NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The most valuable features are cost, performance and usability. NetApp’s really good with usability; to get it up and running quickly and usable.

We've been using for our internal cloud environments, for internal cloud storage. Response time's very fast. Capacity's very good. Performance is very good; it's quick.

We've only had it in production for about three months, so we don't have a lot of time with it. For what we're using it for, it's been fine. I don't know of any issues or anything that we need to do, that I would request additional features right now, aside from the scalability improvements I’ve mentioned.

I know we use external monitoring. There's some level of monitoring on the systems themselves, but we do use a lot of external monitoring, whether it's NetApp versus third party. I know with ONTAP 9, they're working on more monitoring capabilities and more features within the unit, but they don't have that yet. I would like to see more monitoring onboard, on the system, instead of having to throw another third-party system at it.

I've been a NetApp customer for quite a while, at least 12 to 13 years. Stability's never been an issue for any of our systems that I've been associated with; it's been very good. We haven't had any issues with those units, knock on wood, so far; it's been good.

Scalability has been OK. We've been scaling them vertically instead of more horizontally because you can only scale the FAS horizontally so far, so we've scaled out vertically.

I would like to see them improve its ability to scale vertically. With flash, you can only drive so many IOPS, the controllers can only handle so many IOPS. There's a limit; there's physics, a mathematical limit that they can do.

It's been a long time since I've actually called technical support with a case. I try not to call tech support. At my level, I usually need something like a third-level support. You call in, you have to say what your issue is, they can't help you and then they have to pass it to the next person and then usually it's third level. Usually, it's a third-level, advanced person that I would need to speak to.

They've been fine. Once you get to that level, someone that's knowledgeable, support's fine.

In this environment, we were using spinning disks. When we needed to expand capacity, that's when we decided to go with all flash, and NetApp made it very price competitive. They were trying to push those units, so it was worthwhile to get flash instead of more spinning disks.

NetApp's initial setup is very straightforward. It's very easy to get up and running within a day, as long as you have the cabling in place and the power, but that's outside of NetApp's control. Once you have that infrastructure in place and they come on site, it's very easy to get up and running within a day.

Before choosing the All Flash FAS, I also considered Hitachi. We chose NetApp because NetApp is in our internal cloud, and that's what we were expanding. We didn't see the need to switch vendors at that point. NetApp's easier than Hitachi HNAS to get up and running.

For my manager, price is the most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with. NetApp's been very competitive with pricing over the last 2-3 years.

NetApp's features are easier, and the capabilities are a lot more advanced than Hitachi and other vendors that we look at. The software's much more mature than the other vendors. That's why I like NetApp. It's easy to use. It's easy to get down to what you want to do with it; the features and capabilities are there.

Everybody pretty much can do the same. The issue is how complicated it is to get to what you're really trying to do. That's the one thing that I've seen. NetApp does a good job. They're much more mature, as I’ve mentioned. It's easy to drill down to get to the data, get it set up and get it configured, and it works.

We've only been using it three months. We haven't hit any issues with it yet; I can't say that we won't, but I'm not expecting to.

It reduced the overall latency in our Citrix infrastructure. We have a pretty robust Citrix infrastructure. Before putting in the All Flash FAS, end users would see a lot of latency. That's been the biggest improvement, along with a lot of improvement in the overall performance of our SAN and a few other data intensive applications.

There was noticeable latency before the All Flash FAS. Since the All Flash FAS, it is extremely fast, no latency whatsoever.

I would basically just like to see improvements with the reporting; consolidating metrics, performance and any sort of issues. Right now, there are a lot of different tools, a lot of different places to go to see the overall health of the system. I would like one place, a dashboard, to see everything. I know there are some things that NetApp has released and are releasing, but we haven't gotten to the point where we've implemented those yet.

It is extremely stable; never had any down time or issues with it. It's fully redundant. All of the updates have pretty much been non-interruptive; it’s an extremely stable platform.

It scales out well. It’s a new All Flash FAS and we looked at the overall capacities that we needed before. It's only been in place for about six months. From a scalability perspective, we know that it will scale out if we need it to, but it's a new implementation, so no issues or anything like that.

So far, we haven't needed to use technical support for this one, yet.

We did not previously use a different solution. We were a NetApp shop before that, but we were using a different controller and we weren't an All Flash FAS shop. We could see the latency. We used all the utilities, so we could see what was going on, the need and how it would help our business.

Initial setup is generally straightforward, but NetApp has good technical articles and guidance on moving from one NetApp controller to another NetApp controller. It was pretty straightforward for the most part.

We looked at a number of other flash systems and solutions for our latency issues. At the end of the day, we just decided to continue and move forward with another NetApp controller.

Reliability and availability are the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. We need them to be available. There are a lot of vendors out there that have a lot of people, but if you're building a reputation and you can't get the people you need, then it's a problem, regardless of how good the controller is.

It does what it’s meant to do; works extremely well in our environment. We have multiple data centers and the replication works really well. Overall, it's pretty easy to use.

Look at your individual company's needs. In general, look at your nice-to-haves and must-haves, and then weigh the options and see what works best. NetApp has been a great, established company. We've had a good relationship with NetApp for a long time and so we would recommend them to a colleague.

The speed and stability are the two most valuable features. I've definitely have seen a huge increase in speed and bandwidth from when we've put it in production; it's been great.

We use a lot of bandwidth in our company, so user experience is really improved because of that. The IOPS are high enough that there's no latency anymore.

I’d just like to see them continue down the road of increased storage capabilities, bigger SSDs, and bigger flash. That's a problem for us; we use a lot of storage, PBs of storage. We definitely need to keep leveraging, expanding and increasing.

I haven’t rated it higher because we haven't had it enough to vet it. So far, it's been great; haven't had any issues at all with it. Then again, we've only had it in production for a few months. We just need more experience with it.

We have been using it for 6-9 months.

Since we've had it in the last 6-9 months, we’ve not had a problem at all with it. It's been great.

We haven't really scaled it yet. From what I've seen, it looks like it won't be a problem if we need to go down that road.

We have not had to use technical support yet thankfully, other than original installation.

Before we implemented the All-Flash FAS, we had, and still have, a mixed environment of mostly Hitachi and Dot Hill. We also have LTO tape storage that we implement. I'm all over the board.

Even though I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS, we selected NetApp and the All-Flash FAS because of the speed of the flash, the reliability and the stability; it stays up.

Initial setup was just racking and stacking, basically; that was about it. Rack and stack is very straightforward; we had help from technical support to cable it. From that point on, it was pretty easy.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process, so I'm not sure who else we were looking at, at the time.

I would definitely recommend it. I think it's a great road to go down. Like I’ve mentioned, I haven't had any problems with it. The two things we were looking for, it does excellently.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are availability and knowledge: if something helps me go down the right path and pick it, if someone gives the pros and cons for everything we need, and be able to get a hold of them when I need to get a hold of them.

It uses multiple protocols and has all the implementation protocols that other products do not. We use CIFS.

We needed something faster than NFC, and we now have a 30 second latency, down from 60 seconds.

It’s too early to know the features exactly, as we get what we need. We do need, however, more training, which NetApp wasn't able to provide.

We have two devices, and have been using them for two weeks so far. We use it for VDI and Citrix. At the moment we are thinking of putting other workloads onto them.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable and we've had no stability issues.

It scales as we can just plug in more devices.

Customer service is great.

No matter the time of day or night, technical support will always try to help.

We ran VDI on EMC for five years, and it ran out of performance so we had to offload. We then decided to turn to NetApp AFF.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy, but we had a few problems implementing the devices due to a lack of training and the fact that it was a very urgent implementation.

We had great support from NetApp, but we did not do too much training. We have good knowledge of NetApp cDot. It took us a few days to install and configure.

We looked at XtremIO, Dell, Pure Storage, and Nutanix. We already have a NetApp environment, so it met our needs, and it was an urgent decision. There was no option, and we didn’t want to change back to block storage.

• Clustered Data ONTAP
• Snapshot implementation for SAP

It allows us to shrink the maintenance windows and downtime. It provides faster replications between systems because of the installed flash.

ONTAP has a lot of features that are really great, so I don’t think there is something missing that I'd like to have.

However, the best way to improve would be to have better management over the solutions globally (not a part of the software OnCommand, VFA, etc. installed). It would be great to combine all the software solutions together under a single GUI and people can just activate different features as they buy a license as apposed new installs each time.

We've been using it for four months in a multiple system environment with a lot of small writes. This was installed for an SAP HANA system as the persistency layer.

There has been no downtime yet -- perfect stability.

It scales to our needs.

10/10

We didn't have anything similar in use previously.

It's a straightforward and easy setup. It was guided and we had the documents to install it. It took around two days of racking, stacking, and installation.

I did the implementation myself.

We looked also looked at EF from NetApp and chose AFF because of the snapshot technology.

It's definitely worth it if you need the speed.

We use both NetApp's FAS and AFF solutions. It's a hybrid that we use for FileMaker. 

Our use case is to implement it for our clients.

NetApp enables us to consolidate file and block storage into one device instead of using separate devices. Adopting one device for all those services saves power in the data center while simplifying management because you don't need to manage two different systems. We save power costs at the rack site. 

One technology we hope to acquire is ransomware detection. We have block, file, and object storage, but we don't have ransomware protection. We need a second off-site disaster recovery location. 

I work on the infrastructure engineering side. I usually get to install NetApp appliances, and I like how easy the installation is. It seems to be easier than other technologies that we use. 

NetApp could offer more training for new learners because it's a relatively new product portfolio to me. 

We have used HPE and Dell EMC. Previously, we used Dell ECS for object storage and Dell PowerStore for block storage. NetApp enabled us to unify our storage services.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.

We use the solution for IBM and SQL workloads. 

The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency. 

The Bezels need improvement. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

NetApp AFF's stability, reliability, availability, and performance are top-notch. 

The solution is scalable. 

NetApp AFF's support is good. 

Positive

The tool's deployment is easy. 

I am comfortable with the pricing, which is fair compared to others. 

We wanted to enhance performance with the solution's implementation. 

We were able to simplify the infrastructure and get high performance for our business. It has reduced operational latency. 

We have been able to optimize costs by 40 percent. 

NetApp AFF has helped us with power saving by reducing the footprint of the data center. 

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We are using it for storage.

Before, retrieving data or searching for something on the application would take some time. But since we migrated to NetApp, retrieving of the data happens quickly. It's fast.

In addition, we can easily manage the volumes on the NetApp application. We are getting very good, high performance and it has simplified our data management jobs, such as creating volumes. If our hard drive fails, we can reinitialize the process, and do many other things. It's very helpful.

NetApp has helped to reduce support issues due to performance or troubleshooting as we do not have such issues. We have not faced any performance issues since installing this device.

In addition, the ONTAP data management software has simplified our operations. We use it for high-availability of our file system. If any hard drive goes down, it will automatically be recovered.

We use NetApp AFF to support cloud integration and SAP Oracle. It has made the Oracle WebLogic site very fast and we can deploy the machines very easily. We can assign storage to the server visually, and use it to manage the storage.

The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive.

Also, NetApp AFF helps simplify data management with unified data services across SAN and NAS environments.

I have been using the NetApp AFF A400 system for the last three months.

We have had no issues with its stability. It has been up 100 percent of the time since we installed it.

We can increase the storage if needed.

Currently, 60 percent of our storage is in NetApp. Another 20 percent is in HPE, and we use Synology storage for the NAS.

Their support is very good. Whenever I have contacted them, whoever has dealt with me has been good.

But the cost of support is quite high.

Positive

Our HPE system was old so we switched to a new one.

The deployment was not complex, but it was done by our vendor team. Still, it was easy. It was not a big deal.

Our experience with our vendor team was good. They are quite a good technical team with good knowledge.

We only installed it three months ago so it's too soon to talk about ROI.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost. The cost is very high compared to other devices. The HPE storage we used before was less expensive. NetApp is also more expensive than Dell EMC.

We evaluated Dell EMC and HPE storage.

The NetApp interface was very easy, as was managing things. Our experience with HPE, which we used before, was that it was quite a complex system to manage when it comes to the storage and volumes.