NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

As far as our VDI environment goes, it's allowed us to exponentially expand it. We've gone from essentially a trial project to a full-out deployment, corporation-wide, for VDI. It's allowed us to facilitate that quite well.

For example, the bottleneck for speed was one. We’ve tried out some different solutions. We've got some Pure technology in there and we have a couple of other vendors. We've done a lot of business with NetApp over the years. We've kind of decided to stick with them for a while.

We're changing over all of our older models to the new FAS stuff, the AFF especially, because we want high performance, high availability for VDI environments. We're having some pretty severe bottlenecks on spinning disk with VDI, of course. We're changing over almost all of our sites to the AFF to get the performance that we need for the VDI environment.

I would give it a higher rating if they would work a bit on the interface and similar items, especially the metrics that it has displayed, improvement on those, maybe a little bit more historical, maybe have some additional metrics on the graphs and stuff on that.

Otherwise, it's a fantastic product. I'm quite happy with it now. It would have been nice if they would have jumped on the bandwagon a little earlier with flash but hindsight...

Actually, they've already improved it quite a bit; the 7-mode to cluster-mode migration, which they've worked significantly on. We actually have one coming up sometime in the next couple of months for one of our sites, 7-mode to cluster-mode. We were originally anticipating that it would involve a significant amount of downtime. Now, we're at the point where they're assuring us there's no downtime.

With some of the older technology, we have had stability issues; with the NetApp technology. With these new AFFs, they've been rock solid.

We frequently use technical support. They're great. Our SE's fantastic. He comes out all the time, helps us out. We've got a couple of other people that we have on speed dial that will come out and give us a hand when we require it; have issues setting up, making significant changes or anything like that.

Most of the time, investing in the AFF was a result of upgrading our current technology of stuff that we have in there, whether it be older NetApp stuff that we're replacing with a new AFF, or a need presents itself, such as a new project that we would have to look at. We don't have a policy of always having the newest technology in here, immediately; it's project-based or replacement based.

We've been with NetApp before I got to the company. They've been with NetApp for a while and I worked with NetApp in previous companies as well.

When I’m choosing a vendor like NetApp, I look at the support and how the company treats us as a customer. We don't want a company that's just going to sell us a nice, great big box, bow-wrapped, and then never speaks to us again. With NetApp, we've had a lot of continuity with, not only the SEs but, the sales staff and so on. They continually come in and make sure that we're good; checking to see if we have any projects that are coming up; checking to see if we have any problems that we need to solve with them; being very proactive and so on. Some of the other vendors that we've tried out have been, sort of, "Okay, it's in, thank you."

I don't get involved with the pricing, so I'm not familiar with that. I know it's a pretty penny, but I'm not familiar with that.

Depending on what the project is, I'd definitely tell someone looking asking me for advice to take a look at NetApp. Although NetApp is a great product, it doesn't fit every single solution, the different sizes. NetApp is a little more on the expensive side, so it'd just have to fit whatever that they're trying to do, whatever their company is. I'd probably tell them to take a look at what's out there, what would fit them, but I would give a good nod to NetApp. They've always done us quite well.

Speed is obviously one of the most valuable features, with IOPS being the most important for certain applications: database applications and so on; performance with certain applications that has blown away the benchmarks set by the providers.

From an IT perspective, providing that as a platform for these specific databases has made us seem like gods, in short. There is a perception of IT in our organization that we're not capable or we can't provide the services that the other departments want. When they come to us and we give them space on AFF, they're blown away by the performance, as are the people that are telling them, "No, you guys can't provide it. Use these guys or go with a cloud provider." We're more than capable technically and now more than capable technologically.

I don't know if it's going to be possible in the short term to improve upon it because the drive technology is developing much faster than the processing technology, the CPU, that sort of thing. In the future, I'm sure they'll tackle that but right now, drive technology is accelerating.

We’ve had it for something like a year and a half.

We’ve purchased a second larger system and we've had no stability problems with it.

If one can afford the drives, then they're scalable. That's the caveat. Of course, there are some issues with scalability that come from the ability to crush your controller with so many drives behind it. If you have too many disk shelves, you can overwhelm a controller, one of the lower-end controllers. That’s a potential problem. It's not a problem we actually have, but it's something we have to be careful with because we have a mid-range AFF, and now we have an enterprise AFF as well. Now that we have the enterprise AFF, this isn’t an issue.

I have used technical support through a provider, C-Store. They were great.

I was consulted during the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS. It was an addition to FlexPod. We were told we needed to have flash storage to support an application when the truth was, we didn't actually need flash storage but there was an edict to do that. We went with the AFF in order to support the demands of a customer. We're happy enough with it to buy another.

In small ways. For the AFF, I was involved in the initial setup but not directly doing a whole lot of it. I consulted, and we set up the aggregates and all that based on specifications. It was straightforward and, again, we had good providers; good help makes things easy.

EMC was a possibility. I'm sure there were others. For me, it wasn't even a competition. I would have just said, "We're going with NetApp. We can talk about who's going to provide it but NetApp's the way to go." We were so heavily invested in NetApp already; also, most of our storage team had experience with NetApp and bringing in another storage vendor... learning curve and all that; we're already understaffed and over-utilized.

When selecting a vendor to work with, they have to be able to both support and anticipate our needs, communicate efficiently and clearly. Sometimes that means making changes in the way they do business in order to facilitate our needs because we have very little movement in the way we do business. We're a public school, a lot of stakeholders. We are beholden to explain ourselves to a lot of people. Those kinds of criteria are very important. Whatever we're buying has to be worth the money because we're not going to get it again very soon.

Make sure that an AFF is necessary before you buy one, because a FAS full of SSDs is very expensive and might not be necessary to meet your needs. You get plenty of IOPS out of a SAS and they are comparatively inexpensive so that you can increase your spindle count to make up for the IOPS of SSD; when you do that, you gain capacity too.

Don't let yourself be bullied by a vendor saying, "This software solution requires this level of hardware to back it up," because NetApp has already proven that's not the case.

The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases. We saw it in terms of our workloads for our customers for our products that demanded high-performance transactions for, specifically, our Microsoft SQL databases.

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

The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases. We saw it in terms of our workloads for our customers for our products that demanded high-performance transactions for, specifically, our Microsoft SQL databases. 

I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system. That's what I'm being told. That's where I think the improvements will be realized in the system; how the data is compacted inside the system and realizing greater opportunities for your storage on that medium to get higher and higher disk usage inside of that. Today, I think we've been told you can get up to four-to-one ratios. We're hoping we can even realize that even higher inside those disk subsystems. Also, we're going to get more TBs of storage inside of it in terms of the 15-TB drives. We've heard 30-TB drives are on the way, maybe even the 60s and the faster adoption rates of those disk technologies, as they come through.

We're looking at probably about a three-to-one ratio right now in the environment; it's highly transactional in our databases. Four to one would be a great improvement. We think we'll be better as time goes on. We're on the early release of the 8.3 series but until the next release of ONTAP, I think it'll just continue to see improvements as it moves forward.

I did not encounter any scalability issues. How we're seeing it right now is that it's going to be very scalable in terms of architecture. It's going to be scalable within the data center because it's actually a smaller footprint for us. I think overall durability of this infrastructure will be really good as well. I think overall, it's going to reduce our operations because we're going to spend a lot less time troubleshooting performance; we’ll have a lot more time to be more forward looking in the design and implementation.

We're very happy with the support that NetApp brings to us as a company. When we challenge them with our current problems that we have or our customers that we service have, I'm very pleased with what they do for us. We have a broad scope of problems and NetApp has a broad scope of customers. That's why we chose them as our vendor.

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

I've been using this the whole time I’ve been with this company; this is basically everything we've run all along.

I was not involved in the initial setup, just basically the attainment of the technology for our teams, for them to deploy it.

It's expensive right now. Customers probably have different viewpoints on it. It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down. It's going to continue to be driven down as technologies for SSDs continue to be released with NVMe coming out and the adoption of that technology. Spinning media will probably be relegated to archive solutions inside of our data centers from here going forward, as we end-of-life it.

I do see prices going down; I don't think it has a choice. I think the businesses will drive it that way because I think the market will drive it that way, as you see all other companies fight the big cloud providers using SSD and driving the technology down as well.

If you implement AFF, find the right workload solution for what business problem you're trying to solve initially. For us, we found the problem and a solution for it. Does it help everything? Maybe not necessarily. It depends on what your application is and what you're doing. It'll help but it might not help everything. It depends on whether the price point is right to solve that problem. For us, the price point was certainly right. We're going to continue to work toward it. As we go through time, we acquired it. We've got a taste for it now. Our customers certainly do. We'll probably be buying more of it over the next 18-24 months.

We think there is a time envelope where we're going to fully adopt it, but right now we're not too aggressive with it. We think we're just aggressive enough with the implementation. I think there's going to be a curve where the decline of spinning media will occur with the uptick of SSDs in our environment. An inflection point will happen where the price per GB will hit right in the middle and it'll be advantageous for us to do just SSDs only.

When we look to work with a vendor, the important criteria are support from that company, along with the thoughtfulness of the implementation when they bring it to you and when you're bringing problems to them and they bring a solution. You're looking for them to look forward with you and address those problems or feature sets you're looking for. They brought the all-flash array out to us to address our business problems.

I think as we continue to use it and the product matures, as we realize probably ONTAP 9 and the next feature set and versions and it grows, I think it'll continue to evolve and get better and better over time.

It's simplified operations because our storage team is so used to managing all of our stores using a single platform and by just adding flash to that same platform – the existing platforms – simplifies our day-to-day operations.

Their technical support needs improvement.

Stability is 100%. We haven't had any issues with NetApp over all of the years we've been using them; it's a great, stable platform.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give it a 10 for scalability.

With technical support, they need a little more help in there. I would give them an 8 out of 10.

Initial setup it was straightforward. Because we're so used to the FAS systems already, it was easy to add the All Flash FAS system; it was so much easier to deploy.

We did a PoC against other vendors. The decision came down to the simplicity of the platform.

We tested an EMC, an ExtremeIO, and we also did a Violin as well. As far as performance metrics, Violin actually beat all the other vendors but because of the stability and the financial turmoil with Violin, we felt a little skeptic about investing in a company that we didn't know what they were going to be tomorrow. Again, because we're a NetApp shop, to us, that made it so much easier to make the decision based on that.

Look at the simplicity of the operations and the scalability of the products. Being a small company, we're big in storage but we have a small operations group, so I think simplicity just makes our team more efficient. Adding different tools or different storage vendors is just going to add a lot of complexity into our environment.

I liked the performance; it's fast. We use it for Citrix XenApp profiles and we would always have issues in the past from spinning disk with lagging profiles. They'd be slow to log in, which impacted end users. Since we've been using the FAS solution, it's been zero down time, very good response, no issues whatsoever.

We live on the US east coast and when we have snow storms, a lot of users work remotely and that's when it impacts, as profiles get used very heavily. When you have three or four thousand users all logging in at nine o'clock in the morning, trying to pull down profiles because nobody's coming into the office and our company never closes, on spinning disk, the impact is very high. On flash, you don't see it, it doesn't even blink; cannot even tell.

Where I see room for improvement is their technical support.

Stability is the same as the spinning disk solutions. NetApp solutions, in general, I think are very stable. I don't have any issues with them.

I haven't had to scale the AFF, in particular, so I would assume it would be the same as the spinning disk solutions, where we've been able to scale to multi-node clusters.

With NetApp's technical support, when you get the right person, you have a good response. Sometimes, it's a little hard to get to the right person. We have a support account manager, so he helps negotiate that a little bit, or facilitate that. I think NetApp support still has some work to do. Once you get the right person, you usually get the answers you need, but sometimes it's hard to get to the right person.

Installation was fairly simple.

Before choosing this product, I didn't evaluate other solutions, actually. We already had this use case, in particular, running on a NetApp filer. It kind of was a natural progression to move it to a flash filer.

I think that you need to evaluate your use case and do a proof of concept, testing on multiple platforms, and see what works best for you.

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.

• Performance
• Density per rack unit from the capacity perspective with some of the other drives.

It solves the performance issues of the past. 

The primary use case for my customers is enterprise vSphere workloads or Oracle workloads. We have customers using it for both block and file storage.

This is not a directly specific to AFF, but I like the idea in the cluster that the data from ONTAP would allow having a mix of All Flash HA pairs with hybrid arrays. This allows for a somewhat tiered approach for storage. So, that is cool.

I am excited to see how the data fabric story plays out from the entire NetApp portfolio that connectivity of all the different devices. I know in the beginning when it was first spoken about, SnapMirror was something talked about. I liked that idea of just having the ability to transfer data between different NetApp platforms, and that would obviously include the All Flash line.

Cluster data ONTAP as an operating system is very stable and very mature. We seemed to like with 9.2 that there is inline deduplication at the aggregate level. That is a welcomed addition.

Since we are talking 24 nodes for NAS, that is really good. I forgot what the scale number is for block on clustered data ONTAP, but I have not run into any opportunities where we had to go beyond what we had.

When you are looking at NetApp as a scale-out NAS player, they have been in the SMB in the FAS space for long time. They have done it well. They have done the multi-protocol access, NFS to NTFS access and reverse really well. They have the ability to have a cluster of disks contained of different kinds of disks, which has been useful. Also, as a unified box, it is like the Swiss army-knife of the unified boxes.

NetApp has been excellent. Performance has improved significantly.

Because it has been used to deploy the virtualization solution, the consolidation helped optimize its center space, in terms of power, cooling, and so on and so forth. Therefore, we have had significant optimizations across the board. Also, there are SVUs to deploy virtualization solutions for our customers.

We are more like to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF, which is currently being deployed for core banking applications as well.

• The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities.
• It is very easy to manage.

It is very stable. We've had no problems. Drives last for a very long time with very minimal failure, if any at all. Support is also excellent.

It's extremely scalable with minimum downtime when one has to do the scalable solution.

They are very efficient. Once you open a case, you have an engineer who is assigned and stay with you until the problems are resolved. We are reaching the right person quickly and easily.

Previously, we were using external drives for backup solutions before we came across NetApp. We switched because of the features NetApp comes with, then the ease of use.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was all straightforward.

Price is always good, as long as price is coming down, especially for flash systems. The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down.

There was EMC and IBM.

NetApp has always had a good name in the industry for providing excellent solutions, especially with the added protection functionalities, Snapshot, SnapRestore, and SnapMirror features. It makes it easy to have One-Box that provides all the solutions a customer would need to protect their data.

We decided on NetApp because of ease of use.

We use both block and file storage.

With the current release of the ONTAP also, it's going to be easy to migrate the data to the cloud, which is very good because of the trend of doing hybrid solutions now.

NetApp is doing a perfect job. Just go NetApp. You won't go wrong.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• A solution which is fast.
• It is reliable.
• Support is excellent.
• Ease of use.
• User-friendliness.