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NetApp AFF pros and cons

Vendor: NetApp

4.5 out of 5

313 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

NetApp AFF offers exceptional speed and performance for transactional workloads, reducing latency and ensuring high availability with features like SnapMirror and MetroCluster. It enhances storage capacity through advanced deduplication and compression but requires improvements in application compatibility and bug resolution. While praised for scalability and technical support, users note slow response times and high licensing costs. Improvement in deduplication and compression capabilities compared to commercial solutions is also needed.

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 for transactional workloads and virtual environments.

The all-flash technology ensures low latency and high input/output operations per second (IOPS).

Features like deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning offer excellent storage efficiency.

High availability and reliability are supported through features such as SnapMirror and MetroCluster, ensuring data protection and business continuity.

The scalability and flexibility of NetApp AFF support the growing demands of enterprise-level storage requirements.

CONS

Compatibility matrix could be improved.

Technical support is lacking and response times can be slow.

Costs, including total cost of ownership and licensing, are high.

Integration with other systems and applications needs enhancement.

Scalability and performance analytics require improvement.

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: August 2025.

867,445 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: August 2025.

867,445 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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Product Categories

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All-Flash Storage

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

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Product Categories

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NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Popular Comparisons

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