NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

All-Flash FAS:

We were beginning to have performance problems. Our databases were getting larger and larger, and we needed to move to something that had that low latency, and this has greatly helped us with this.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

All Flash FAS:

One of the most valuable features is the very low latency, especially when it comes to the databases, very demanding applications. Also I like the very small form factor, compared with the older models; what used to take seven or eight racks now use four. It's just amazing. The savings in power, cooling, and everything else is just incredible.

All-Flash FAS:

They could maybe make the documentation more available. Every time I want to find a document, I have to log in with my username and password. If I go to Google and look for stuff, it's sometimes hard to find. Things like that.

They have several issues that have been solved with the new line of products that they showed us at a recent NetApp conference; they really solved a lot of things I didn't like. For instance, when you allocate spare drives, you can only allocate one spare drive per node. If you have one spare drive, you can either go through node A or node B, and once you assign it, that's it. You have to know if you need to use spare drives. With the new product line, that no longer applies. That is one thing I didn't like, but they fixed it in the new release.

EMC VMAX 10K:

If you look at their CLI or their GUI, it looks like there isn’t any order to anything; it's just horrible. To improve it, they would have to re-architect the whole thing from the bottom up. I don't see them doing that anytime soon, and I can see why not. They are very loyal to their customer base. People have been writing scripts for their systems for 30 years, and they don't want to break those scripts. In order to support those people, there are a lot of things they can't change, and that's what's really holding them back when you compare them to NetApp or something else.

All-Flash FAS:

I've only had it for three months but so far, no problems. It's been great; it's been pretty stable.

EMC VMAX 10K:

It's very complex, but if you get it to work after a very long process or
if you have it working already, the thing never fails. You can use it, leave it on an island and you'll never touch it again. It's very stable, and we kind of like that.

Then, if you want to change things around, such as take the data out and put it somewhere else, such as FlexClone, you can't do that; you couldn't do that with an EMC.

All-Flash FAS:

I only have the one, so I haven't really scaled that all that much. It looks like from the specs and everything else, you can scale it incredibly easily.

EMC VMAX 10K:

We only have that one, so I can't really comment on its scalability. It looks like it could be scalable, but we're not thinking of going in that direction.

All-Flash FAS:

I might have used technical support a couple of times when installing the All-Flash FAS. They were great. There were a couple of times when I had to get on WebEx with them and they walked me through whatever I had to do. It was awesome.

When a drive fails in the NetApp, they send me a replacement and I just put it right in the array. I don't have to wait for anybody to do anything.

EMC VMAX 10K:

When it comes to the EMC, everything is so complicated that even when the drive fails, an engineer has to come onsite to change it. It is that bad.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash system. It was just given to me, I took it and I just ran with it.

Before we switched to the All-Flash, we were using the old FAS. It was also NetApp. It was a 3100 series. They got deprecated and we went to the All-Flash.

All-Flash FAS:

I already had some prior knowledge of the spinning FAS systems. Compared to those, this was much easier. It took us something like three hours to set it all up. It was really fast.

EMC VMAX 10K:

I was not involved in setting up the VMAX. I just have to deal with it.

Before choosing this product, we did not really evaluate other options. We have an EMC VMAX 10K array, and the thing just sucks. We also used it mainly because we are required by politics not to be locked to one specific vendor. As an engineer, I can tell you that NetApp is the best solution; we all know that. We're slowly pushing management to try to change their model. What NetApp sells you that nobody else has is the feature set; you get the FlexClone, the SnapMirrors, and it's all very easy to use. God, the EMC is so difficult that it sometimes makes no sense. It's a very reliable solution. If you get it to work, it just works but then again, I have so many things I can't really do with it.

It's getting to the point that every time we get a new application, every time we get a new requirement for storage, we don't even think of the VMAX, we put it on the NetApp, because it's so much easier to work with.

For instance, we have a UAT environment that can't really work with the EMC, because the EMC doesn't have a FlexClone capability that the NetApp does. Every time something else or something new comes in, we have to ignore the EMC and just put it on the NetApp. For the stuff that's working there right now, it works great, but for the new things that come along, it doesn't work so well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are the ease of use of course, stability, reliability, and feature set.

Talk to your peers. Go talk to the industry; talk to all the people in the industry. See what they're using. See what their thoughts are. I think that if we had done that from the beginning, we might not have done it the way we did. Maybe we would have gone NetApp all the way; I don't know. That's one of the things I would do I guess, in hindsight.

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. 

It has to be the ONTAP System Manager. It is really easy to use and the interface is really clean. We are running 9.2 at the moment, and I have been able to configure it without a lot of assistance from the NetApp technical team.

We have been able to successfully use their high availability as well as run online upgrades without any disruption. It is the non-disruptive upgrade that has really impressed me.

We use it for our VMware environment. We store our virtual machines (VMs) and use it to run our work loads. It is used for file storage.

I have been looking at 9.3. It looks like they already have some really promising features, with the ability to import into CSV. So, this would definitely simplify the configuration without having to do point and click.

They have been very solid so far, in the five months that I have used the product. I have not seen any outages and their support is outstanding.

It has been very stable so far.

We have scaled so far to another unit and have a FAS2620 that we recently added. We were able to get that up and running without disrupting the environment.

Their tech support is very responsive. We have been able to put P1 cases in and we have gotten responses within the hour.

I was involved in the initial setup. We have an AFF and a FAS. We were able to set those up in a cluster.

There were other vendors on the list, primarily EMC and HPE, as they are the other players. NetApp came in at a better price.

I came from an EMC shop with block level storage and found that NetApp was a lot easier to manage and configure. From a learning curve, it was easy for me to set up and pick up.

Definitely give them a chance and see if the solution works for your environment. If you are doing block level storage, maybe try NFS.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: price.

Multi-platform support is one of the most valuable features. It has lots of data protection solutions and cool new features, such as vol moves and FlexCloning. That's very useful for database refreshes.

We heavily leverage the FlexClone features to clone databases for various environments. We use the multiple protocol feature to support different operating systems and platforms.

It allows us to be more flexible with customer demands and needs. It has not allowed us to save money, per se; there are other solutions that are probably cheaper in the flash arena, but this was a nice transition from our NetApp 7-mode to CDOT platforms.

I’d like better performance management tools and a federated provisioning tool to manage our storage. They're working on that right now. They don't have anything out of the box that comes with that at this time that I know of.

I've been using AFF Flash for about eight months; we tested it 12 months ago.

It's a very stable platform; so far, it’s been very stable.

It scales very well. I'd give it about a 9 out of 10 on scalability.

They have strong technical support. We've had some issues in the beginning with the technical support because it was a fairly new product, but they seem to be scaling up in terms of their support engineers.

We evaluated Pure and Tintri. We're an incumbent customer of NetApp’s 7-mode product, so for the migration from 7-mode to CDOT AFF was easier than transitioning to Pure or Tintri.

Some of the competitors did not offer multi-protocol solutions, so the architecture for those solutions would have been a little bit more complicated.

Me and my team did the initial setup. Setup was more complicated than their 7-mode platforms, but it's a necessary evil to provide the new functionalities within CDOT and AFF.

Moving to a flash solution was definitely beneficial.

If you're not already in flash, you should probably start thinking about just buying just flash. Flash helps relieve some of the performance capacity management overhead that comes with traditional spinning disk platforms.

What I would suggest to people that are looking at flash is to make sure they're able to do proper sizing. With buying flash, you need to also make sure your controllers are able to support the workloads you expect the flash to handle. I think flash removes the disk as the bottleneck, but then that pushes that bottleneck down to other hardware components, such as either the network SAN or storage controllers. Make sure that the rest of your system can handle it.

That's what I would offer in terms of evaluating a flash solution, and to look into scaling out versus scaling up for flash.

I like the speed and that it's easy to set up. We are now using the compression and the dedupe, which is very useful in saving a lot of data space.

As I’ve mentioned, we are using the compression to save data space. We do a lot of vaulting. We have our primary storage and our secondary storage. For our secondary storage, we always had to buy big SATA disks but now we can use compression to actually save buying monstrous disks and use compression to save our secondary vault for data.

I'm hearing about compaction, I kind of want to find out more about it. I guess it's another level of compression on top of things. I’d like to just see where it takes off from there. I know that the speed of the disks isn't going to be the bottleneck anymore. As far as the NAN technology coming out, I want to find out what the feature design is for NetApp on that, too.

So far, I haven’t seen any features in other solutions that I'd like to see brought in to AFF. I'm pretty impressed with the way we run things for what we have so far.

They could always improve the pricing. It is relatively expensive. When we priced things out before, it was priced by how many GBs you need for whatever you need, how many TBs. Now, it's terabytes compressed. You're looking at a compression tool, so you don't need as much hardware to get the same amount of space. It actually is saving space in our data centers, so we're getting a lot of improvements with heating and cooling, and with tile space; half the data center's coming back. For the past two years, we've been really ramping up on different technologies and decreasing our data center space. We've been looking at AFF now for over a year now. We've been running more and more of those in.

I've been running the AFF systems now for over a year.

We have not had any stability issues. We can do vault moves and everything else. It gives us flexibility, mainly in our VMware environment, because we're all NFS. We’re able to buy new equipment, retire equipment, swap things in and out very easily.

We have not had any scalability issues so far. It's scalable, depending on what your network switch is; we're running ten-node clusters right now.

Sometimes we use technical support. It depends on who you get. The last couple of people I had were helpful. We use professional services. For example, when we do an upgrade two or three levels up, we'll mostly use professional services or our contacts. For any kind of upgrades, we'll get recommendations from technical support, and so on. They've been great.

Our main kick off was our VDI environment, our work stations, heavy writes. Typically, we were running SAS disks and they were doing good but for the right performance, you really had to have huge aggregates to carry that load. With AFF, you don't really need that because the IOPS are there and it can handle it.

Initial setup has been easier and easier because we used to set older systems up with SAS and aggregates and everything else. Now, it's kind of, start it up and let it go. It's getting a lot easier, at least on the hardware setup.

We mainly run NetApp for our NAS environment but for SAN, we run some of the other vendors. However, that's kind of coming around. People are seeing what these AFF systems are doing and I'm actually doing some testing in our SAN environment for some of the NetApp stuff, too. It might be a good thing. We'll have to see.

We do a lot of work with our NetApp professional services or just design teams. Get help with them to start it out, so you have some kind of baseline. Don't just go run out there and buy something. (I guess if you have the money, you can go out there and try it.)

We've been working with a pretty good support team that we get to bounce things off of.

I can't find anything bad about them. It's been a big improvement for us.
When I look for a vendor, support is important to me. You want to be able to buy a piece of equipment, run a piece of equipment, you don't know anything about, and know that somebody can support it, so that when something does crash, they're not going to just say, "Oh, call somebody else," or run away from you. Support is very important; I would think so.

The performance gains over traditional FAS systems and spinning media make it invaluable for an organization. We specifically have deployed it to troubleshoot storage performance. We don't really have a use case for it other than to troubleshoot at this point. It's allowed us to validate that there are no problems with the storage and to leverage the All Flash system to show that storage wasn't the issue.

It's reducing troubleshooting time to identify which major functional area the problem has been in. We're able to identify quickly now that, whether storage is or is not a contributor to any troubleshooting that we have going on.

At this point, I don't really have any comments on room for improvement because we don't have a lot of use case in our environment right now. We don't actually have a use case other than troubleshooting. Right now, we don't have any high-performance data that needs all flash at this time.

Obviously, keeping the scale and leveraging higher-capacity, solid-state drives is great to reduce power and cooling and space in the data center. That's not really a NetApp thing, that's more of a Samsung thing, who are our flash vendor. It’s absolutely something we’re looking forward to improving on. They're essentially getting rid of SAS in our environment as they grow. We purchased it with the 3.8 TB drives and they've done well to reduce a lot of space. All Flash FAS has been touted as something to get rid of SAS, and we like the fact that it's able to mask some of the issues that we have inside of applications just due to the performance gains that we get. I’m really just hoping that they keep on that, providing higher stability for applications that have had problems in the past.

Pricing can always be improved. We noticed that the pricing on it was very similar to the caching pricing, which is held at a premium even though this is storage that's not for caching only. It's not like a flash pool where you've added it to an aggregate to increase performance. This is your base disk. This is actually where you're storing data not just for caching. That's one thing that we saw in the pricing, but as solid state prices come down, the pricing is going to get better.

There isn’t anything that I wake up in the morning and think, "If only had just did this," or, "If only this was a little bit easier to use, that would make my day." We keep a very simple environment by design, and so we really try to eliminate any complexities that are out there. We're all file-system storage so we don't have any fiber in our environment. It just keeps everything simple. As far as the interfaces, our group has been using the NetApp interfaces for years and we’ve grown used to them.

So far we haven't had any major stability problems with the platform. There was no real trouble with installing it or migrating to it. We don't have any problems at this time, but we don't have a lot of performance data on it right now, either.

Scalability seems great. We purchased an AFF8080 with only one disk shelf, so we're able to scale much larger than we are right now.

As far as NetApp technical support, we've had one case open with them for the All Flash FAS. We haven't used any professional services, but we've used the support group for one small issue with deployments. They were great; they had a fix with us faster than anyone had expected.

To a certain degree, I was involved in the decision process to invest in the All Flash FAS. I recommended of it and then obviously, higher up the food chain, they decided to go with it.

We weren't previously using anything else with all flash. The company I was with was a NetApp consumer long before I got there. No real big changes on the commercial side of what we bought; just kind of investing in the new technology of all flash.

The decision to invest in it in the first place was strictly for performance testing, to make sure that applications weren't running into performance issues with spinning media.

Initial setup was done through me in combination with professional services. We had them do the racking and cabling through a VAR that we use, but then we specifically had joined it to the cluster and configured it.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to leverage some of the documentation on the NetApp site and get through it in under a week so.

We weren't really considering any other vendors. We have a very good relationship with NetApp and we've been really happy with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the support infrastructure; we have to have good support. For business-critical applications, if there's downtime – it happens – but we need a support organization and infrastructure that can help us. We'd leverage a support account manager to get the best out of support and we've had very good success with NetApp so far.

I can't really give any advice because I don't really have anything to compare it to. We've deployed and it's worked well for us, so I would definitely recommend it but I can't recommend it against anything else.

We haven't seen any issues, but it's software and hardware so there will be one at some point.

For us in the health care sector, the most valuable feature is quality of service because we're able to stop the workloads from taking over other workloads that are more important.

We have storage virtual machines at work, so we're able to segregate and distinguish between different workloads. I think local HFL might as well form the natural process side of things, which is an improvement from 7-Mode.

We're able to treat more patients now because our workloads are performing faster.

I'd like to see online duplication, which I believe will be available with 8.3.2.

We've been using it for the past four months or five months with lots of clinical applications that deal with healthcare, and VMs with SQL.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no crashes. We have experienced a couple of problems based on configuration and books. I believe these issues are going to be addressed in an update, but for now I think they are just focused on the reiteration of what the best practices are.

It scales to our needs.

7/10, as there were a couple of issues which took technical support some time to handle.

We have used Fusion-io for flash but nothing in SAN. We were looking to address performance issues, and NetApp addressed them.

I think we took about two weeks to get up and running. We performed initial tests and diagnostic tests, all the results of which surpassed our expectations. We were able to get 400,000 IOPS from our system processor.

We used a mix of three days with NetApp, another three days with a partner, and everything else was done in-house.

We won't have a number until we've fully migrated, but so far it looks good.

We were looking at Pure Storage and a couple of other vendors who had all-in-one solutions.

I think it fits a lot of peoples requirements, but I'd recommend waiting until v8.3.2 just for the additional features and to resolve some books. Other than that, it's great.

AFF is our complete storage solution. We use it for SIP shares and VMware volumes. 

Upgrading from spinning disk to AFF increased the overall speed of our production servers. AFF helped us simplify our infrastructure and improve the performance of our business-critical applications. The administration has become more straightforward. We were on an old version of ONTAP. Now that we are completely updated, it's even easier on the latest version.

AFF works well for VMware storage.

AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform.

I have used AFF for three or four years.

AFF is stable. I don't have to touch it unless I want to. 

AFF is scalable. The ability to add shelves makes things easier.

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. I've never had a complaint.

Positive

We've seen a significant performance increase. Upgrading from the A300 to the A400 was a noticeable difference. 

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10.