NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it for electronic medical record storage.

Because we use the production environment and copy down to test environments, we've taken it from days to hours.

• Speed
• Reliability

The next solution needs to simplify the day-to-day operations.

The stability is excellent. It's highly stable. We've just never really had a failure since we put it in. It's been two years.

There have been no issues of scalability, for our use.

Technical support has been very good. We use scripting called WFA, and we've had a little bit of an issue with that, going from the first generation to the second generation. But the actual hardware, product, and support itself have been excellent.

We were moving to a new data center, so we needed it.

The initial setup was complex. The fact that it has to interact with both IBMs - AIX - and with the Epic application, means there are three vendors in the mix.

We used an integrator, Sirius. Our experience with them was excellent. Sirius already knew the environment it was coming from, the reseller was an IBM flash storage environment. They brought it over to a NetApp flash environment.

There were really only two on the shortlist: IBM and NetApp. We chose NetApp because we had an opportunity to make all of our environment NetApp.

I definitely recommend it. It's very complex to set up. Everything is. Even though it's complex, NetApp, out of the other two options, would probably be the least complex.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had any failures in the production environment. The only issue, as I said, is that we've had some trouble with the scripting. Otherwise, we'd give it a ten.

We use it in the healthcare industry.

It's helped with latency. It has improved our job flows.

It's fast and reliable.

I would like to see more functionality with the external software, SnapCenter. There should also be more integration with the flash side of things. But overall, it's been pretty good.

My impression of the stability is that it's good. 

It's pretty scalable. When you add more to the environment it helps things, overall.

Technical support has been really good. NetApp support has been really helpful. We have a SAM that we use as well, and he helps us with issues that come up, bugs, etc.

We were pushing what we had too far on performance. It wasn't so good, so that's when we looked at All Flash.

It was really straightforward, for the most part. We were used to working with FAS already and this is just adding All Flash and SSD to the mix. It's a lot of the same standards we had already.

For the installation and configuration, we've done the recent ones directly through NetApp. Our experience with them has been positive.

We'll have the solid-state drives around longer so we won't be turning over controllers or disk as fast.

Our shortlist was really just NetApp, in our situation. We're pretty much all NetApp. We didn't evaluate anything else for this particular project.

I would recommend NetApp.

I rate it at nine out of ten, and close to a ten. We've been pretty happy with the All Flash.

We use it for data storage.

We have more storage capacity. Managing it is easier and it's available anytime we want it.

• Ease of use
• Availability

Everybody's moving to the cloud. We, as a financial company, are moving to it as well. We need to find out what about the security of the information that we have on it. That's the main thing that they need to talk be talking about. How secure is that information?

The stability is extremely good. It's very stable. We've been running it for about four years now. We haven't had any hiccup with it so far. Okay, there have been a few here and there, but they have been easy to resolve with the engineers that we have.

The reason we have it is that it's very scalable.

Technical support is excellent. We have an excellent team with NetApp. They help us and they are available anytime that we need them.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because everybody is moving forward. We don't want to stand still.

The initial setup was straightforward. They had all the codes with them, they just implemented them on the system and, next thing we knew, it was up and running.

We used a consultant for the deployment. Our experience with them was extremely good. They knew what they were talking about, they made it easy, and didn't take a long time.

The amount of data that's stored is increasing day by day. We are a financial company so we have new customers every day and we need to keep their information safe and secure. It definitely has that return on investment in that we didn't have to invest in something else, outside of what we have now.

There was one other option we looked at but it didn't have the scalability. It also didn't have the support that we needed. The experience that we have with NetApp support is excellent.

I would definitely encourage colleagues to go ahead with it. I have had a great experience with it. I would definitely encourage them that this is the way to go.

I rate this product at ten out of ten. It's easy. Once you know your way around it, there is nothing to it. You can do it in a flash.

We are it for CIFS, NFS, and NAS. We are also using it for the cloud environment.

They have come up with top of the line inline deduplication. They are delivering compression and aggregate compaction, as well. Everything is improving with their new features coming out on a day-to-day basis.

• Inline deduplication
• Compaction
  
• I've seen them compress it a lot, which provides efficiency.

These features are missing from other products in market.

The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions.

It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product.

We started with a cluster of two nodes, then we reached a six node cluster. We have scaled this up, as needed, whenever we saw a requirement coming up from the client. 

It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes.

From a technical perspective, the technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward; there is no complexity.

We used our vendor partner for the installation. We do have multiple vendors with whom we deal with for the procurement of NetApp devises. So, we call with them to come and do the deployment for us, as per our company standards. Our experience with these vendors is good.

I would recommend NetApp. It is a good product to use. 

We use it for typical data center workloads: Exchange, file shares, and SQL.

We have a big problem in our organization where I can't get the application engineers to give me performance requirements. Now, with the SSDs, I don't need to worry about that anymore. All of our applications are high. Our test applications perform at a higher level now.

It has improved performance of our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs because we have a higher IO from the disk now. We run a lot of write-intensive VMs. For sure the solution helps out.

Our total cost of ownership has decreased because of the nature of the SSDs, their mean time to failure is much higher. They don't fail as often and that's going to reduce it. And because we upgraded to the All Flash and the bigger SSD, we reduced our footprint. I increased my capacity 500 percent and reduced my footprint in the data center by 95 percent.

The most valuable features are

• the IO performance that we get
• the cluster part 
• the increased workload and performance with the SSDs.

And the CLI portion of ONTAP, in general, is much easier to use.

It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products. In my area, we are really big on security, using smart-card authentication. Multi-factor authentication is a big thing for us, being on the federal government side of things. We need all the products to have the ability to do smart-card authentication. That's the biggest one. That's the drawback of this solution. But otherwise, it's getting there. It's starting to catch up.

It has been very stable so far. It's about a year old, we haven't been using it for long, but so far it has stood up very well.

We haven't needed to scale it yet. We probably won't. But obviously, because we are in a multi-node cluster environment, with the switches we can scale out very easily if we need to.

I mostly interact with my sales engineer who is very sharp. The few times that I've had to interact with technical support, it has been very good.

The gear we were on was about ten years old. We always buy behind the technology curve. I noticed that spinning disk was going away and that the industry moving towards SSDs, so I wanted us to try to get ahead of the curve a little bit, to give us some more horsepower to do some more initiatives that we want to get done in the future.

It was very straightforward. There are setup tools so if you're not very familiar with NetApp, they walk you through the process step by step: How to configure all the interfaces and the SVMs, etc. I'm more experienced with the command lines, so I deployed it that way. But it's very receptive to PowerShell scripting, so it's easy to use.

We used an integrator, reseller, and consultant for the deployment. Resellers are resellers. I don't have a good or bad opinion of them. As for the integrators we had, I'd rather do it myself quite honestly. But it was okay.

Because we're federal government, we really can't choose. We've had NetApp for years. I did evaluate a lot of other products. Honestly, at the end of the day, storage is storage and disks are disks; it's all the bells and whistles on the front. Other solutions could probably have accomplished the same task. Ultimately, it comes down to dollars and cents, but I'm not really involved in that side of it. I'm sure they chose NetApp because of the cost.

Know your workload, know your customer. Know what your requirements are, know what your future requirements are. Determine what's important to you. Think about the administrators, if you're not the administrator; I'm not, I just engineer it. Think about them and how they will use it. Think about the future, where you think your business will grow.

When it comes to setting up and provisioning applications using the product, it depends on what you're doing. But I I can have an Exchange server up and running in about 30 minutes.

At the moment the solution is not having any effect on IT's ability to support new business initiatives. I got it to support things like ADI and solutions like that. So hopefully, going forward, it will play a role in that. We have not connected the solution to public clouds. We do plan to in the future.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten because there's room to improve. There's always room to grow. The security side of it: They have a large government customer base but it seems like they really don't pay attention to that side of things. There are a lot of security things, a lot of customers can't send their stuff offsite, and I'm one of them. So coming up with better ways to satisfy that part would be great.

We are mostly using it for NAS, CIFS, and NFS protocols.

Logical data might be very high, but the physical data, because of efficiency features (such as, dedupe, compression, etc.), has been greatly reduce data. Therefore, we are getting 10 to 20 times the efficiency on this product.

Data efficiency is the most valuable feature of NetApp.

I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical.

Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down.

It is stable.

It is scalable. On the NFS side, we have around 24 nodes, so that is pretty scalable. Also, the scale up is very high.

Technical support is always great from NetApp. It is the best.

We were not previously using another solution.

The initial setup is very easy.

We have seen ROI from the product.

We were looking at NetApp and Dell EMC. However, NetApp is know for their NFS solution.

This is the best solution in the market.

NetApp is a good company. I use to work there.

We use it for our VWware environment. We run virtual machines and our plan is to migrate all of them to the All Flash platform.

The improvement for us has been space savings on the All Flash FAS platform. The data space savings are almost three times better than the what we have right now, a two-to-one ratio.

Regarding the user experience, it's pretty fast. For applications where they require a high throughput, this platform is pretty solid. It also helps improve the performance of enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs because it's pretty fast. We are on a different level of tiered platform, where the All Flash is completely hybrid, SSD aggregate, so it tripled the performance for the customer.

The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe.

The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions. The hardware is really stable but we see some glitches here and there with the software. That's how the system works.

Right now, we are on a pretty stable version: 9.3.8.

We have not had to scale it. We have a two-node cluster.

Technical support has been pretty good. We have had to involve them two or three times per month.

Our old solution was working fine but the system was going out of support so we needed to do a refresh.

It is straightforward. The whole cluster configuration is pretty straightforward. Just bring up the node and add to the existing clusters. We didn't see any difficulties.

It takes us one day to set up and provision enterprise applications using this product. Migration takes a lot of time but provisioning is setting up the cluster and that takes one day.

We used NetApp Professional Services and they were pretty good.

Because we are government, it is an open contract. People have to bid on government projects. We don't have a say in the options.

I would say this is a good solution but talk to the NetApp guys and see how it really fits in your environment.

We do not connect it to public clouds at the moment. We have plans to do so in the future, depending on the use cases.

I rate the product at seven out of ten. Their system is pretty good but we are still facing a few issues, mainly on the software side where there is an SVMDR. We had it in the previous configuration. We did an ONTAP upgrade but had some issues replicating the whole configuration. There are a few other glitches here and there. Other than that I would say it's pretty stable.

We do storage across the United States.

We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users.

• Uptime
• Ease of use

I would like them to roll in global monitoring instead of having to buy another product for it. If it was built into the solution, that would be awesome.

We haven't had any issues, so far.

We are scaling up to the new solution. We haven't had a lot of scalability yet. We are looking forward to what it can do.

Our technical support experience hasn't been very good. However, we are hoping with our new contract that it will be a lot better.

We were using HPE EVAs, which are very clunky and old, so we moved over to NetApp.

We were just bought out by another company who has been using Dell EMC. They're not happy with that solution, so we brought them into NetApp.

The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out.

We used a reseller, EVOLTECH. It has been okay so far. There are not a lot of technical individuals with their group.

From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage.

NetApp and Pure Storage were on our final shortlist. NetApp just came in with a better price point that my VPs and CIO couldn't refuse.

Do your research. There are a lot of different storage vendors who have a lot things which are good. Pick the one that you feel is best for you.