NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We are in the process of moving to AWS and we are using this solution to help move all of our data to the cloud, using the tiering and other functionality.

We have approximately fifty AFF clusters spread across three locations.

We plan to use this solution for artificial intelligence and machine-learning applications, but we are still in the PoC right now. It is something that my team is working on.

Our DR and backup are done using SnapMirror.

This solution has helped simplify our IT operations. We can easily move data from on-premises to the cloud, or from one cloud to another cloud. NetApp SnapShots and SnapMirror are also helpful.

The thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We are shrinking the data with functions like deduplication and giving almost two hundred percent. It is very helpful.

This solution has allowed us to move very large amounts of data without affecting IT operations. We have moved four petabytes to the cloud. We have moved data from on-premises to the cloud, and also between clouds. It is easy to do. For example, if you want DR or a backup in a second location, then you just use SnapShot. If you have a database that you want to have available in more than one location then you can synchronize them easily. We are very happy with these features.

Our application response time has been improved since implementing this solution. The AFF cluster is awesome. Our response time is now below two milliseconds, whereas it used to be four or five milliseconds. This is very useful. 

The costs of our data center have definitely been reduced by using this solution. The power consumption and space, obviously, because this solution is very small, have been reduced.

We have been using this solution to automatically tier cold data to the cloud. I would not say that it has affected our TCO.

This solution has not changed our position in terms of worrying about storage as a limiting factor.

The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds. We have been using Cloud Sync and Cloud Volumes, and we have moved four petabytes using Cloud Sync.

It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time.

We are finding limitations when it comes to moving data to AWS.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

The stability of this solution is fine. We have not experienced any downtime or any issues.

Scalability is something that we are spending time on, but it is an internal issue related to seeking financial approval. The scalability of the solution is not a technical issue.

The technical support for this solution has always been number one. There is no doubt that they are getting more responsive and more technical.

We performed a PoC using Cloud Volumes and Cloud Sync, and we were happy with the time, durability, and availability.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We can install this solution ourselves.

We have seen ROI from this solution.

We evaluated a solution by EMC, but we found they their filesystem was not as robust. That is the reason that we chose NetApp.

We are really happy customers and this is a solution that I can recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it primarily for CIFS and NFS shares, e.g., Windows shares and network shares for Linux-based systems.

It has been very helpful for us. Data mobility is big. Being able to move data between different locations quickly and easily. This applies to data protection and replication. The hardware architecture has been very good as far as easily being able to refresh environments without any downtime to our applications. That's been the biggest value to us from the NetApp platforms.

The solution simplifies IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments on-premise.

We are working on a lot of efforts right now where environments need multiple copies of data. Today, those are full copies of data, which require us to have a lot of storage. Our plans are that you'll be able to leverage NetApp Snapshot technology to lessen the amount of capacity that we require for those environments, primarily like our QA and dev environments.

We've done full data center migrations. The ease of replication and data protection has made moving large amounts of data from one data center to another completely seamless migrations for us.

• Simplicity
• Their storage efficiency
• Compression
• Deduplication
• Compaction
• The ease of being able to move data around.

Early on, the clustered architecture was a little rough, but I know in the last four years, the solution has been absolutely rock solid for us. 

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.

I would like to see them continue to make it simpler, continuing to simplify set up and the operational side of it. 

I can't remember the last time we had an issue or an outage.

It is one of the best solutions out there right now. It is extremely simple, reliable, and seldom ever breaks. It's extremely easy to set up. It's reliable, which is important for us in healthcare. It doesn't take a lot of management or support, as it just works correctly.

Our NetApp environment has been fairly stable and simple that we don't have a lot of resources allocated to support it right now. For our entire infrastructure, we probably have three engineers in our entire enterprise to support our entire NetApp infrastructure. So, we haven't necessarily reallocated resources, but we already run pretty thin as it is.

Scalability has been great. There have been some things I would like to see them do differently, but overall, the scalability has been wonderful for us.

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.

We use all-flash arrays for our network shares. We have a couple of other platforms that we also have used in the past. I really wanted to move away from those for simplicity. Another big reason is automation. NetApp has done a great job with their automation The Ansible modules along with all the PowerShell command lists that they have developed, make it very consumable for automation, which is very big for us right now. That was one of the big driving forces is having a single operating environment, regardless if I'm running an all-flash array or hybrid array. It's the same look and feel. Everything works exactly the same regardless. That definitely speaks to the simplicity and ease of automation. I can automate and use it everywhere, whether it's cloud, on-prem, etc. That was one of the real decisions for us to decide to go that direction.

The overall setup is very easy. Deploying a new cDOT system is the hardest part. On our business side, because our environment is very complex, there was some complexity that came up. In general, that is one nice thing about Netapp. Regardless of how simple or complex your environment is, it can fit all of those needs. Especially on the network side, it can fit into those environments to take advantage of all the technologies that we have in our data centers, so it's been really nice like that.

We did the deployment ourselves.

The solution has improved application response time. We are using the All Flash FAS boxes of the AFS and our primary use case is around file shares. These aren't really that performance intensive. Therefore, overall, response times have improved, but it's not necessarily something that can be seen. 

From a sheer footprint savings, we're in the process of moving one of our large Oracle environments which currently sits on a VMAX array, taking up about an entire rack, to an AFF A800 that is 4U. From just the sheer power of cooling and rack-space savings, there have been savings.

I haven't seen ROI on it yet, but we're working on it.

We did RFIs with the different solutions. We were looking at a NetApp, Isilon, and Nutanix. Those were three that we were looking at. NetApp won out primarily around simplicity and ease of automation. It's the different deployment models where you can deploy in the cloud or on-prem, speaks to its simplicity. Our environment is very complex already. Anything that we can do to simplify it, we will take it.

When you are evaluating solutions:

• What are your goals?
• What are your priorities? 

You will be looking at things, like cloud, automation, and simplicity, regardless of how big you are. The NetApp platform gives you all of these things in a single operating system, regardless of where you deploy.

The solution has freed us from worrying about storage as a limiting factor. I'm very confident that the NetApp platform will do what they say it's going to do. It's very reliable. I know that if there is an issue, I can quickly move that data wherever I need to move it with almost no downtime. It gives me a lot of data flexibility and mobility. In the event that I did need to move my workloads around, I can do that.

I would give it a nine out of 10. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because I would like to see some architectural changes. Other than that, its simplicity and the ability to automate are probably the two biggest things. Being able to move data in and out of the cloud, if and when we decide to do that, it gives us the most flexibility of anything out there.

We do not use this solution for AI or machine learning applications.

We are talking about automatically tiering cold data to the cloud, but we are not doing it yet.

The primary use case is enterprise storage for our email database system.

We have just been using on-premise. We are looking to move the workloads to the cloud, but right now it's just on-premise.

From an operations standpoint, we pretty much set it and forget it. We don't have to manage anything because of the AFF speed and low latencies. Because a big requirement in the healthcare industry are the low latency type response times, It has been perfect.

With the thin provisioning, we can overprovision our boxes, but there are still applications which are storage capacity hogs. So, we still have to report.

It simplifies our IT operations and makes them more efficient.

The most valuable feature is it's fast. We do not use the solution for artificial intelligence or machine learning applications, but our overall latency is low. With our SQL Servers and Oracle servers, compared to the older meta filers, like 7-mode, the 8000 custom mode, or performance on Pure flash systems, you can't compare. We are seeing submillisecond, which is pretty nice.

The solution has enabled us to move large amounts of data from one data center to another (on-premise) without interruption to the business using SnapMirror.

The solution has improved application response time. Compared to the 3250s and 8000s, it has been night and day.

We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups. I think they're going to fix it in v9.7. 

The SnapDrive is just another piece of software which is used to manage the storage on the filers. They could use some updates.

We are still a lot of things that we have to think about, like storage and attributes, to be able to go ahead with it.

We haven't gone to their standard Snaps product yet, but that's supposed to centralize everything. Right now, we have to manage individual hosts that connect to the stores. That's sort of a pain.

We've been using NetApp for the last 15 years.

So far, the stability is good. It's great.

For the AFFs, I haven't had any problems with the scalability. We went from two to six nodes without a problem.

It helped us easily move about 10 petabytes of data from San Diego to Phoenix.

The technical support has been awesome. Whenever we have a problem, we just give NetApp's support a call, and they fix our issue. 

With the newer versions, we have needed less support. The solution has just been working.

We didn't switch over. We have been using NetApp for 15 years.

This solution has reduced our data center costs because when we went from the 8000 and 3200 series that took us from 20 racks of storage down to two.

The initial setup was straightforward. We've been deploying NetApps for the last 15 years. We are pretty familiar with the boxes.

I've been using the technology for years. For every model and version, the deployment is basically the same.

My team did the deployment.

We use a private cloud, which is Wesco, and it definitely saves us a lot of space.

The pricing is good.

We did go through the whole vetting out process of scoring different vendors and NetApp won, when we went through a Greenfield environment.

Check out the AFF. It is super fast and reliable. We've been using it for a long time. It's the perfect system for us.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10 because there's always room for improvement. To make it a 10, it would have to have super submillisecond performance at a cheaper price. It is about latency in our environment. We want submillisecond for everything across the board. If something can guarantee that performance all the time without increasing costs, that would be cool.

Our primary usage for All Flash is for the Oracle Database. 

All Flash is improving our organization because we used to have the databases on different tiers and now All Flash is reducing the report time. All of the reports and processing is taking less time, so all the information is ready in the morning for the executives to make decisions.

This solution is also bringing up a new initiative for our company to include more databases or more reports into the All Flash because of the speed of getting the information.

For enterprise apps, we mostly use Oracle. All of the Oracle applications have been improved a lot since we began using All Flash. All of the processing and ETL, for instance, used to take 25 hours, now it is taking three. That improves a lot of parts of the price of applications.

TCO has decreased. After we acquired the AFF 8080, we got a couple of A 700s, and they are cheaper than the 8080. 

As the main uses for the all-flash we have is for Oracle. For us to provision a new VM with new databases takes 35 minutes exactly.

The most valuable feature for us is the speed of the read of the information. We can get the information as fast as possible. 

The user experience we are getting from All Flash is excellent. The performance is great. The administration is exactly the same as all the other storage in NetApp which is great. It is very good, we are so pleased.

I would like to see the ability to include more applications from applications to managed storage. If we can have more applications or more interface in more applications, that would be great.

One to three years.

The stability is even better with version 9 with all the Oracle Databases including OVM, which is a virtualization of the Oracle.

Scalability of the All Flash is the same as the other. We can increase the amount of storage needed as we need it. As we buy them we just add them up with no downtime required. We just go ahead and increase the size, that is it.

NetApp tech support is so good. Their tech support has always been so stable and the people are so good in case of any failure or any good feature that needs to be updated or features that supposedly can help with performance to improve some performance. NetApp support is one of the best that I deal with.

I would rate this solution a ten for the huge improvement in performance between All Flash and the hybrid storage to the All Flash with the ONTAP 9. From 8.2 to 8.3 to 9, the performance is almost double. Ten is the best answer I can give.

We use it for NFS and CIFS to structure data. We have about a couple of petabytes of all-flash.

Some of the volumes for our response times were 30 to 40 millisecond. When we move to all-flash, our response times were reduced to microseconds. There was a tremendous improvement. In terms of the dedupe and compression, it is squeezing the physical size where we are now seeing an 80 percent reduction, which is very positive.

The solution has affected IT’s ability to positively support new business initiatives.

It has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. These improvements are a result of all-flash, throughput, reliability, compression, etc.

• Deduplication
• Compression
• Speed
• The user experience is fast.

One of the features that I am looking for, which is already in the works, is to be able to take my code and automatically move it to the cloud. I believe this is coming out in version 9.4.

We have been running it for two to three years. It hasn't gone down yet. It can't get anymore reliable than that.

Thanks to dedupe, our physical footprint is quite a lot. All the scalability that we have done, we have so far done it within our organization. We haven't expanded it physically yet.

Since the product hasn't gone down in three year, there hasn't been a need to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward. Nothing to it. The professional services from NetApp came in to help us out, and they knew their stuff.

We used NetApp for the deployment and our own resources. The experience was very positive.

The vendors on our shortlist were Oracle, Dell EMC, and Hitachi.

We chose NetApp because we were already using it, which make things simple, and its pricing. Also, some of NetApp's features are dominant in the market versus its competitors.

With all-flash, you can never go wrong. I am in the process of converting everything to all-flash.

We are not currently connected to the public clouds. We are looking to connect to them in 2019.

It takes us days to setup and provision enterprise applications using this solution.

We chose this solution because vendors are choosing all-flash over hybrid.

We use it for block storage.

It takes no time at all for our production instance to be snapped over to development and QA servers.

Because so many other features and products interoperate with NetApp, the IT team is able to expand our horizons and broaden our scope for future projects.

• SnapMirror
• SnapVault
• FlexClone capabilities

It takes a good administrator or someone with knowledge of the product in order to manage it. That was one of the downfalls that we had with AFF. We have a lot of offshore team whom we have to spend a lot of time training to be up to speed. However, once they're up to speed, they know the product pretty well, and it seems to be okay.

The hardware is a little difficult to configure and operate. However, with the configuration and operation, you get a different nerd knobs that you can use to design and critique the environment.

The stability is great. I like the capability and the upgrade functionality of all the clustered environment. We can go through and do an upgrade without worrying about any issues with the process. 

It takes a node offline, and we don't even receive an alert for that. We click a button, and it's done unlike other storage systems which are out there

One of the scalability problems that we've had is the amount of storage per node, as it is 600 terabytes. This still seems a little low. However, there is a compute issue with large capacity, so it's just smarter to add additional nodes into a cluster. So, the scalability is there.

Technical support is a little lackluster. Some of the issues that we've had were opening up tickets. They seem to be routed in the wrong direction or it takes one or two days to get a call back for simple tasks. However, if we want immediate assistance, we have to open up a Severity 1 case, and sometimes it's not a Severity 1. But if we need a response back within four hours, we'll open it as a Severity 1, then once they contact us, we can drop the severity of the ticket.

Calling technical support with NetApp, you talk to ten unknowledgeable people to get one half decent person. It becomes frustrating, especially if you have an immediate need for an enterprise outage.

We were running into a lot of storage roadblocks that were performance based. Also, the IBM product that we were using was at the end of life for 90 percent of our enterprise.

I spent 15 years with IBM. Anytime I go into a data center, and I see Big Blue, it is the first thing that I replace.

The initial setup was very straightforward, but complex. With the new clustered environment, you have to have a virtual server instance to run anything through the cluster, so you have to create a B server and a data logical interface to use block, then you create a separate lift if you want it to use files. The virtual instances have to be in place before you can actually use the product.

I did the deployment, integration, and migration. We've done two petabytes in less than six months, and we're almost done.

The experience was great when it comes to our virtual environment. It was a very simple process. We use vMotion and it moves everything across. It is a little more painful when it comes to standalone systems and Oracle Databases, but the integrated migration product (Foreign LUN migration) that they have, once configured properly, works well.

Our TCO decreased significantly because we were paying maintenance on nine different arrays throughout the country. We've condensed those down to three arrays, and our maintenance fees from the IBM product dropped by over a half million dollars a year, saving us $500,000 USD.

We just migrated two petabytes of data storage from IBM over to NetApp All Flash. Some of the performance improvement that we've seen is 100 times I/O and microsecond latency.

The two vendors that made it through the evaluation process were Pure Storage and NetApp. We had Pure Storage and NetApp proof of concepts. Both of them performed admirably. Pure Storage beat out on the performance, but on price per terabyte, NetApp was considerablely cheaper.

NetApp, being the behemoth company that it is, if you're looking to have a solution provider be end-to-end when it comes to file, block, scale, and cloud, NetApp is probably the leader of the market.

Depending upon an application, provision enterprise applications could take from a day to a week. A lot of times, if it's just a simple application that we need to install, it takes an afternoon. However, incorporating it and twisting the nerd knobs and making sure that everything is operating as efficiently as possible that takes a week of deployment to make sure it's on the right tiered disk and making sure it has the right connectivity and it is on the right network. Sometimes, on our old, antiquated network environment, it takes a little bit longer.

We might connect to public cloud in the future, but we are not connect at the moment.

We use it for our EHR. We have 4,000 users who need to have access to a very large EHR called Epic. We are sharing a cache database through AIX servers. 

It made everything faster. The user performance went from about eight seconds, for certain screens, down to three seconds per screen. That was the primary reason. Our users can multitask faster. The way Epic works is that you have multiple screens up at the same time. When you have multiple screens up at the same time and you have a patient sitting in front of you, speed is quality. Where before, the patient would have to wait for answers, now they get them almost instantaneously. Our users can run multiple things at the same time. For the users, the nurses and doctors, it is faster. All around faster.

As for IT's ability to support new business initiatives as a result of using this product, we are upgrading to Epic 2018 next year. The older system couldn't have supported it. That is another reason we went to a faster system. Epic has very high standards to make sure that, if you buy the upgrade, you will be able to support the upgrade. They advised me, top to bottom, make sure you can do it. Our new system passed everything. It's way faster.

We have VMs and we're were running VDI. We're running VMware Horizon View. We have about 900 VMs running on it and we have about another 400 Hyper-V servers running on it. Our footprint is very tiny now versus before. We now have some 30 servers running 1,000 machines where we used to have 1,000 machines running 1,000 machines. We have Exchange, SQL, and Oracle and huge databases running out of it with no problem at all, including Epic. It's full but it's very fast.

It takes us a minute or two minutes to set up and provision enterprise applications using the product. We can spin up a VM in about 30 seconds and have SQL up and running, for the DBAs to go in and do their work, in about two minutes.

It would primarily be speed. That's why we got it. Storage is costly but it's very, very fast. Very efficient, very fast.

Zero downtime so far. We've had it for two years.

We have not had to scale it. We bought it at about 128 terabytes and, right now, we are probably at about 80 or 90. Because of the upgrade, next year we are going to grow 30 percent. We will probably upgrade in 2020 or increase the space.

Zero downtime, so we've never really called. The engineer who supports it will call for firmware upgrades or for a yellow light: "Why is it on?" For the most part, we haven't had any issues with it at all.

We were on a standard NetApp but we upgraded to the FAS because of performance. We had it in for a test and it succeeded. That's why we bought it.

I have been with the company for 20 years and we have had NetApp for 20 years. We did switch over to IBM, about ten years ago, right before we went to Epic. But Epic said, "No IBM. NetApp." We were switching from NetApp to IBM, because IBM had a little bit of advantage, a long time ago. Then Epic came in and said, "No, switch back." So, we're back.

We have clusters but our guy doesn't know how to do the cluster side of things. That's what the reseller did, primarily.

We used a reseller, IAS. They have helped us. Our experience with them is good. We have had them for 20 years.

The benefit of getting the product, versus not getting the product, has allowed the clinic to do more. Since they are doing more, the return on investment is shrinking. We bought it two years ago and we have probably already paid for it.

The old NetApp we had was paid for. The new NetApp was about $3 million and we paid for that in about two years. It was well worth it because we can do more. For example, our advanced imaging is all pictures, videos; huge amounts of data get used up. Now they can triple and quadruple the amount they could do because of the speed. So instead of seeing ten patients a day, they're seeing 30 or 40 patients a day.

The total cost, the pricing of it, has gone up quite a bit.

Dell EMC. We looked at them briefly when they were EMC. We looked at IBM. But Epic pretty much says that NetApp sets the standard and we have to follow that.

If you have the money, you can't compare it to what we had at all, you just can't. In fact, the one that we had for production for the entire clinic is now sitting in our DR as cold storage. It went from state of the art to boat-anchor in about two years.

NetApp is our primary storage device for our line of business. We use NetApp as our primary storage device and also for our DR.

We are a workers' comp insurance company that has been in business for a 120 years.

It has helped us improve the performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs across the board. We recently upgraded from a FAS3250 platform to the AFF A300 all-flash array. Batch times went from approximately seven hours down to about two and a half. Functionality during the day, such as taking or removing snapshots and cloning instances, is higher than it has ever been. 

We are employing the native encryption on disk along with NVMe. Therefore, it is a more secure solution. Our user experience and performance have been remarkably better as well. 

A lot of application administrators have a lot more time. We have been able to do some things that we were unable to do before, so it has helped streamline our business a lot.

We enjoy the native built-in replication and the snapshot functionality (to take snapshots).

I just got through the session where it looks like they are going to support Oracle running on Linux with SnapCenter. That is one of the main things that we are hoping to get integrated.

NetApp has always been a stable platform with very few problems at all.

It is very scalable. Because of the cloning and snapshots that we do, we are getting a data efficiency ratio out of our production array of about 32:1, which is a high ratio. So, we took quite a bit of data and shrunk it down in size, letting it scale out better.

We are going to be adding another shelf to it, but storage to the NetApp application has always been easy to do. We usually do it ourselves without getting a third-party contractor involved.

NetApp's support has always been top-notch. I haven't met anyone in the NetApp institution who hasn't been a remarkably intelligent, easy-going person to work with. It is amazing. Everyone from their support crews to their sales engineers are good. We have a good relationship with them.

A big guiding point for upgrading hardware of any type now is to look at the support costs. If support costs get high enough, it financially doesn't make any sense to not upgrade.

Usually once a new technology matures enough, you can look at TCO and decide to make the decision to move ahead. So, we invested in this solution because of costs and the technology improved to the point where we knew it would be stable.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was intuitive to set up storage volumes and get the networking functioning. Their engineer was very helpful. We got the current array on our production site the very same day it was shipped in. We had it up on the network and started to put some storage on it. 

We used a NetApp professional services for this deployment. It worked out really well. We had involvement of several different support engineers to help with all aspects of the rollout.

The total cost of ownership has decreased a great deal. As far as percentages, it's hard to gauge, but we did have quite a few personnel staying up, making sure batches ran well every night. Now, batches are being done by 8:00 in the evening, so we don't have to do that anymore. When you start adding the employee hours that we have for people working in the off-hours, and it is not an issue anymore, I suspect TCO might have gone down 25 percent.

Setting up storage for an application (storage provisioning) is quick and easy. Maybe a quarter of the time is now spent getting the application up and running, or even less. 

We also talked to Tegile and HPE, but nobody else offered up the functionality or snapshots. It was a no-brainer.

We have been an NetApp customer for about ten years and have enjoyed the relationship a lot.

The important thing for anybody to check out is the snapshot functionality of NetApp, and how well it works to provision for backup. It also provisions test environments with it. There are so many advantages to the way they do snapshots compared to other companies, and they have all these wondrous tool sets to leverage the snapshot functionality. Anybody who is looking into a storage solution needs to look at all of the attributes to the NetApp platform.

Connecting it to public cloud is our next project. We are looking at DR using NetApp cloud services, so that will probably be coming up first quarter of next year.

We are looking at a new series arrays for our building video security storage as well, and there is no doubt that we will be going with NetApp. NetApp just does a solid job, and their support is top-notch.