NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

VMware multi-tenant and SnapMirror destination, multi customers' filesystem too, no problem with multi AD and domain

• IOPS
• Reliability
• Multi-tenancy
• Network segmentation
• easy to maintain and configure starting from a correct initial setup. focus on network conf in particular

Reliability. flexibility and multi tenant. we host 20 client virtual dc on our a200.

I scaled out our previous 2 node cdot cluster on the fly by adding cluster's switches and then the 2 node a200, after that data migration between fas 2554 and a200 was made non disruptively and on business time.

The full bundle is too expensive. It's needed to implement native replicas (i.e. snapmirror) and backup (i.e. snapvault) features

our system is very stable and reliable, of course it needs to be maintained and monitored, even in case of network switch failure a200 keeps to serve data, very important is the initial setup, so you have to focus on the final architecture.

very good

tech support is very responsive and effective to find solution to some issues, most of the issues can be resolved reading KBs

fas 2554, need to scle out with space and performances

initial setup maust be done by cli, storage space privisioning made by gui, good interaction with vmware with vsc 

I'm the vendor team and storage administrator

I need to ask for it to my ceo

full bundle too expensive I.e. full licenses to implement native replicas and backups

starting from a fas 2554 it was the best solution

good deduplication and compression ratio

Going from mechanical disks to flash was a huge benefit, speed-wise. A lot of big BI reports that we were running that would take hours, we can do in 10 minutes now. That was really the biggest impact. The user saw it immediately, the benefit of it.

We're an electronics manufacturer. Shop floor people rely on these reports to make decisions throughout the day and we can, instead of having a once-a-day refresh, they can almost get it on demand.

I would just like to keep seeing improvements in performance and efficiency, which it seems to have been doing between 8.3 and 9; it's getting better with every release.

The user interface is a lot better. I think in 9, we do a lot of command line stuff, so I'm not into the GUI too much.

We’ve been using it for six months. It's fairly new.

We've had no issues stability-wise; we've been a NetApp customer for 20 years and just rarely have any issues.

Technical support is getting better. Historically, it's been painful. We had some challenges with support but over the last couple of years, I think it has gotten a lot better. We have a really good SE now that we leverage and our partner's really good as well.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we lease our equipment and it was due for release return.

Initial setup was easy. We had one small system. We have a lot of FAS systems; we have a single AFF right now. It's an 8080, with just one shelf. It was a very simple setup. We're familiar with cluster mode already.

Rack it and call it good.

We looked at several other options:Pure Storage, Nutanix, and Tintri.

We chose NetApp because all of our other storage systems are NetApp. We just liked being able to leverage the knowledge that we already had in house. We didn't see a lot of value in having another siloed storage system out there that we had to support. Price-wise, NetApp was very competitive, more competitive than we had expected.

Do it. You won't regret it.

I like the product, and am quite happy with it.

When I choose a vendor, some of the criteria I look for are support, the ability to execute and a mature product line.

For us, the most valuable features were the SnapMirroring, deduplication, and inline compression. Now with 9.0, the compaction system, that's actually the big thing that sold us on it besides just the price in general. It was a very well-priced system for what we got. The data dedupe and inline, we're getting substantial rates. I think it's about 60-65% in general. That's a massive savings over what you would get if you didn't have any of that stuff.

We have a job system that runs all the time; people can run what they call campaigns. It drastically increased performance. It decreased times by three times the amount. The amount of the CIFS shares increased from about 128 Mbps – it was only a 1-gig line anyway, to a 10 gig – to about 800 Mbps. The engine actually can't pull enough and it has caused a little issue here and there, because it's basically causing a race condition. We've had to program around race conditions because we haven't had a system that was this fast.

It saved us a lot of time as well, substantial savings.

If they could do the tabbing for the nodes, that would be spectacular. On 9, they offered more insight, so I can't really say that. We haven't upgraded both nodes. We have HA pairs, and one of them is still running 8.3.2. We upgraded our DR solution to nine first just to see if it causes any issues. So far, we haven't seen anything. They have a lot more insight into that; I wish they would have it on 8.3.2 but, what are you going to do?

So far, stability’s been excellent, and the update process was actually incredibly painless. We've upgraded twice now and I am surprised that it didn't cause any issues at all. Usually, you have to have some kind of user intervention. For this product, you just throw the image on there, click update and it's done. You come back about an hour later and you're happy.

The GUI is really good, but if you don't find the option in the GUI, then the CLI is amazing. You can hit Tab and just tab out. The only thing is, they haven't done that on the nodes themselves but I was told they're working on that.

We don't have that big of one yet. We originally quoted out a system of eight nodes, and it was going to be something like 12 GBps. That seemed like substantial amounts, considering what everyone else quoted. However, it actually was going to come in at about the same price for the AFF compared to everyone else's quotes for disks. The reason they went with it is because of the trust with the vendor they were currently using and they just didn't want to leave.

We were using NetApp before, but we evaluated EMC, IBM, HP, Pure Storage, XtremIO and Nimble.

It came down to XtremIO and NetApp. NetApp offered much, much more storage. And the cost difference to buy XtremeIO was huge compared to NetApp. NetApp just totally blew it out of the water on price. We got something like five times the storage for the price. It was really worth testing on that.

Try out what you actually want to do, because that's actually the problem we had; some of our people swore up and down that NetApp wouldn't be able to do compression at the new rates that they got, or that we got. They said that Oracle doesn't compress and so on. We ended up getting them to stick some of their machines on our NetApp, and we showed them that you actually do get it.

We actually bought ours and then we tried to show those other people before they got to the bidding table for theirs. They didn't really want to listen to the facts. They went with IBM. I wouldn't say they were not unhappy or anything. They realized that they could've gotten a lot more if they just went with our ideas instead of their idea. Actually, I was told it was more of a management thing; they actually didn't even want IBM, they wanted Oracle. It all comes down to what the boss says.

Our primary use case for AFF is for databases.

The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp.

The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price.

I have been using NetApp AFF for eight years.

In terms of performance and stability, AFF is good for our current needs. However, if we require higher performance, we may need to invest in new hardware.

NetApp AFF scales well for our needs. We can continuously add more storage and capacity to expand the system, which has been a viable approach for us.

The support is great. When issues arise, the support team quickly addresses our questions and resolves problems efficiently. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have previously used Hitachi, but it is very slow.

The initial setup of NetApp availability can be considered medium difficulty. If you have experience with NetApp systems, it is relatively easy to medium in complexity. However, if you have never installed such a system before, it can be quite challenging.

NetApp can be expensive. It is worth noting that the cost isn't just in the hardware but also in the support, which can be a significant portion of the overall expense.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF as a ten out of ten.

We are a multi-cloud provider and we use NetApp All Flash as the base for providing the cloud services.

It gives us the power and agility to spin up VMs as quickly as possible.

We have also standardized on NetApp. All the storage that we have for our services runs on NetApp. Being standardized, it's easy for our Operations. We can train them on a single platform.

It helps improve performance for enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. With the power of flash, we moved from a traditional hybrid storage to all-flash. Having the full-fledged power of flash, and the controllers, it has doubled the performance compared to what we used to get.

Finally, our total cost of ownership has decreased by approximately 10 - 12 percent.

The most valuable feature is the efficiencies that all-flash brings. It helps us reduce costs and be competitive in the market. It's quite easy to operate and monitor, to do business as usual.

Whatever they talk about it delivers. It's fast, it's efficient, it's agile.

With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage. The features we require today are present in ONTAP.

It would be great if they had a single pane of glass or a single dashboard where all the NetApp ecosystem storages could be viewed and monitored simply. That would help my Operations.

Being a service provider, we cannot afford any downtime. It's working fantastically as of now. It's sturdy and just rocking.

It's an all-flash so you just add more clusters, nodes, and you're done. Scalability isn't an issue. That was one of the evaluation criteria, we needed something that would scale out.

Tech support is not just for AFF, we have a long-standing relationship with NetApp. Overall, the support guys are very proactive. They help us with new fixes and patches - we keep up with them. We have a very good relationship.

We haven't really had much of a need to escalate issues. We don't actually get into "escalation mode." We just talk with senior management and things get done. We're happy with the support.

We did not have any other flash solution. We were running a tiered storage approach but because of market demand, where our customers wanted efficient performance, agile cloud storage, that is what drove us to evaluate the newer technologies. With all the technical evaluations we did, we settled on All-Flash.

We chose NetApp because we had the SolidFires in place and we already had the standardization. We also went with NetApp because of the partnership and the support that we get from NetApp. In addition, it proved that it was technically better than the competitors in the benchmarks.

I was involved in the technical and commercial analysis, but not in the actual environment setup. That was taken care of by another team. The initial setup was straightforward but there was definitely a lot of planning that went into getting it deployed smoothly.

Being a services provider, every customer has unique requirements, which makes it more complex for us. We took a good amount of time to understand, evaluate, and come up with a proper deployment plan so we wouldn't get into trouble at the deployment phase.

We had an in-house team do it.

I haven't calculated ROI because, being into the OpEx model, since we're providing serivces, typically the ROI is 36-plus months. We're not there yet.

We evaluated Nimble, 3PAR, Dell EMC. 

You should definitely look at NetApp AFF and evaluate it.

In terms of how long it takes to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF, we have a back-end provisioning tool so it's all automated. I cannot define it only with respect to AFF because the entire orchestration works. But on average, we take about five minutes to provision a VM.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It has definitely helped us bring our costs down and gives us a powerful storage at the back end to serve our customers. It would be a ten out of if they brought my TCO down even more.

We use NetApp AFF to support our VMware environment.

We have been happy with the performance and it has not given us any issues.

I like the simplicity of data protection and data management. We use snapshots for our FAS recovery, and we use SnapVault for our backups.

NetApp definitely simplifies our IT operations by unifying services. We only use this solution on-premises, but with NAS, we don't need Microsoft Windows to create a share. It's all on our NetApp platform. I like it because we do not have to switch.

I wouldn't say that we have reallocated resources that were previously dedicated to storage operations, although it does give us time to do other things.

We have used NetApp to move large amounts of data between data centers. It has made it easier for us, and RPOs are shorter because of it.

With respect to the response time for applications, I can definitely say that it has improved, although we have not done any benchmarking. I perceive the improvement through monitoring the applications.

This solution is pretty expensive, so I'm not sure whether it has reduced our data center costs.

NetApp has helped eliminate storage as a limiting factor in our business. My customers are happier because they have no issues with performance or accessing their data.

The most valuable feature is the ease of management. You just set it and you don't have to worry about it.

During a maintenance cycle, there are outages for NAS. There is a small timeout when there is a failover from one node to another, and some applications are sensitive to that.

We are in the process of swapping our main controller, and there is no easy way to migrate the data without doing a volume move. I would like a better way to swap hardware.

Technical support could use some improvement.

Stability is very good, although we do have some NAS outages during maintenance.

Overall, I like the scalability. It can do NAS, CIFS, and fiber channel all in one box and it's easy to manage.

I would say that the technical support is hit or miss. Sometimes you get somebody good, but other times, you have to just escalate a couple of times to get the right person.

Our previous solution was spinning disk, and our application demands more in terms of storage and performance. NetApp AFF just seemed like the natural route because we didn't want to get left behind.

One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license. For example, we can use NFS, CIFS, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, etc. It's all included in the package and we don't have to pick and choose.

We purchased the license for a five-year term.

We evaluated other options, including solutions by EMC, before choosing NetApp. The reason for our choice is that we already had NetApp in our environment, and the price-point is also a little better than the competing products.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to test and compare all of the products. Overall, I think that AFF is a solid store system and it's very easy to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for back end storage of vSphere virtual machines over NFS.

This product was brought in when I started with the company, so that's hard for me to answer how it has improved my organization. I would say that it's improved the performance of our virtual machines because we weren't using Flash before this. We were only using Flash Cache. Stepping from Flash Cache with SAS drives up to an all-flash system really had a notable difference.

Thin provisioning enables us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. Virtually anything that we need to get started with is going to be smaller at the beginning than what the sales guys that sell our services tell us. We're about to bring in five terabytes of data. Due to the nature of our business operations that could happen over a series of months or even a year. We get that data from our clients. Thin provisioning allows us to use only the storage we need when we need it.

The solution allows the movement of large amounts of data from one data center to another, without interrupting the business. We're only doing that right now for disaster recovery purposes. With that said, it would be much more difficult to move our data at a file-level than at the block level with SnapMirror. We needed a dedicated connection to the DR location regardless, but it's probably saved our IT operations some bandwidth there.

I'm inclined to say the solution reduced our data center costs, but I don't have good modeling on that. The solution was brought in right when I started, so in regards to any cost modeling, I wasn't part of that conversation.

The solution freed us from worrying about storage as a limiting factor. In our line of business, we deal with some highly duplicative data. It has to do with what our customers send us to store and process through on their behalf. Redundant storage due to business workflows doesn't penalize us on the storage side when we get to block-level deduplication and compression. It can make a really big difference there. In some cases, some of the data we host for clients gets the same type of compression you would see in a VDI type environment. It's been really advantageous to us there.

The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options.

The solution's data protection and management are as simple as you can hope for. On the data protection side, we have a gigabit connection to our disaster recovery center and we replicate snapshots with SnapMirror hourly. This gives us a really good way to roll things back if we need to but have everything offsite at the same time.

I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs.

I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right.

It's reliable. I don't have to lose sleep over something being wrong with the system. The few incidents we've had here and there have been resolved quickly, either by our channel partner or by NetApp support.

As for scalability, we've added shelves in with very little effort. We're probably not what NetApp wants to see, but we've been purchasing some large six-terabyte SATA drives to expand out colder storage and just get those racked and plugged in. It's very easy to take it up and scale. We are looking very slowly at moving towards the cloud and the NetApp approach to cloud storage is way ahead of what we need, which is very reassuring.

The technical support team is always easy to deal with. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with them much, but when the need arises they're good to work with.

That decision to got with AFF was made before me. They switched from a NetApp FAS system, which is spinning disc storage. We came over to that from a Hitachi BlueArc system that was very old. The FAS system was doing well, but when it came time to add more storage, it was obvious that the choice for flash was the way to go, specifically for virtual machines and applications. It would have been chosen for virtual machine storage and application delivery.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward. When the stuff ships out, it comes with diagrams of how everything needs to be wired. The online resources are great to read through and the ONTAP system is consistent across platforms. Deploying AFF is less complicated than deploying older solutions.

We do a lot of work with our partner, which is informative. They know the products well and do a great job working with us to meet our schedules and technical needs.

I'd definitely encourage people to do a proof of concept and get trial gear in there because it's going to shine. It's something that when you actually get in there and use it, it just clicks.

I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten.