NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

The ease of data access has enabled faster service delivery for customers. It is easy to get whatever data they like quickly across sites. That has made it much easier for us, but it is also quicker and easier for them to request things, and then they can get what they need.

We have one pane of glass. We do not have to waste a bunch of time. We can streamline even simple things like logging into individual applications or individual NetApp hardware. We can automate things and govern who has access to what, not only on the application and software side but also on the hardware side, and I love that. It keeps everything secure.

This week at NetApp INSIGHT has been great because it has offered a lot of additional information on things that we are looking into. We are new to NetApp, so ONTAP has been the thing that delivered the most value to our organization and changed things for us. Based on where we came from, it is a ten out of ten. Based on where we may be able to go with it, in terms of the expandability of the feature set and the vision that we have been hearing about this week, it is definitely a nine or maybe a ten.

We would not have been able to have the data access and the ability to control it the way we needed without this technology. We have multiple ways of access. We have flexibility and backup and disaster recovery opportunities for replication that we did not have before. That really helped.

We wanted data security through our NetApp technology investments. We wanted the ability to govern multiple pieces of hardware across multiple sites through a single pane of glass. We wanted to get very granular with what groups get what and all that. There is now a significantly easier way to handle all of that. We can do that more quickly for our business.

Previously, we were pretty limited in disaster recovery, backup solutions, and things like that. Snapshots and other features have dramatically improved our situation.

When it comes to AI, at this point, you cannot get away from AI. You are being shoved into it quickly. NetApp has allowed us to adapt to that. The journey is accelerating, and we are able to adapt much more quickly to it.

We are able to expand our flexibility in both data access and data security. It will allow the business to be freer to request things from us and to innovate in their space. They are free from having to worry about whether we have the technology to handle that or whether we have the expertise to handle that.

It provides simplicity. Previously, there was not any kind of unified structure to our multisite storage infrastructure. We now have multiple sites where we have been able to install NetApp, and through ONTAP and BlueXP, control all of them from one pane of glass, which has been very powerful for us.

We talked to almost everyone such as Dell EMC and Pure Storage. NetApp was the only one we found to be cost-effective, which obviously was a huge concern, and it also had the unified ability. The feature set was just head and shoulders above what we saw.

We are not a huge company, but we are big enough. We have lots of sites in the US and also in Europe. The ability to make that feel smaller was a big deal for us.

We have plans to expand how we use this solution in the future. There is a ton of growth opportunity in terms of how we technically use the product, and it is also exciting how our clients will experience the speed and access security in their actual jobs.

We hear a lot about ransomware, security, early detection, and proactivity. That is the space where we are focused because it feels that we are playing catch up constantly on that.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage in general, but cybersecurity is right up against it. They go hand in hand. Our clients are asking for more and more transparency about how we are protecting their data while also serving them well. 

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. I hope the same vision will continue.

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'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.

I work in the defense industry. We have lots of data silos, more than there are colors of paint in the paint store. Trying to get people to agree on how and if they can combine those and how they can share them easily and securely is a big challenge. The solution has an architecture that emphasizes consistency above all else, and that's why they're successful. That's why, as an architect, I've been successful in convincing somebody to go ahead and buy it, consume it. They find not just performance or capacity improvements. They find operational improvements in ease of accessing the data, how consistently people can find what they're looking for quickly, and how they can integrate it with their applications. They provide not just storage. They provide a real solution.

In some cases, we design systems that have to go in strange places. They might have to go to space. They might have to go underwater. Having all manner of different data come into a system sometimes is not well understood. Is it block? Is it file? Is it something else? This solution has all of those services no matter what scale you buy. The result is that we don't have to wait until the customer knows what their data mix would be. We have a comprehensive solution that could accommodate anything. We can fly it earlier and get them in the air testing and prototyping much faster than they could have with other solutions. Customers have been very successful in places that probably no one else could have been thanks to the solution's consistency.

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident.

We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability.

It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time.

We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. 

For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

We have to work with technology that we can deploy ourselves, run where we decide, and not necessarily anywhere, and that can survive for long periods of time disconnected from a cloud. For us, that's probably been one of the bigger cybersecurity challenges: how do we maintain security, maintain updates, patches, profiles, policies, and all that stuff without subscribing to a service from your friendly neighborhood cloud provider? This product does a better-than-average job of that. 

They are continuing to offer fanatically good support. That is what's always cemented in my mind why the solution is positioned as a leader. They support people in organizations and missions in ways that others don't or don't necessarily have to. 

We looked at companies like Hitachi, Dell, and EMC, to name just a few. The reason this solution was chosen was the software feature set. We needed flexibility in how things were stored, but with common operations and a common set of AFF, rather than segmented, siloed solutions. Some of those other companies are getting better and better at that. They've streamlined their product lines. They have one model for how they deploy everything. That said, it's obvious where that has meant the lowest common denominator is all that they can offer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. They are competitive. I wouldn't give anyone in this industry a ten out of ten.

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.

We're a hospital, and we do a lot of imaging tasks. Specifically with our cardiology imaging, we had a lot of issues with the data transfers to the FASM. Once I moved all of that over to the AFF, all of that went away.

NetApp AFF has helped reduce operational latency. From going from our old FAS systems to AFF, I already see massive performance improvements.

For years, my company used EMC, and EMC really wasn't doing what we needed it to do. 

Some of our sales reps invited my boss and a previous administrator to NetApp INSIGHT. From there, they got to see everything work. The administrator got the certification and they actually bought it right there. AFF just fits the bill for the company. 

AFF has helped us simplify our infrastructure. 

The simplifications have improved our operations. Our operations used to be one to two hours, just trying to set up simple shared drives and things. Now, I do it in a couple of minutes. It's taking a lot of weight off of me.

NetApp helped to reduce support issues like performance tuning. It's the auto-support features and everything that just fires off to NetApp and they're back to me within minutes of those auto-supports firing off. It's things that would normally take days to resolve, now take minutes using NetApp.

ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day.

NetApp AFF has absolutely helped to simplify our infrastructure. One hundred percent. It's still getting us very high performance for our business-critical applications.

There are features that are available but we haven't purchased them. We haven't delved into the cloud environment too much. BlueXP offers a lot of options that I would like to see, but it's not available with what we currently have. 

They should make these features a little more affordable.

I've been using it for less than a year. We've had it at our company for years, but I've been working with it since March. 

I've never had any major issues out of it other than the drive or node failure. The way it's configured is not an issue. We never saw any dip in performance or anything. 

Scalability is fantastic because we work with new clinics all the time. Usually, I have to spin up some new volumes for those, and it's no problem at all. We're looking at Keystone right now, and that's going to help it quite a bit more.  

The customer service and support are fantastic. A couple of weeks ago, I had a drive go down, and they had one out to me the next morning.  

I had a control board go down on one of my nodes a few months ago, and they sent a guy out to me the next day.

Positive

We previously used different solutions. We opted for AFF because of its flash capacity. The all-flash capacity is fantastic.

I enjoy understanding how the setup works. I never have any issues with it. 

The previous guy set it up before me, and I've picked it up and run with it. I haven't really had any issues since then.

We saw an ROI in terms of turnaround times on our data. It provides patient care at a much faster speed than what we normally would be able to.

In future releases, I would like to see some nonprofit licensure tiers because it's a nonprofit hospital, so it's competing with more commercial licensing. It gets a little more expensive for the nonprofit.

My company evaluated different options, but AFF was definitely one of the front runners.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. 

NetApp has increased our speed. It can speed up our production and save us time. Our production runs on NetApp, and the data cannot be disturbed. It gives us the capacity and speed we need for our production data. 

NetApp's new technology will improve our skills, which we can use to improve the company. We will have the architecture to deal with production issues and improve our production environment, enabling us to make more money. For example, adding AI technology will significantly enhance our operations because AI can perform traditional maintenance and routine jobs.

Our investment priority should be security because we're still growing on a straight path. The second one should be a true cluster. NetApp's cluster is still not an actual cluster. Then we'll have a perfect product.

I like NetApp's edge visualization and load balancing. 

NetApp could lower the price and offer a true cluster architecture. It's currently a 1.4 cluster, not a real 2.0 cluster.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.