NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Name: NetApp AFF
Brand: NetApp
Rating: 5 (28 reviews)

Vendor: NetApp

4.5 out of 5

28 reviews

4,784 followers

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NetApp AFF A-series systems are cloud-connected, flash storage designed to meet and exceed the performance requirements of business-critical applications and enterprise workloads. Powered by NetApp ONTAP data management software, AFF systems deliver industry-leading performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data services and cloud integration to accelerate, manage, and protect your business-critical data in the hybrid cloud.

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Featured reviews

Pedro Paz

System Engineer at Eni Energies et Services

Jun 2, 2022

The deployment itself, compared to other platforms, should be a lot easier. We don't find it all that complicated because we have been doing it for such a long time, but it should be a bit easier. They can improve that. 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. I know that SAN, itself, is quite complicated. It's not the same approach as the hyper-converged solutions, but there are always ways to improve. NetApp's engineers should try to tackle that so that integration between devices, including the cabling at the back, is simplified. Another thing that could be simplified is the Service Processor setup. That is something that requires you to perform a lot of tasks before it is completed. Also, joining clusters should be a lot easier. With one or two commands you should be able to complete that.

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Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson

Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

Oct 5, 2021

When it comes to backups, it has given us quick options when restoring things for customers, using the ability to mirror Snapshots onto another cluster, having managed status, and using previous versions in Microsoft. It gives the customer the possibility to restore their items too. Backup size, in general, gets much smaller since it is based on mirroring a Snapshot rather than being repetitive. 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. AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all. It does what it is supposed to do for SAP and Oracle. Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list. We mostly use AFF to support when we mirror data onto a FAS solution to immediately spin-off a new environment, e.g., if something happened to the prior data.

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MohanReddy

Sr. Technology Architect at Cerner Corporation

Nov 23, 2021

AFF has simplified data management across SAN and NAS environments. As admins, we're always trying to reduce the complications on the technology end. We're looking at the product from a single perspective. It's more about how the team engages with it. If one person on a 10-person team isn't comfortable with the features, then that's where we have to improve our understanding and where the vendor can help us. With AFF, we haven't had this issue. The whole team is thrilled to work on the product. NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier. If you asked me to rate AFF's effect on the flexibility of SAP and Oracle workloads, I would give it a seven out of 10. AFF is what we are using right now, but the team isn't fully utilizing it because our architect team is managing everything. We haven't had enough time to look into that. We were interested in that. It is easier to understand and manage. There isn't a need to dig into that. However, I'm on the backend side of things, and we are still looking for some relevant documents that can help us understand this aspect better.

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Pricing

"It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."
"Once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought."
"Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."

Valuable Features

"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"Deduplication"
"The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files."

Room For Improvement

"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."

Pricing

"It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down."
"Once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought."
"Other vendors may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime."

Valuable Features

"The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases."
"Deduplication"
"The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files."

Room For Improvement

"I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system."
"It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better."
"It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our NetApp AFF Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Learn more about NetApp AFF

These systems support end-to-end NVMe technologies to deliver the industry’s lowest latency for an enterprise all-flash array, making them the superior choice for running the most demanding business-critical workloads and AI/ML applications.

NetApp AFF is a robust, scale-out platform ideal for virtualized environments and can be deployed as an independent system or a high-performance tier in a NetApp ONTAP cluster configuration.

NetApp AFF Benefits

The AFF systems yield many benefits:

Reduce Cost: Change the economics of your data center with flash - you'll consume 11 times less electricity, require 11 times less rack space, and spend 67 percent less on support compared to a data center using HDDs.
Increase Performance: AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
Simplify Operations on premises or in the cloud: Eliminate fragmented and redundant toolsets and combine visibility and manageability of storage instances with data services in a unified control plane across the hybrid cloud.
Secure your data: automatically protect your data from ransomware attacks and avoid paying ransoms, meet compliance requirements with ease, and create a Zero-Trust perimeter around your organizations data on premises or in the cloud.

NetApp AFF Features

Many critical features play a role in making AFF systems the optimal flash storage choice:

Take advantage of faster host connectivity with NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP support.
NetApp SnapMirror replication software reduces overall system costs by replicating to any type of FAS or AFF system, whether it is all-flash, hybrid, or HDD, on premises or in the cloud.
Automatically balance and optimize your production all-flash capacity with efficient cloud storage.
Built-in, app-integrated backup.
Automatic ransomware protection, multifactor admin access, secure multitenant shared storage, and in-flight and at-rest encryption.
Unified architecture which supports file, block, and object storage
Scale out to 24 nodes, 367PB of effective capacity, and 4 million IOPS non-disruptively.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp AFF stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its high performance and simplicity. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

PeerSpot user and Storage Administrator, Daniel Rúnar Friðþjófsson, comments “AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure, while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. Having all these things working well on one solution is really good. We run this as the backbone for both Hyper-V and VMware as well as an archive location for Rubrik. So, it is great having one solution that can do it all.

Because of the ease of it all, you have a highly tunable, high-performance storage system that alleviates a lot of problems. With its ease of management, you can quickly get your work done and go onto the next thing on your list.”

Additionally, Mohan Reddy, Sr. Technology Architect at a Pharma/Biotech company comments on how “NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.”

NetApp AFF was previously known as NetApp All Flash FAS, NetApp AFF, NetApp Flash FAS.

NetApp AFF is the #4 ranked solution in best All-Flash Storage Arrays. PeerSpot users give NetApp AFF an average rating of 9.0 out of 10. NetApp AFF is most commonly compared to Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series: NetApp AFF vs Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series. NetApp AFF is popular among the midsize enterprise segment, accounting for 65% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 60% of all views.