically. Before, we didn't have standardized storage, so adopting the solution across our organization has allowed us the ability to provide data across all our sites and dramatically improve our backup and disaster.

We've recently adopted their Snapshot technology. Before, we didn't have any form of that. Having Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapLock really feels like we've added security to an organization and we really appreciate that.

The storage speeds have improved. We work with a lot of high-resolution imagery. Having this product has been a huge improvement. Our backups and disaster recovery plan have improved drastically.

We'd like to see them implement more subscription services into the base support model. It would make it cheaper for us.

We're definitely going to jump more into the data replication. Recently, we learned about the caching functionality that the solution has built-in. We may look into doing that to reduce our product footprint at our remote sites, bring all that data centralized, and allow us to have more security and management.

We've only had to contact support once before we're on top of it. They treated us like we were a top priority.

We previously were reliant on on-site backups at all of our data centers with some cloud adoption. Recently, we've started replicating data across sites to ensure that we have high availability and quick recovery times. 

We looked at Dell, Pure Storage and considered vSAN.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced our technology decisions. We've implemented the Snapshotting, and our next step is to implement the ransomware discovery AI tech that is built in. We're going to implement that as soon as possible.

We're going to avoid the AI space for now, except for ransomware detection. We'll be prioritizing security, and any time the product introduces a new technology, we'll likely jump in.

Overall, the product has provided us with some amazing tools that we haven't had before. We're so new to the family that we just appreciate the product so far.

I work in the defense industry. We have lots of data silos, more than there are colors of paint in the paint store. Trying to get people to agree on how and if they can combine those and how they can share them easily and securely is a big challenge. The solution has an architecture that emphasizes consistency above all else, and that's why they're successful. That's why, as an architect, I've been successful in convincing somebody to go ahead and buy it, consume it. They find not just performance or capacity improvements. They find operational improvements in ease of accessing the data, how consistently people can find what they're looking for quickly, and how they can integrate it with their applications. They provide not just storage. They provide a real solution.

In some cases, we design systems that have to go in strange places. They might have to go to space. They might have to go underwater. Having all manner of different data come into a system sometimes is not well understood. Is it block? Is it file? Is it something else? This solution has all of those services no matter what scale you buy. The result is that we don't have to wait until the customer knows what their data mix would be. We have a comprehensive solution that could accommodate anything. We can fly it earlier and get them in the air testing and prototyping much faster than they could have with other solutions. Customers have been very successful in places that probably no one else could have been thanks to the solution's consistency.

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident.

We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability.

It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time.

We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. 

For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

We have to work with technology that we can deploy ourselves, run where we decide, and not necessarily anywhere, and that can survive for long periods of time disconnected from a cloud. For us, that's probably been one of the bigger cybersecurity challenges: how do we maintain security, maintain updates, patches, profiles, policies, and all that stuff without subscribing to a service from your friendly neighborhood cloud provider? This product does a better-than-average job of that. 

They are continuing to offer fanatically good support. That is what's always cemented in my mind why the solution is positioned as a leader. They support people in organizations and missions in ways that others don't or don't necessarily have to. 

We looked at companies like Hitachi, Dell, and EMC, to name just a few. The reason this solution was chosen was the software feature set. We needed flexibility in how things were stored, but with common operations and a common set of AFF, rather than segmented, siloed solutions. Some of those other companies are getting better and better at that. They've streamlined their product lines. They have one model for how they deploy everything. That said, it's obvious where that has meant the lowest common denominator is all that they can offer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. They are competitive. I wouldn't give anyone in this industry a ten out of ten.

It's a three-tier architecture and it's separated. It runs over the network instead of hyperconverged infrastructure. It sells itself since it's centralized management. Three-tier is completely separated away from it. With centralized management, you actually have pitfalls where speeds and read/write operations are all slower. Having it separate and having a dedicated storage area network or a dedicated network attached storage, for us, just worked better. It's been faster.  

In terms of improvements, they could have a couple more things that are usually done through the command line. 

I see that they're making more improvements by adding things like SnapMirror to ONTAP Systems Manager, so maybe some more features in that area would be helpful.

We do plan to expand. We're going to purchase a few 250s for some off-site backups in our secondary location, and that's kind of where we're at right now. With the next technology, we're actually getting Veeam. It integrates perfectly as a backup and replication system with NetApp. Being able to use an old NetApp as essentially a target for our backups is going to work perfectly. That's the next step for us.

We had Nutanix and VMware vSAN. We had sit downs and meet and greets with Pure Storage as well. A lot of them were very expensive, and we knew how Nutanix was operating. They give you everything upfront, and then you have to pay extra for the nodes. So the pricing models weren't as transparent. 

The scalability of this solution fit our needs and was better. Performance was the biggest factor in our decision-making.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Data storage and optimization are going to be our biggest focus next. We've had problems with it in the past, and we're able to fix those issues with the solutions that we're purchasing.

Our company is really into growth and innovation in general, and they're always looking for new ways to do something better. Previously, we have been doing things not to the best of our ability. Being able to purchase new hardware, new software, and have solutions architects come in and look at what we've got going on, it just makes sense to to go in that direction as well. 

The replication of data from on-premises to the cloud is very easy when we are using the SnapMirror technology. 

Being able to use FlexCache is the best part of this solution. It is something that on-premises users are using for their production. There are some users who want to use the same volume from the cloud. FlexCache helps us in providing that.

We have a unified storage to access the file and NAS. We can do all the things in the same solution. We do not need any other product or storage mix.

CVO and AFF technologies have delivered the most value to our company. I would rate AFF a ten out of ten, and I would rate CVO a nine out of ten. We are still exploring the cloud. AFF is completely packed, and with CVO, we have a few challenges that we are trying to solve. Taking a snapshot and cloning are some of the best things that we are doing with these technologies. CVO also offers cost-effectiveness.

Their customer support can be better. When we have an outage, we need to wait until the issue is escalated to L3 which takes a lot of time. If that can be improved, it will help a lot. If there is any issue, we should be able to resolve it immediately instead of waiting for so long to get a qualified resource from NetApp.

We have a NetApp partner and we also have a point of contact from NetApp with whom we have regular calls every week. We can see what the new products are and we try to adopt the new ones. 

If there are any issues, we can get NetApp support to get them resolved. Their customer support can be better.

We considered another solution that is used only for SAN and is server block storage. With this solution, we get both SAN and NAS within the same storage device. We chose this solution due to its flexibility.

We have had a few outages on the CVO where the host needed more performance but the CVO that we selected in terms of disk type and other things was not able to support that workload. To support that workload, we moved the host to ANF instead of CVO. 

We are moving towards AI, but we are not fully involved as of now.

We have plans to increase its usage both on-prem and on the cloud. Data is constantly growing. We need more capacity. New business needs require new storage. New projects require more storage.

Cost saving on the cloud is the goal we have. We do not know how much exactly it will come out to be because it is on a usage basis. It can grow constantly, and then for one month, it can come down. We need to make sure that the cost is constant.

Our upcoming investments would be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. Data storage is the main thing that we cannot avoid. Cybersecurity is something that we need to make our environment secure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We're still in the process of the migration, so we're hoping that it will help with business and serving customers. We're hoping that it will be faster. We had previous file limitations with our old technology. We're hoping to better utilize the NetApp arrays to serve our expanding and growing business.

If the data is deduplicated, we'll hopefully begin to save space. We're also hoping it will allow our business clients to access their data faster, and we'll be able to read and write it faster as well using all-flash technology.

The C400 flash arrays have been very valuable so far.

We'll use it to secure data, back up that data, and replicate it to other data centers. We'll leverage it to take a holistic approach to data replication, backup, and accessibility.

We're assuming accessing and writing files will be a lot snappier with opening files will be faster. That's what we're looking at. We're hoping for a lot of speed.

We don't have it in production yet. We don't have areas for improvement right now. Once we put it into production and get client feedback, we'll have more visibility.

We did use a different solution. We made the change based on the price point and being able to open more files.

We looked into Dell and another big player in the space. We chose this solution based on the price point and the all-flash technology.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We just got it. We're expecting it will be faster and that we'll see some good compression and deep replication on our data.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI influenced our technology decisions. It's a factor in every decision that we make. The security is very important. I know other vendors provide similar types of types of security, and data tech and data security as well.

We're using it all just for NAS right now. We possibly might use it
for SAN in the future and then maybe archiving.

We're very new to AI and it will be a consideration in the future. Cybersecurity for sure will also be a priority and data optimization is the most important.