NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Dedupe (cost saving): We were able to achieve a lot more capacity than expected.

• More desktops on storage
• Ease of management

• Software packaging and ordering.
• We wanted to integrate with replication and Commvault options, and that was difficult.

We have been using the solution for about six months.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support at about 8/10.

Other solutions were not all-flash compatible.

Initial setup was easy.

Compare and look for your use case.

We evaluated Pure Storage, SolidFire, EMC Unity.

The migration plan should be clear upfront.

The most valuable features are the deduplication and compression, along with NetApp's Snapshot technology.

I'm looking forward to the compaction feature after the code upgrade in a few months.

We have been looking for a flash solution that scales horizontally along with a proven application integration stack. NetApp has been helpful and stable, and enabled us to buy capacity as needed, as well as help in quickly refreshing UAT/DEV environments as needed.

The product still uses the concept of decoupling hardware with multiple HA pairs where system resources like CPU/memory is bound to a single controller. This approach definitely helps keep the system more resilient and stable, but it makes the environment a little complex for the end user to decide where to place their application for best performance. This is being mitigated by a few of the performance and automation tools they provide, but it may not be the most efficient approach in real time.

I have used it for one year.

There were no issues with stability.

Scalability in regards to capacity hasn't been an issue. The product really scales well.

With regard to performance, storage pools/aggregates are tied to a single node, so a storage device/LUN can only use CPU/memory of that particular node.

NetApp technical support has been excellent for years and they are also improving with their deep software engineering skills/customer reports.

We used to deploy other large storage vendor products that didn't integrate well with the application stack. Automation and efficiency has been a driver in the company, which made us switch to NetApp.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Snapshot/FlexClone are the core licenses that I would recommend to others. Opt for a converged infrastructure like FlexPod, where the Cisco UCS server platform is involved.

We evaluated other large flash vendors including EMC and Pure. Every vendor has their own niche in the flash industry.

Decide your current and future requirements in terms of performance, capacity scaling, application (SQL/Oracle/SharePoint/Exchange/SAP) integration, storage efficiency (dedupe/compression), operational overhead, etc., and decide on a vendor based on it.

No vendor is perfect in every aspect, so chose the vendor based on your requirements and test them!!!

• CIFS (stable solution)
• Ability to support multiple protocols

• SVM application provisioning: makes it easier to provision applications for VMware, VDI, Oracle, and SQL.
• All flash: low latency and higher IOPS since it’s all flash.

Firmware upgrades consistently continue to be the weak spot in all NetApp products.

For 8 months now.

I have not yet had any stability issues.

I have not had any issues with scalability.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate them 3.5.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate them 3.5.

Initial setup was complex. In spite of the new CDOT 9, NetApp setup is still complex. It requires configuration of all the network interfaces, SVMs, which can become a little overwhelming.

NetApp is trying to stay in competition and are offering competitive prices to existing/new consumers. The key is being aggressive.

We looked at Pure Storage and Nimble.

Be prepared for a lot of configuration hiccups before being operational.

It is very user friendly. Someone in my position needs to be able to bring up and shut down the system quickly, efficiently, and shut it down if there's a power outage quickly and efficiently without having trouble. It also supports VMware, which is what we use; but we use the NetApp as our only filer.

I am trying to understand it more, so I can employ it better during high tense situations.

I have been able to manage the system easily myself since we got NetApp four years ago.

The Ilom's graceful shutdown feature is no longer there in the version that I have. I believe I'm using 7.0.x, using the FAS 2040 and also the FAS 2020. I don't know where to say it needs improvement because I'm just not that versed in it yet.

It is excellent in terms of stability. I've had no issues during the last six years that I've had NetApp. Just recently, on one system that's been out and had a lot of controversy about, we had a filer fail on us. We were able to get a filer the following day. It was excellent.

For what we do, I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems; and everything works, no problem. I am currently trying to find out where we’re moving ahead from here.

Technical support is excellent.

I was involved in building it. I found it a little bit grueling to get my certification to build it, but I really can't speak to the NetApp filer documentation. The documentation that we use for it is different from what NetApp uses.

I didn't evaluate anything. That is done in the organization at higher levels than I am. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right because we’re not going to give a contract to anybody for a bad product. Right now, I'm concentrating on our collapse-down strategy in which we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I'm here. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer: whether the filer is going to need to expand; whether we're going to be migrating to a new filer; and so on.

From a relations perspective, it makes us look better that we have the best foundation to run things that we can. It also provides cost savings because it has efficiencies we can gain with it.

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

The performance is probably the most valuable feature. It allows us to meet our customer's needs, being able to provide that level of performance that they need for their workloads.

There's always going to be room for improvement. I don't really have anything sticking out that's a major pain point or something that it's not doing that I need it to do.

Anything that I might like to have seems to be happening already, whether it’s the price coming down, tracking performance, or higher capacities; that work is already getting done or it already has been done.

We're interested or excited in getting to 32-Gb fiber channel. With their new models, NetApp will be moving to 32-Gb fiber. That would potentially raise performance and or lower our port counts, simplifying or minimizing the amount of cables we need to put in places. It would be a nicety, to be able to clean things up and simplify. It’s something I’m looking forward to.

It seems to be rock solid. We've not had any issues with it at all.

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

Since we've added the All Flash FAS, we have scaled up. We've added additional disk shelves; it seems to be growing just fine with us.

I don't think we've had to open up any cases, or needed any kind of tech support on it, other than working with our VAR setting it up.

I've contributed opinions regarding the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS.
We've been NetApp customers for quite a while, so we just kind of grew into it, from disk to flash cache, flash pool and then to all flash.

I was involved in the initial set up. It was very straightforward. Working with our partner, they tend to do a lot of the work on our behalf but it's still a pretty straightforward process. That were really no gotchas.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

The solution is great; the company is fantastic to work with. I cannot think of a bad experience that we've had with either the company and or the product itself. We've had issues but nothing that wasn't overcome and worked through and better in the long run for working through it with a good company like NetApp.

We're very pleased with it but then I guess we don't have a lot of experience with other things to maybe compare.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the support. Everybody's going to have issues with something, but being able to resolve or remediate any issues as quickly, seamlessly and as open as possible is very important to us.

With the FAS, the most valuable features are the snap capability and remote snap.

We would like to be able to import the share as NFS and CIFS at the same time. I recently came into three different scenarios where I needed to share the same data both to Windows and UNIX. Samba was not a solution that we could use, so it would have to be CIFS and NFS to UNIX.

I’ve been using this for at least 5 years.

We have not had any downtime with the FAS series. It has been very good and stable.

Scalability is good. It's going to meet our needs going forward. We are in the process of adding drawers to it right now.

Technical support is good. The problem right now is that NetApp is in the process of discontinuing old disks and the new disks are not yet available. We were in the process of upgrading, and I had to buy old disks that are going to be end-of-life by the end of the year, but new disks are not available yet.

This is a good solution. I would recommend that they go for it.

First of all, we have very low latency. We just moved a good piece of our stuff over from spinning disk onto All Flash FAS. We didn't have performance problems before, but now we are screaming. Things are really fast with really low utilization now. We're surprised at the low utilization and high performance.

I like that they keep the same operating system as they do for all of their stuff, so you learn all their platforms. It's easy to learn and user friendly.

They haven't added all the features in that they have from everything else because they're still kind of new to the all flash game. They haven't added all the features in that you can get on a spinning disk system. It's getting there, but it's taking time.

We have not had any problems with stability.

The scalability meets our needs.

We have a support account manager through NetApp and he helps us out anytime we get stuck on something. We let him know about it and he jumps in and takes care of tickets or problems.

We used their professional services. They came in an installed it for us and it went really well; flawless. They just went in and took care of it all. Then we just put our configurations in and away we went. I thought it went pretty slick.

Currently, we are comparing NetApp Flash with HPE for one of our customers for one of our applications. We are comparing those. I'm not involved with that, so I don't know really how that's going, but I know that that process is under way.

I've been really happy with NetApp All Flash FAS, and I'd hope that others find the same success. I've been really happy with them.

Before we started working with it, we moved input data and resources over. We virtualized the environment over to all flash and it went smooth. We didn't have any problems with it. There wasn't anything crazy we had to do for it.

The most valuable features are that it's all flash and it's super fast. The only problem is, it's a little too fast in some situations. It's actually causing problems with our applications because it's too fast.

Other than that, it's great because it gives us enough IOPS to manage our whole system. Except for that one, it works great.

We're able to bring in a bunch of SANs together, into one solution, instead of having a bunch of separate ones. We had about two or three other ones we were using, and now we just use one.

It's as fast as it's going to be. The problem is the whole application somehow manages to eat up 450,000 IOPS, which is insane. It just has bursts of speed because it's programmed badly. We've been trying to fight with the vendor about that because that was originally why we went with the solution.

Other than that, I can't see any areas with room for improvement right now. I haven't used it for too long. It's only been a couple of months, because it's relatively new.

Stability hasn't been an issue at all. It's just been that one program, pretty much, lately.

Scalability hasn't come up yet. It's pretty nice because we're planning to expand on to an offsite location, as well, to have redundancy. Scalability seems pretty good.

We haven't yet needed to use NetApp technical support. We have gone with the vendor that sold us the NetApp. They've been helping us with it, when we have any questions. We haven't had to directly contact NetApp.

We were having performance issues with that specific application and we were trying to fix that. Then, once we moved, we came to the conclusion it wasn't the speed problems; it was the application itself. So now, we're trying to get them to fix it. It was actually more proof of that for them.

In general, when I choose a vendor, the important criteria that I look for in a vendor are cost and performance. That's what it comes down to: Who has the best prices? The most bang for your buck.

Initial setup seemed pretty straightforward. The vendor pretty much took care of most of it, but it was more of the implementation of the VMware. That's what we were working on, or what I was working on, anyway. It was fairly simple.

I think we looked at EMC a little bit, but I think they were too expensive. They were out of our price range, and we wanted to go all flash. That's pretty much why we chose NetApp.

Make sure all your applications aren't the problem with what you're trying to fix. There really weren't that many problems with it. It just worked. It works like any other SAN really; it's just really fast.

There’s probably more VMware-type issues that you might have to run into. I’d look into how to set up a lot of iSCSIs if you have a lot of databases. Other than that, it wasn't so bad.