NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The benefits are automatic; the power consumption is very low with the All Flash and the performance is very high. So, it helped us to better serve our customers to do the VMware data source.

The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool. We are primarily using VMware environment. We use it for VMware data source for our hosting customers. We have 32 petabytes of data on NetApp's storage, so we definitely use it for primary storage.

Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool.

It's very stable.

We have a 9.1 operating system on it, and it's very stable. We did an upgrade online, and we had no issues. We did a failover testing, and nothing. It's solid.

The scalability is good.

I use it for small issues, like how to configure using multiple VLANs. It was pretty easy to set up, and the technical support were very good.

We decided, as a company, to not buy any more disk storage for our primary customers, and that's the reason we needed All Flash. NetApp was a perfect fit because we could grow as we needed and it scales out the architecture works for us. We were looking for a high-performance, small, low footprint block rate, and NetApp fits in right there.

Very straightforward. NetApp already does all the installation for us. They just come in and set the IPs, etc.

It's a pretty solid solution. If you're looking for a block solution, or file solution, on flash, you definitely have to look at it.

It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment.

We're more nimble. We can move from block to file. The ability to have all of the efficiencies that come with it. The dedpulication, the compaction, the compression, give us those capabilities to get more bang for the buck.

The fact that we can move forward, increase capacity, update hardware, without having to take an outage.

There are a bunch of features that are available but aren't vetted for enterprise use yet, at least not in my environment.

Better stability, not releasing features until they are fully functional, or at least giving us a software train that doesn't add them until they are fully functional and proven. Right now, the long-term support model is nice but it still has features in it that are not ready. At least not for our environment.

NetApp's base solution is very solid. The latest, greatest features of course are not always that stable. We avoid those. If we stick with the tried and true, we have no problems. It's very stable.

It's extremely scalable. With the cDOT, you have the ability to add many, many nodes, and that gives you that capability of also being able to upgrade portions of it without taking the entire thing out.

Technical support, the first wave is a little bit rough sometimes to deal with. However, once you get to the right resources, it's quick in action.

It's actually kind of hard to deal with the first level because of the questions and we already have visibility into the triage sheets that they are asking us the questions from, and we've already gone through those. So we've moved beyond that dependence on the first level because of those triage sheets that are publicly available on the website.

It's been there as long as I've worked there. So, before that, CIFS, user shares, that kind of thing. It was never really an option for high performance storage.

We've been using Netapp for many years, long before I even came to the company.

It was very straightforward.

We're multi-vendor. We do EMC and NetApp. We will look at others but most don't have the track history that we are looking for.

We use AFF for both block storage and file storage. We are more likely to consider to NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF. With clustered data ONTAP, it's actually a true enterprise solution that has upgrade paths that don't require actual downtime.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor solution is the ability to deliver in the long-term.

The TCO makes it a very desirable solution. The efficiencies are more than worth the money. It means you can have a small footprint but support a lot of different solutions within the datacenter.

Reduced latencies, and the cluster data ONTAP, less down time, able to do upgrades, things like that, without much disruption.

I would say the consistency with the ONTAP versions and the speed and performance from the flash.

A shorter list of bug fixes would make it a 10 out of 10 for me. It looks like they're doing monthly releases now, so there are a lot more upgrades. It feels like a little too much, but we get to choose whether or not we need to pick that version or if we're going to wait. It's good not to have to wait four months for a patch.

With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade. The upgrades are very minimal. They've got the waiting period in between them, kills about 15 minutes of time. It'd be nice if that was streamlined a bit. I'm sure the engineers have that pause in there for a reason.

Normally good.

I think we've got an eight-node cluster right now, so it's meeting our needs.

It's been easy to tag nodes and scale out.

It's always been a good experience. I've never had any issues getting the right level of support.

Pretty straightforward.

I would say the primary use case for AFF is a combination of database and virtual servers. We have both block storage and file storage.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage, both before and after we purchased AFF, was top-notch. We are definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future based on our experience with AFF, due to its reliability, ease of administration, cost.

For us, reliability, cost, and just a good relationship are the most important criteria when selecting a vendor.

It's reliable, fast, low latency, and we haven't had any issues with it. It's been quality.

With the AFF, we can run VMs with databases now. That was one of the big features with the AFF, we needed the speed for databases. By moving them over, we can put VMDKs housing databases on there and use them on the VMware infrastructure now.

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

The AFF we have, we use the in-line compression. The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files. We got a lot of compression, a lot of efficiency out of the dedupe because a lot of the VMware are similar with the OS, VMDKs, etc. It makes it really compact. You can put a lot of stuff in a little space.

That's a hard question to answer off the top of my head. I'd have to go through and evaluate everything. Right now, it fits our needs. I'd have to evaluate what else I'd like to see, I guess.

While not for AFF specifically, for clusters in general, it would be nice to be able to have volumes everywhere. For example, now you have volumes tied to a node tied to an HA pair. It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch. Then, they have a volume owned by something and have it should be able to move around to anywhere based on ownership of a volume, as opposed to between HA pairs. That would be a good improvement in their infrastructure.

The NetApp AFF itself, the FAS's, they're stable. They're in a cluster mode, they're HA, so we fail them over, we have upgraded fail back. We've never had an outage due to NetApp in the 12 years that I've been there.

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

Scalability, it's like anything else. The ability now to take out and add shelves, pull out shelves from the middle of an array if you want, to upgrade them, to pull heads out, and put new heads in as a non-forklift upgrade. All that functionality and scalability is one of the things that makes NetApp really good for our environment.

We use tech support for everything. Since it's a cluster, something that's not specific AFF, it's just nodes in the cluster. But we use support all the time.

Tech support is like everything else. It's hit or miss. It depends on who you get and what the subject matter is. We had a Support Account Manager (SAM) at one point too and, when we had the SAM, it was a lot easier to work with their support through the SAM. We've dropped the SAM stuff.

Sometimes it's difficult to escalate correctly and get the right people involved. It's not been as bad as it was before we had the Support Account Manager (SAM) though. Our SE helps a lot as well. It's pretty good support. We just had a support call yesterday with him and the guy we got was knowledgeable about what our problem was, so it worked out pretty well.

We've been a NetApp customer for 10 to 12 years now. We use their non-flash stuff a lot. We use hybrid flash, and after that, hybrid arrays. All Flash was the next logical move. Our next move is going to be the object storage, as well to spin off some of that data, the snapshots, on to object storage, because they've got flex groups.

I was involved and it was seamless. We had a two-node star cluster with AFAs on them. NetApp did the install. A few years ago, we used to do our installs ourselves, as a company. Then we started using NetApp installation services to do them. They did the install. They inserted it seamlessly into our cluster. It came up, we had the arrays, and we could create aggregates on it, pretty much right after they got them installed.

We're using NetApp now as our hybrid storage. We have VMs on there. They wanted to put databases on the VMs. We said, "Well, we don't have the speed to put your databases on there. If you want to stay on the NFS structure with NetApp, the next logical solution is just to put you on All Flash, so we just throw some of those in the cluster and do a motion of your volumes over."

For All Flash, we have a SAN infrastructure and a NAS infrastructure. We use the EMC for the SAN infrastructure, for the block. NetApp is the only NAS we have. There's not much else we can look at besides Isilon. Isilon just isn't fast enough. It's slower than what we had them on at the beginning. NetApp was really the only logical choice for that particular environment if we wanted to use NAS.

The primary use case for our All Flash FAS (AFF) system is pretty much VMware and its servers. It's just for file storage right now, for NFS, for the VMware stuff. We're investigating using it for other things. It's also used as a Zerto, a web application depository for some of the Zerto replication for the VMware stuff.

We use it for our mission critical stuff right now, as our VM infrastructure.

The most important criteria, when selecting a vendor to work with is functionality. I look at the functionality of the systems, what they provide us, what the features are, and where they're going, and what we need. Then, after that, I'll look at support. Of course, my company wants to look at market share and similar thing to it, but I look at the those things last. I look at the functionality first.

I give it a nine out of 10 because nothing's perfect. It works really well for what we want to do with it. It may not work well for other people. But in my experience, nine is where I would put it. It's functional, it's expandable, no forklift upgrades, and no disruptive upgrades, even for the OS or for the hardware itself. The flexibility of moving things around. All of its features, including its SnapMirror functionalities, make it really good for our environment.

All the features and their flexibility is where I would give it the bigger rating. What would make it a 10 out 10 is better support.

Regarding advice, it's the same advice you give to everybody. Evaluate what your criteria are, then look at NetApp. If you're looking for NAS, even for block, NetApp to me is mid-to-high level block. If you're looking for certain things in block, something else might be better, as opposed to FAS. You can look at NetApp for their other products. Look at NetApp for their file system for; FAS, look at their block stuff. Look at their stuff because all their stuff is available for use, it's just that the FAS itself is not suitable for everything, but they have other stuff that is.

The primary use case for our Flash FAS is general storage for our hypervisor, software as a service provider. We primarily use it for storing our applications, web servers, file servers, and whatever other applications we have. We mainly utilize the AFF platform for the high performance and the deduplication capabilities. The management is a lot simpler on an AFF.

• Deduplication
• Compressions
• Simpler management
• The performance is great.

I'm not sure there are any additional features which I want to see, except for maybe more compatibility within the hardware universe and more compatibility for cables and other hardware. Some better integration with the E-Series to give us more options to scale. The other issue though is a completely different product called HCI, so this might not even be an AFF request.

It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better. That's what we run into a lot. Our datacenters have a need for more flexible cabling and NetApp has very strict guidelines on what kind of cables you use. That's the only reason why I wouldn't rate it a 10 out of 10, but everything else is great.

Stability is very good.

Regarding scalability, on a scale of one to 10, I'd say about a five.

Tech support is great. I'd rate it as a nine out of 10.

The initial reason for going to NetApp was that our original solution, which was Dell Storage, just wasn't cutting it. We did our own in-house testing, performance-wise, resilience-wise, etc. The Dell Storage just wasn't cutting it. Dell's other solution at that time was Compellent, and NetApp was just better. The initial reason we didn't go with NetApp was because of cost, but they were able to meet us in the middle and we just went from there.

Not straightforward, there is a learning curve when it comes to AFFs, but once you understand the setup it's pretty easy.

Our initial perception of NetApp was it's extremely expensive and a little too inflexible. However, once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought.

The cost effectiveness is due to deduplication compression, the number of managed hours that we need to maintain the system, and the flexibility of NetApp which is geared toward keeping their systems more resilient.

I would check to see that you're okay with centralized storage because that's what NetApp's bread and butter is. If you want a centralized storage platform that is bulletproof, NetApp is great.

We use AFF for both block storage and NAS storage. We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF.

Two functions are valuable for us:

• Snapshot: We are able to replicate/clone production environments to test the SW version up (e.g. the Oracle Financials upgrades).
• MetroCluster: Our disaster recovery is based on two active-active sites. The MetroCluster feature allowed us to continue our operations (without business interruption) when we stopped one of the sites.

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

This solution is based on the scale-out concept. Some workload balancing activities across the nodes are not transparent (requires server downtime).

When moving volumes between controllers, you should always use the optimized path.

FCP is doing this automatically, but NFS unfortunately not.

So when moving NFS volumes between controllers, you will not move the load to the other controller.

To do this, you need to remount the volume to the correct LIF.

We did encounter stability issues but nothing that interrupted the solution; more background type of problems.

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

We did encounter scalability issues, the solution is not delivering the requested performance (I/O response time for the requested IOPS).

The technical support level is between poor to medium in our geography.

Previously, we were using the older generation of the NetApp MetroCluster (6240 unit). We switched as this unit was not performant enough, i.e., it had a high maintenance cost for the performance delivered.

Negotiate everything, i.e., including the price for the future capacity upgrades as part of the deal.

We looked at EMC, HPE, and Fujitsu.

You need to understand the limitations of the scale-out architecture.

Clustered Data ONTAP

Low latency

My company uses mostly NetApp products, so I have existing knowledge of using their products.

We're still testing it, but I expect it to provide us a lot more speed because of low latency and clustered Data ONTAP.

They still have to reduce in price when compared to their competitors. Also, the current version has some problems with global deduplication.

It's not yet in full production, but I have been testing the product for few month now with VMware.

I've had no issues deploying it in our test environment.

We do not expect any issues, and have had none so far.

It has problems with deduplication when done globally.

Their customer service is one of the best, and I am a demanding customer.

• Tier 1 – room for improvement as they hold onto tickets for too long
• Tier 2– much more serious

From my experience with NetApp products, initial setup is going to be nice and easy. We are very techy, so it was easy for us.

The majority of work was based on existing knowledge, but we also got help from the vendor.

We considered Kaminario and XtremIO. We chose NetApp in order to utilize current resources.

It has better adaptation than pure flash solutions such as XtremIO. It’s important to learn the weak spots of the suppliers in the market, and I can say that I have great expectations for the migration of the flash array to disc via cluster.

The customer improved its time to market.

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

I have found three main features to be valuable:

Ease of use: Business continuity solutions are not typically so easy to manage from a storage admin prospective

Storage Efficiency: Inline compression, inline reduplication, and other inline features allow space-saving without losing performance

Performance: All flash disks allow extreme performance at low latency

There should be more functionality regarding tiering of the oldest data.

The solution is very stable.

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

The solution can scale-in and scale-out.

I would rate the level of technical support 10/10.

The customer previously had the NetApp solution based on hybrid disks.
They don't have a business continuity solution.

It took one week for the startup to pepare the storage for use. We have migrated about 150TB of data in six months (VMware, Oracle, SAP, filesystem, etc.).

Licensing is very simple: all flash solutions include the entire license. Regarding pricing, storage efficiency can lower the cost per TB.

The customer evaluated EMC and HPE.

Involve a competent and certified partner.