NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It has sped up everything through the all-flash storage. Everything is faster than it used to be. Everybody can access their VDIs fast and get to their servers fast. There is probably a 5x or 10x faster speed, but I am not sure. It is just quick. Nobody is waiting for things anymore.

The switch to the work-from-home model because of COVID was the key challenge that our business wanted to address. Before COVID, it was all in the office, and then after COVID, everyone was working from home. We wanted to scale the VDIs easily and spin up VMs that people can use on a day-to-day basis.

All-flash storage has definitely delivered the most value to our organization. We have a large VDI deployment, and there is now no wait time when they are booting up. Everything is quick. Everything builds fast. I would give it a ten out of ten. It is easy to use. It just runs. I never have to touch it. Without it, we would probably not have been able to grow our VDI deployment. The compression and dedupe required would not have been possible without it.

I would like to improve the ransomware aspect. We get a lot of false positives, and there are no details of what is happening. This seems to be already fixed in the new version.

Previously, we have used Hitachi and other lesser-known solid-state storage vendors. I do not know the reason for choosing NetApp at the time because I was not there for that decision.

I am familiar with other solutions. The advantage of the NetApp solution is that it is easy to use. SnapMirror is very nice and easy to set up. It is easy. When we push in a volume, it is automatically replicated to our DR site. It is touch and go. We can do it with one click.

We have been working with NetApp for the last five to eight years. We have not evaluated any other solution. We have been happy with them, so we stuck with them.

We definitely like the anti-ransomware capability. That is cool to have. I am excited to go to the new version where we also have fewer false positives. There is all-new reporting which is cool, so I will have to look at how to do more in-depth reporting than what we do now.

Data is always growing. We will see where our usage goes. We have had the biggest impact by going to the all-flash storage. We just purchased a C800, so that would be around for the next couple of years. We do not have any goals for our next technology investments over the next couple of years.

We are not yet too big on AI. It would be exciting to try to use some of the AI features. I want to see how that works.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

NetApp has sped up delivery for our virtual environment. It's been a great solution. Our customers have been amazed and overjoyed with the performance of our virtual environment, which uses VDI for virtual desktops and VMware for our virtual host servers. Everything is working seamlessly. 

We plan to expand our use of NetApp solutions, and we're already in talks about this. We will be looking at the new ASA products they just released to see if they're more suitable for us than the C-series and what the cost is. We would love to have flash storage, but we'll see how much that costs.

A Flash environment would be great. We still have some spinning disk storage, and we hope to get rid of those completely and go all SSD. So we're looking for that to be within our budget

The NetApp C-Series storage soutions are the most valuable to us. I would rate them 8.5 out of 10. 

Customer support is a hot-button issue, so we definitely need better customer support. We get some support from our vendor that helps. If the C-Series had a more user-friendly GUI, that would help us get our LUNs built and data storage connected faster. 

We've been with NetApp for years. We considered switching to HPE Nimble Storage, but we decided to stay with NetApp and upgrade our environment to the C-Series. With NetApp, support has been a pain point, but the price and warranty costs are perfect for our budget. 

NetApp is offered at a reasonable price point, so it has saved us money. Our primary goal is to keep our costs low. We're hoping that the next line of products will include a more budget-friendly option. 

I rate NetApp solutions 8.5 out of 10. Improving support would increase the rating. They could also enhance and streamline the GUI to make management more efficient. 

I am a storage engineer at a government ministry. We enable our customers to use storage on-site because we are a government entity and don't use a public cloud. We enable almost all features available within the NetApp portfolio.

Governments are quite slow when it comes to business. I'm always trying to bring the storage side up to speed with current technology and hoping the rest of the organization follows. They're doing that but at the speed of a government. 

It's heading there, but when I got here five years ago, they had no plan for the storage infrastructure. I first needed to get everything on a level playing field to have storage for specific business cases like VMware, user data, and SAP HANA. I had to set everything up correctly. Now, I'm trying to step it up a notch to get to 2024. 

Our data includes every Dutch person's social security numbers, so we cannot have that on a public cloud. Our biggest challenge is to rebuild the public cloud privately. 

When I arrived, we were far behind anything that works on the market, so I first needed to get the basics in order. I am busy setting up ransomware detection and application policy rules. Once I complete that, the next step is to get AI within the data center.

I hope other teams from our environments, like the Linux and Yammer teams, will join. We already have a storage grid so we can use S3. That's not a problem. We use all those things. The only thing we need to do is build it ourselves. 

NetApp's most valuable features are ONTAP, FabricPool, and media storage.

I would like NetApp to be more aware of organizations that don't run it on a public cloud. Everything is built on the cloud, so if you want to run BlueXP in an environment like ours, it's a real pain because it wants to host too much info on the cloud. 

It causes some friction with the security guys. BlueXP is also there in complete dark side mode, but it's a significant hassle to install and create. You don't get all the features. You're trying to get the same out of it because you have your own data center, and you can't go out due to government regulations. 

I've been an admin working in the NetApp environment for a long time. I used NetApp with different companies before but have worked at the ministry for five years.

I've used their support multiple times. One aspect that stands out about NetApp support is that the system is yours. You have it in your data center, so it's your system. You can press any button that's in there. Nobody will say you can't do it. Support will say that it was foolish to press that button but won't stop you.

A lot of other storage vendors don't allow that. They have the interface they want you to be in. They say no if you need to do something under the hood because there is a problem. You have to go through support for that. But what if we have multiple issues? We don't need to go to support to make changes. I can run ConfigAdvisor, and support says it's okay. 

Positive

NetApp was deployed when I joined this organization. They asked me to help because I was already involved with NetApp. I'm constantly checking if someone has a better solution than NetApp, and the answer is "no" in most cases. Especially with old-fashioned NAS environments, I haven't seen a competitor that does a better job or costs less. 

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. I give it a high rating because of the support. Nothing is ever perfect. For example, ONTAP is a software solution with millions and millions of lines of code. Something can always go wrong with it. Bugs happen, but I like that you have a very good support organization behind it. I've found bugs that were so incredibly large that NetApp couldn't roll out systems to other customers for 48 hours until they solved the bug.

We recommend NetApp for all our clients that have traditional infrastructures with two servers and some companies that are in manufacturing or the public sector. We have many different experiences with NetApp.

NetApp AFF has helped our clients simplify their infrastructure while delivering high performance to their business-critical applications. We have a lot of clients that use SQL Server with NetApp, and we have noticed improved performance. We usually recommend NetApp AFF instead of SaaS because it's much faster.  We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from our customers about the reduced latency. 

I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone. 

I don't work on the technical side of things, so it's hard for me to highlight areas of improvement, but maybe the price could be a little better. 

We first implemented NetApp AFF in 2016. 

We haven't faced stability issues with NetApp AFF. 

NetApp AFF is scalable.

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. We've gotten good feedback from our customers. They're very satisfied. 

Positive

We sometimes offer clients alternatives to NetApp like HPE and Dell EMC. While we typically recommend NetApp, some clients prefer other storage vendors. We had one client who used Pure Storage, but they asked us to try NetApp. Today, none of our customers have Dell EMC. 

NetApp AFF offers some cost advantages because the product has a long lifecycle. The clients don't need to change their storage solution every two to three years. Customers can extend their guarantee to six or seven years. 

NetApp isn't the cheapest solution on the market, but the price is good for the performance we get. 

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10. Our customers are satisfied with the performance. We never have any problems with the data speed. 

We are the local government, so we have a lot of customer data. With NetApp, we feel secure. We feel our data is safe. NetApp has good compute, so our apps run faster with this solution.

We use ransomware protection, which is very good technology that NetApp provides to us. We can enable it with one click and our data is secure. We do not have to use any other product to protect the data when our data is residing on NetApp. 

I would rate the ransomware protection technology an eight out of ten. Without it, it is very hard to manage our data and protect our data. Nowadays, we see all kinds of attacks on public data. Without NetApp, we would not at all feel safe.

We just updated to the latest version, and the GUI has changed a lot. It is user-friendly. Everybody can use it, not just the technical people.

Their customer support can be better.

We opened a couple of tickets for their support. Not all of them were bad. We had issues with some of them. For example, we scheduled a meeting with their support at 5 PM after hours, but their support never showed up.

We first chose to have Pure Storage, but after the PoC and a few trials, we decided to go for this solution because it is stable and scalable. It is also more user-friendly.

We have not used a lot of features that NetApp provides. The only feature that we use right now is ransomware protection. For ransomware protection, NetApp stands out for our company.

Innovation was a factor in our decision-making process. NetApp updates its products almost every day. They are on top of the technology. They now have AI, ransomware protection, cloud, and other things.

We need to migrate our data to the cloud. It is difficult to migrate the amount of data we have in a short time. Our current challenge is migration.

We would like to use NetApp Cloud. That will have a big impact on my company because it will be easier to use for us and more secure. We would not have any headaches related to expanding or scaling it. Our goal is to move to NetApp Cloud.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. These are the top priorities that we have right now.

It is hard to say if the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced our technology decisions. That is because we have to provide the information or data to AI in order to get the AI working correctly, but I would consider using AI.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Better customer support will make it a ten.

The most common use case of NetApp AFF is as block storage and file-level storage. 

From my standpoint, NetApp AFF is the most powerful enterprise solution. I find it to be highly flexible, allowing me to do whatever I want.

It is pretty flexible. Additionally, ONTAP is a very powerful operating system, and there are many use cases related to data protection, integration with the cloud, and monitoring solutions. NetApp has great documentation, and as a NetApp partner, I also have access to the NetApp Partner Portal and their learning center, where I can learn a lot. Partner Portal is a big plus.

They have great support. They have great documentation. They have learning sources. They have everything. You can even download the ONTAP simulator and deploy it on your virtualization platform and test almost all features.

SnapMirror is one of the best replication mechanisms in the world, and it is very well described. NetApp has good integration with other vendors such as Veeam, Commvault, and other backup solutions.

I do not like the NetApp GUI. For example, the GUI of ONTAP Command Manager could be better, but the CLI is perfect. With every new version and upgrade, they change things, which makes it messy, and I am not good at working with that. Even for monitoring, I use other tools. I am totally command-line oriented.

I have used NetApp AFF for five years.

I have not encountered any stability or performance issues.

I am satisfied with their customer service. I have had no problem.

Positive

I have worked with Dell solutions. It is pretty simplified for end users, but it does not offer as much flexibility as NetApp. You do not know what is happening in the background. They have simplified their GUI, and it is easy to use. However, when you want to try something from the command line, it is not so comfortable. You have to read the documentation. The ONTAP command line interface is quite extensive.

Dell's support is so expensive. We have a NetApp partner portal tool, which is called the TCO estimator. When we compare these two, Dell's support is expensive. It is good, but it is expensive. The support of both NetApp and Dell is good.

I do not deal with pricing, but the pricing of NetApp and Dell seems pretty close.

NetApp support is cheaper than Dell support.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten.

We're using NetApp AFF primarily for file and block storage. We have deployments for remote sites and our data centers, and we also use it for NAS file storage, both NFS and CIFS. We're also using it as a cloud backup, so it is like our tertiary spot for cold data or snapshots. 

Our team is gaining experience with ONTAP, which works similarly in the cloud with Azure. As the business has more requests for spinning up new apps in Azure, we'll have the expertise to deploy that quickly in Azure natively with ONTAP stuff. 

Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us. 

AFF is simplifying our operational model. We get a lot of requests from our DBAs for routine operations like quick snapshots, backups, or something related to storage. Those requests happen all the time. You could do that with PowerMax, but the process on NetApp is more straightforward and less prone to error. We're a small team supporting a global organization, and every minute we can shave off our routine operations does make a difference for us. It enables us to focus on major projects instead of everyday work.

I'm not in the weeds in terms of costs. One of my other colleagues handled that a little more than I did, but time is money, and we can respond faster to requests. That saves everybody's time, improving efficiency and productivity. You get angry when you're on the other side, making requests and waiting. You're like, "Why have they not finished it yet?" Your morale, effectiveness, and productivity can go down. That can spiral out of control. It's a ripple effect of the little things adding up to make a big difference, so that's where I would frame it in terms of cost-effectiveness. 

We have quite a few active-active processes in our data center. We have primary and backup data centers and high-performing databases that require active-active workloads over a 10 gigabit WAN connection. And we are usually at about 1 millisecond latency at all times. So we're hitting it with lots of stuff, and it doesn't bat an eye. It's been very high-performing and easy to use.

I've only been using AFF for about a year now, so I don't have many criticisms. I wrote a lot of the automation for our initial migrations from PowerMax to NetApp and as well as automation related to refreshing our production systems. We clone a lot of our production systems to the testing or QA environments so our developers could use real production data in a safe environment.  

I worked with the APIs quite a bit, including the REST API. We're working to move out from RDMs to do more VMDK-based disks in VMware, which will allow us to use SnapCenter for more efficiency. SnapCenter makes things even simpler than they already are. Additionally, once we are on VMDKs, we’ll be using the SnapCenter API, which I like even better than ONTAP's REST API. 

The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different. 

That 5 percent mostly come from response data being returned slightly differently than the ones you've already worked with. It's easy enough to work around but blows up in your face the first time you try it, so you inspect the response to see what changed. I would like it if they worked a little harder to get that a little more perfectly standardized. Thankfully the documentation is top notch, so if you aren’t sure of something specific you can just look it up.

NetApp AFF has been rock-solid. We've had it in production. We did have a node blip recently, but it auto-recovered. Support was automatically alerted, and they told us to check it out. Support had already identified the bug, and there was already a patch for it.

We purchased NetApp AFF with scalability in mind. We ended up going with the A900, which is a switched design, so expanding nodes out will be trivial. For some of our smaller sites, we use the A150, and we don't expect that we will need more. If necessary, we can buy some more A150s and expand without much fuss.

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. NetApp AFF reduces support issues like performance tuning and troubleshooting. EMC didn't fail regularly, but EMC support has decreased in quality over the years, and getting satisfactory problem resolution has been challenging. That was one of the factors that started getting us to look at other alternatives. We certainly have had our fair share of implementation issues and little bugs here and there. We ran into a panic bug the weekend before flying over here [to NetApp Insight 2023]. But that was an auto-support case from NetApp and quickly resolved.

They were aware of the problem before we were. It automatically recovered. They found the bug for us and gave us a patch to use when we were ready. In most cases, it was pretty simple. NetApp support has been top-notch.  I've not had any issues working with NetApp. They've been some of the best and brightest people I've worked with in my career.

Positive

We previously used EMC PowerMax. The biggest reason for the switch is that we needed a cloud-ready, cloud-first solution. PowerMax is still a fine platform if you are committed to on-prem and have high-performance on-prem workloads and use cases. It could still be a perfect product for you. However, PowerMax may be limiting if you know your business requirements will take you to the cloud. That's where we were at. Our business was pushing us into the cloud, and we needed more of our workloads to be replicated in the cloud or cloud-native. PowerMax wasn't the right solution for that. 

PowerMax is an aging platform so it doesn't have the flexibility to easily migrate into the cloud. We need our hot-tier data readily accessible on-prem and to be able to access cold storage in the cloud through Azure or whichever provider you want. But we use Azure. That was a key factor for us. We currently use cloud tiering to Azure for automated cold storage processes (mainly for file level data) and we are still exploring additional use cases for future and expanded operations.

We did a six-month proof of concept and put it through its paces. We had a cluster in our primary and backup data centers. We tested out SnapMirror Business Continuity quite thoroughly. That was a new technology for us, and it's still fairly new in its own right. We even did some automation in the proof of concept where we built out a process that explored what our refresh process would look like on NetApp. We were able to bang that out in about three days. It was easy. I was involved with that from day one.

We partnered with CDW during implementation. They've been a fantastic value add for us. We also worked with a rep from NetApp, but we met a lot of NetApp people and CDW people. Both companies brought deep knowledge and expertise. We had a long list of questions that they answered to our satisfaction.

I wouldn't be able to quantify the ROI in dollars and cents, but we've seen improvements in terms of saving time and increasing our effectiveness. My background is in virtualization and networking. I was new to storage when I started working with NetApp only a year ago. It has been easy to figure out. As we grew our infrastructure team, it has been easy to onboard them and get them up to speed, so it's much easier to realize the value we're looking for.

When we bought NetApp, it was very reasonably priced. When you factor in the time savings, it's highly cost-effective. 

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10.  I would recommend AFF depending on your use case. PowerMax might be right for you if you're completely on-prem and have high-performance needs. You need to understand your business requirements and what your developers and DBAs need. It's crucial to figure out exactly what's driving the business. Plot out what the next year or five years will look like and ensure you're in a position to handle those needs. 

Once you know what those needs are, you'll be able to ask NetApp or whatever vendor the right questions. Those should be tough questions you ask your vendor and you should take them to task. If they don't give you good answers, they need to figure something out because you don't want something that doesn't solve your problems. That's pointless. 

If you have your list of requirements, and there's five things on the list, and storage solution A does two of the five. And you've got another one storage vendor B has five out of five. Are you really gonna buy two solutions if one has a specialty feature? Because maybe one does one better/is more performant? Or are you gonna buy the one that does five and handle everything. We had a very long list of complicated protocols and setups and NetApp checked every single box.

To accommodate growth, we invested in the technology to manage data that must be retained for at least six years to comply with legal requirements. Consequently, as our data storage reaches capacity, the overall size of our storage grid has significantly increased.

NetApp has been essential to our data management for the past ten years. Our environment includes FAS 8200 and AFF 300 systems, with a storage group dedicated to aggregating clinical data for use in New York State. This enterprise-level solution has served us exceptionally well, and we rely on it heavily.

The utility of the SSDs with the AFF series. We have some high-performing databases and high-performing active computational use from those systems. So, that's been pivotal in terms of performance. We ingest a lot of data, and having the ability to deliver that data for our analytics is paramount.

Our company is constantly evolving, with new demands and features emerging. This solution helps us maintain momentum and stability.

The AFF series SSDs delivered the most value to our business. We definitely needed the horsepower. I would rate them nine out of ten. It is a high demand in our environment. So once we know that our developers and DBAs need that, everybody wants it. That's the only caveat, not giving it a ten because now, it's a demand that we need to get as much as we can regarding scalability. We also have other technologies that help out the storage grid because we have a whole storage box. Additionally, we must retain clinical data for a certain number of years to comply with state regulations, which prevents us from purging old data.

I am trying to take advantage of all available features to protect our data, especially considering the high risk of ransomware. To ensure data security, we will explore various options, including replicating data to our disaster recovery site. NetApp can help in these endeavours by focusing more on security.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I would rate NetApp eight out of ten.

Given the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI, we are freshening up our cybersecurity, and AI is an initiative our senior management wants us to look into.

We were part of another organization that separated, and they always had NetApp.

We are investing in additional hardware and increasing our focus on NetApp resources to address expiring tools and facilitate expansion.

We expect the expansion to positively impact our organization, allowing us to scale our business.

Our company always has initiatives to expand its capabilities, and NetApp can help with that.