NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

I think NetApps improved our organization in customer experience and system management. It gives the customer options when they move their system to the cloud. I think the cloud solution from NetApp is very good for customers when they have a plan to use cloud services.

I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product.

It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system.

I have been using NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) for more than three years.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very stable.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very scalable. I think the scalability of NetApp is the best because they have a custom solution, and it can scale well.

NetApp technical support is very professional and good.

The initial setup isn't really completed. It's easy.

NetApp is a good choice because it's not only for a normal application, but it can also integrate with Nvidia for AI solutions.

I would tell potential users that NetApp is one of the best primary storage systems with many good features. I think it's a good choice for storage services.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) a nine.

The primary use case for AFF is for use in our production environment. Within our production environment, we have a number of different data stores that AFF serves. We use a number of protocols from NFS to CIFS, as well from the file system protocols, and in the block level we use iSCSI.

We are a fully on-prem business as far as data positioning data sets. 

We don't have real-time applications that we run in-house, being a law firm. The most important thing is the availability of our environments and applications that we serve to our client base. We don't have real-time applications that we could be measured in real tangible form that would make a huge difference for us. Nevertheless, the way it goes: the faster, the better; the more powerful, the better; and the more resources you can get from it, the better.

We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero.

We have one program that has been running for about a year. It is called Nakhoda, and it is an AI application (written in-house) based on AI technology. As far as latency, it is not visible nor noticeable because these machines throw hundred of thousands to millions of files per second.

For DR, we use the SnapMirror technology that ONTAP provides us on based on these platforms. Then, for the local backups, we use snapshots mainly. We are currently implementing SnapCenter for Exchange and VWware to utilize the backup features that the solution provides us.

AFF gives us a number of really valuable features. It ranges from a full flash to all-flash product. So, the speed and resources that we get from AFFs is just unparalleled in storage environments. Also, we utilize all the OCR features that AFF gives and has built into its ONTAP environment, like dedupe, snapshotting, data compression, and the number of the other things. 

Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid.

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. Overall, for the pure back-end, we are not seeing any issues whatsoever.

With our previous storage solution provider, we had the availability of synchronous mirroring. SnapMirror is asyncronous. I would just like to see if NetApp has any plans to implement synchronous mirroring for DR solutions into the tool in the future.

We were early adopters of the cDOT environment five or six years ago. In the early stages of deployment (five or six years ago), we saw some challenges around cDOT. However in the last two to four years, the product has matured incredibly. Ever since the introduction of ONTAP 9.X, we haven't seen any issues in terms of availability and performance.

We are upgrading to ONTAP, which will give us a data encryption level at an aggregate layer of the ONTAP environment. We are looking forward to that.

We are using SnapMirror and not seeing any issues. Let us hope it stays like that.

The technical support has always been really helpful. 

In recent times, the first line of support has moved and is now concentrated in Bulgaria. If they are new to working with your customers, we have seen some slight challenges in terms of speed when transferring higher priority cases to higher levels of NetApp's support structure. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

Once I reach the second or third line of support engineering, the support has always been good.

Before moving to NetApp, we were with their major competitor.

In simple terms, you just rack the hardware, you load your codes, and it's ready for configuration. That is pretty straightforward.

We benefited from implementing all-flash by reducing our data center footprint. We took it from 30 racks to just over five. This is one of the biggest savings for us.

NetApp is the largest storage vendor in the market, purely based on storage technologies. I hope it stays that way.

We have been really happy with the product. It is a robust, strong, solid platform.

I would rate the product a nine and a half (out of a 10). The product is robust, solid, easy to manage, and provides a number of features with speed of operations. The resources are okay, but they are not unlimited. They are at a very high level.

It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good.

Its integration could be improved.

I have been using this solution for a few years. I am using NetApp FAS AFF A300.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

I am satisfied with their technical support.

I have been using NetApp solutions for the last 15 years. I have also used EMC, which is also good, but flexibility-wise, NetApp is better.

Its initial setup is easy. The deployment took a few days.

I would rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

We use it for different machines, Oracle Database, super server database, and a few BDI projects.

The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments.

The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. 

It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved.

I have been using this solution since 2012.

Its stability is very good.

It is scalable. There is scalability for processing. We have small and large organizations as clients.

Their technical support is very good, and the documentation is also complete and useful for us.

Our clients were using other solutions, such as Hitachi, and they switched because of its scalability, functionality, and support.

The cloud setup is easier to implement. The on-premises setup is a little more complex.

We deployed it a few weeks ago. It took one to two weeks for planning and two weeks for final implementation, but it can take longer if there is any kind of migration or change of product.

We deployed it ourselves. We worked for NetApp from 2012 to 2015. We did a lot of implementations in Chile, Argentina, Columbia, and Peru. It is very familiar to us.

All features are included in the license, whereas with an EMC solution, you have to pay separately for extra terabytes. 

We evaluated HP and EMC. The main differences were the support, functionality, and cost of NetApp. 

Last year, NetApp started to move away from Chile and the Latin American region. They are not selling the solutions directly. They have an agreement with Lenovo to sell NetApp products worldwide with the Lenovo brand.

I would advise others to take the help of a good implementor and get proper certifications. It is also very important to understand what do you want from the solution.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. It is a great product with great support.

We primarily use it for storage for VMs and backup units.

We use this solution on a daily basis. In Sweden, typically small to medium-sized companies use this solution.

MetroCluster functions, SnapMirror functionality, and ease-of-use are the most valuable functions for us.

Their backup software could be improved.

In the next release, I would like to see a complete S3 protocol. Also better compatibility and integration with VM-ware.

I have been using AFF since its release.

Nowadays, AFF is very scalable — ever since they implemented the ClusterMode. I think it's very easy to scale, both up and out. It's also very stable.

They provide different types of support. When an accident happens that impacts your business, they respond very fast and give very good help. Sometimes, when you have problems with their software, it can take a long time — that should be improved. Overall, their top functions, operating systems, the storage controller, they are very strongly enforced.

The initial setup is very simple. How much time it takes depends on the size and what the initial setup should be. It can be a long process.

We do everything from the initial setup, to the integration with system backups, the whole chain, including the hardware, the software, the daily work, as well as the daily administration as well.

It depends on how you look at things, but they are in a higher price range.

They have different license models. You can get a license model where everything is included, but you can also purchase more licensing and buy what you need. It really depends on what you buy.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to other companies.

Our primary use case for AFF is to host our internal file shares for all of our company's "F" drives, which is what we call them. All of our CIFS and NFS are hosted on our AFF system right now.

We've been using AFF for file shares for about 14 years now. So it's hard for me to remember how things were before we had it. For the Windows drives, they switched over before I started with the company, so it's hard for me to remember before that. But for the NFS, I do remember that things were going down all the time and clusters had to be managed like they were very fragile children ready to fall over and break. All of that disappeared the moment we moved to ONTAP. Later on, when we got into the AFF realm, all of a sudden performance problems just vanished because everything was on flash at that point. 

Since we've been growing up with AFF, through the 7-Mode to Cluster Mode transition, and the AFF transition, it feels like a very organic growth that has been keeping up with our needs. So it's not like a change. It's been more, "Hey, this is moving in the direction we need to move." And it's always there for us, or close to being always there for us.

One of the ways that we leverage data now, that we wouldn't have been able to do before — and we're talking simple file shares. One of the things we couldn't do before AFF was really search those things in a reasonable timeframe. We had all this unstructured data out there. We had all these things to search for and see: Do we already have this? Do we have things sitting out there that we should have or that we shouldn't have? And we can do those searches in a reasonable timeframe now, whereas before, it was just so long that it wasn't even worth bothering.

AFF thin provisioning allows us to survive. Every volume we have is over-provisioned and we use thin provisioning for everything. Things need to see they have a lot of space, sometimes, to function well, from the file servers to VMware shares to our database applications spitting stuff out to NFS. They need to see that they have space even if they're not going to use it. Especially with AFF, because there's a lot of deduplication and compression behind the scenes, that saves us a lot of space and lets us "lie" to our consumers and say, "Hey, you've got all this space. Trust us. It's all there for you." We don't have to actually buy it until later, and that makes it function at all. We wouldn't even be able to do what we do without thin provisioning.

AFF has definitely improved our response time. I don't have data for you — nothing that would be a good quote — but I do know that before AFF, we had complaints about response time on our file shares. After AFF, we don't. So it's mostly anecdotal, but it's pretty clear that going all-flash made a big difference in our organization.

AFF has probably reduced our data center costs. It's been so long since we considered anything other than it, so it's hard to say. I do know that doing some of the things that we do, without AFF, would certainly cost more because we'd have to buy more storage, to pull them off. So with AFF dedupe and compression, and the fact that it works so well on our files, I think it has saved us some money probably, at least ten to 20 percent versus just other solutions, if not way more.

The most valuable feature on AFF, for me as a user, is one of the most basic NetApp features, which just:

A user comes to you and says, "I need more space." 

"Okay, here, you have more space." 

I don't have to move things around. I don't have to deal with other systems. It's just so nice. 

Other 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.

The simplicity of AFF with regards to data management and data protection — I actually split those two up. It's really easy to protect your data with AFF. You can set up SnapMirror in a matter of seconds and have all your data just shoot over to another data center super quickly.

But I find some issues with other administrators on my team when it comes to management of the data because they have to either learn a CLI, which some of them really don't like to do — to really get into managing how volumes should be moved or to edit permissions and stuff like that. Or they go into a user interface, which is fine, it's web-based, but it's not the most intuitive interface as far as finding the things you need to do, especially when they get complicated. Some things just hide in there and you have to click a few levels deep before you can actually do what you need to do. 

I think they're working on improving that with like the latest versions of ONTAP. So we're kind of excited to see where that's going to go. But we haven't really tried that out yet to see.

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. 

As far as other areas, they're doing really great in the API realm. They're doing really great in the availability realm. They just announced the all-SAN product, so maybe we'll look at that for SAN.

But a lot of the improvements that I'd like to see around AFF go with the ancillary support side of things, like the support website. They're in the middle of rolling this out right now, so it's hard to criticize because next month they're going to have new stuff for me to look at. But tracking bugs on there and staying in touch with support and those sorts of things need a little bit of cleanup and improvement. Getting to your downloads and your support articles, that's always a challenge with any vendor. 

I would like to see ONTAP improve their interfaces; like I said, the web one, but also the CLI. That could be a much more powerful interface for users to do a lot of scripting right in the CLI without needing third-party tools, without necessarily needing Ansible or any of those configuration management options. If they pumped up the CLI by default, users could see that NetApp has got us covered all right here in one interface. 

That said, they're doing a lot of work on integrations with other tools like Ansible and I think that might be an okay way to go. We're just not really there yet.

We've been using AFF for file shares for about 14 years now.

The stability of AFF has actually been great. This is one of the areas where it has improved over time. During the Cluster Mode transition, there were some rocky periods here and there. Nothing serious, but you'd do a code upgrade and: "Oh, this node is being a little cranky." As they've moved to their newer, more frequent, deployment model of every six months, and focused more on delivering a focused release during that six months — instead of throwing in a bunch of features and some of them causing instability — the stability of upgrades and staying up has just improved dramatically. It's to the point where I'm actually taking new releases within a month of them coming out, whereas on other platforms that we have, we're scared to go within three months of them coming out.

Scalability on AFF is an interesting thing. We use CIFS and that doesn't scale well as a protocol. AFF does its darndest to get us up there. We've found that once we got into the right lineup of array, like the AFF A700 series, or thereabouts, that was when we had what we needed for our workloads at our site. But I would say that the mid-range stuff was not really doing it for us, and our partners were hesitant to push us to the enterprise tier when they should have. So for a while, we thought NetApp just couldn't do it, but it was really just that our partners were scared of sticker-shock with us. Right now we've been finding AFF for CIFS is doing everything we need. If we start leveraging it for SAN I could have something to say on that, but we don't.

Don't be scared. They're a great partner. They've got a lot of options for you. They've got a lot of tools for you. Just don't be scared to look for them. You might need to do a little bit of digging; you might need to learn how the CLI works. But once you do, it's an extremely powerful thing and you can do a lot of stuff with it. It is amazing how much easier it is to manage things like file shares with a NetApp versus a traditional Windows system. It is life-changing if you are an admin who has to do it the old-fashioned way and then you come over here and see the new way. It frees you up from most of that so you can focus on doing all the other work with the boring tools that don't work as well. NetApp is just taking care of its stuff. So spend the time, learn the CLI, learn the interfaces, learn where the tools are. Don't be afraid to ask for support. They're going to stand with you. They're going to be giving you a product that you can build on top of.

And come out to NetApp Insight because it's a good conference and they got lots of stuff [for you] to learn here.

NetApp certainly has options to unify data services across NAS and local and the cloud. But we are not taking advantage of them currently.

I'm going to give it a nine out of ten. Obviously you've heard my story. It's meeting all our needs everywhere, but the one last piece that's missing for me is some of those interface things and some of the SAN challenges for us that would let us use it as a true hybrid platform in our infrastructure. Because right now, we see it as CIFS-only and NAS-only. I would really like to see the dream of true hybrid storage on this platform come home to roost for us. We're kind of a special snowflake in that area. The things we want to do all on one array, you're not meant to. But if we ever got there, it would be a ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for our production storage array.

We have not used this solution for artificial intelligence or machine learning applications as of yet. This product has reduced our total latency from a spinning disc going into flash discs. We rarely see any latency and if we do it is not the discs, it's the network. The overall latency right now is about two milliseconds or less.

AFF hasn't enabled us to relocate resources, or employees that we were previously using for storage operations.

It has improved application response time. With latency, we had applications that had thirty to forty milliseconds latency, now they have dropped to approximately one to three, a maximum of five milliseconds. It's a huge improvement.

We use both technologies and we have simplified it. We are trying to shift away from the SAN because it is not as easy to failover to an opposite data center.

We are trying to switch over to have everything one hundred percent NFS. Once the switch to NFS is complete our cutover time will be one hour versus six.

The most valuable features are the FlexClone and SnapMirror. The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features.

The simplicity of this solution around data protection and data management is extremely easy.

With Data protection there is nothing easier than setting up SnapMirror and getting it across and protecting our data. Currently, we have a five minute RPO, so every five minutes we're snapping across the other side without any issues.

This solution simplifies IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments.

There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same.

When you have SVM VR and you have multiple aggregates that you're writing the data to on the source array, and it does its SVM DR, it will put it on whatever aggregate it wants, instead of keeping it synced to stay on both sides.

This solution doesn't help leverage the data in ways that I didn't think were possible before.

We are not using it any differently than we were using it from many years ago. We were getting the benefits. What we are seeing right now is the speed, lower latency, and performance, all of the great things that we haven't had in years.

This solution hasn't freed us from worrying about usage, we are already reaching the eighty percent mark, so we are worried about usage, which is why we are looking toward the cloud to move to fabric pools with cloud volumes to tier off our snapshots into the cloud.

I wish that being forced to change the volume name would change or not exist, then I wouldn't have to go to the command line to do it at all.

This solution is stable, it's the best. I can't complain.

We move large amounts of data from one data center to another every day without any interruptions. In terms of IT operations, it has cut our ticket count down significantly, approximately a seventy percent reduction in tickets submitted to us.

This solution is scalable, it's phenomenal.

This solution's thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. The thin provisioning has helped us with deduplication, maintaining compaction, and efficiency levels. Without the provisioning, we wouldn't be able to take advantage of all of the great features.

We are running approximately a petabyte of storage physically, and logically approximately ten petabytes.

The technical support is one of the best.

Previously we had not used another solution. We have been using NetApp for years, we went from refresh approximately two years ago, then sixty to forty to the A300 All-Flash.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We filled out a spreadsheet ahead of time that contained everything necessary to get us going. When it came time for the deployment we went with the information on the spreadsheet and deployed it successfully.

We used an integrator to help us with this solution, we used Sigma Solutions, and our experience was excellent. We worked hand in hand with them.

It's expensive. It's in the hundreds of thousands.

It's beneficial, but at times, I feel compared to other vendors, we are paying a premium for the licensing that other vendors include.

You're locked in with NetApp, and you already have everything setup.

We have not evaluated other solutions, it's not worth it.

We are not at the point where we are allowed to automatically tier data to the cloud, but we are looking forward to it.

I can't see that this solution needs any other features other than what it already has. Everything that I need is already there, except for the cloud and it's there but we haven't taken advantage of it yet.

I would advise that you compare everything and put money aside, really take a look at the features and how they will or can benefit you.

It's a total win for your firm.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use NetApp AFF to host all of our on-premises applications and data.

We use NetApp for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, and we find the latency to be pretty decent.

Data protection and management is one of the best features of NetApp. We like the SnapVault, SnapShot, and SnapMirror, and we use those features extensively.

Our IT operations have been simplified by unifying data services. We have fiber channel, block data, NFS, and CIFS, and we can deploy multi-tenancy boxes from each one. Sometimes, we have all of the different data types in one box. You can add more clusters or more nodes to your cluster. It is easy for us to modularly grow if the need arises.

NetApp has allowed us to leverage our data in new ways, including our test scenarios. A lot of the time it is really hard to test production data because we do not have multiple copies of the same thing that we can use for testing. The solution is flexible enough to allow us to create multiple copies, then try out seven or eight scenarios, then pick which one will be the best going forward. We can do that all within minutes.

We have utilized thin provisioning so that we haven't had to purchase additional storage for our applications. The snapshot technology, unlike other ones, doesn't take up extra space when you're making multiple copies. This means that we don't need extra storage for our temporary tests. Once we are finished we delete the extra copies.

We have used this solution for moving large amounts of data between data centers. We are currently migrating data from a cloud in Atlanta to a cloud in Chicago, and we are using the SnapMirror technology extensively for this.

Using the all-flash solution improves our application response time, and it also has a smaller footprint. You can also tier it, depending on the needs of the application.

NetApp AFF has definitely reduced our data center costs. We have been increasing our storage but not increasing our footprint. I would estimate the savings to be thirty percent.

We have not tested tiering cold data to the cloud, but we are currently working on finding appropriate use cases.

Overall, this solution has really reduced our downtime and has made our lives a lot easier.

The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment.

Using snapshots at each stage of the configuration for applications means that administration is easier because you don't have to worry about messing it up. It makes things a lot smoother.

On the fiber channel side, there is a limit of sixteen terabytes on each line, and we would like to see this raised because we are having to use some other products.

I have been using NetApp since 1998.

This is a stable solution. The dependability and reliability of the product have improved significantly over time, and there is redundancy built into the boxes. We don't worry about stability anymore.

Scaling this solution is easy. You can start small with one HA pair and add them as you go. You can make new clusters and add new nodes to clusters. 

The technical support for NetApp is decent. I mean, it's improving. I understand that it is hard to get people up to date with all of the new technologies but NetApp has done a pretty good job.

Using the online documentation, we are able to find answers most of the time. If not, we can find an expert who will come online and help us to get through. The combination of technical support, Professional Services, and online documentation has really helped.

Service is one of NetApp's strengths.

We were using a bunch of other products prior to using this solution, and we are still using some that have been deployed because of the sixteen terabyte limit on each line of the fiber channel.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It has been made easier compared to other vendors.

We're a big corporation and we have the expertise in-house. Once in a while, we use Professional Services to get through some situations. Our experience with them has been very positive and we have a very good relationship with them.

It is very hard to measure ROI, but we know that it is very good compared to other products. 

The price to performance ratio with NetApp is unmatched by any other vendor right now.

We have products from HPE, Dell, and NetApp in our environment right now. They each have their share, and each one is equally working.

I am a long-time user and I love this product. Over the years we have asked for improvements and they are doing a great job. I will be happy to see them continue to make improvements, overall.

My advice to anybody researching this type of solution is to look at NetApp. If they don't then they are missing out on great technology and a feature-rich product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.