NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

NetApp is highly flexible. We can do things on the fly. Because the nodes are rock-solid, there is less downtime and maintenance. We don't have any downtime due to NetApp storage.

Our internal operations are rather static. We're a healthcare company, so we have the same product line. We don't have to fluctuate too much due to market pressure. The integration with VMware has streamlined the IT operations, where we can use vCenter to do half our BlueXP work.

One of the biggest challenges we had recently was SnapMirror. SnapMirror is rather old, but that shows how good it is. It hasn't been reinvented in so long. We're on-prem right now. I think hybrid integration with BlueXp to manage both storage types will greatly benefit us. We're not heavily involved in AI, but I am so happy that NetApp is with ARP and Cloud Insights. 

We plan to expand our NetApp usage to include more AI and ransomware protections. I want to strengthen our security posture with MFA and multi-admin approvals. We want to get off VMware and go right to Kubernetes. 

Our future investment will focus on cybersecurity. We've had partners who were attacked, infected, and went down. I won't give names. We weren't affected, but we were indirectly affected. We had to change how we communicated with them. It's coming from the top down that we all need to focus more on cybersecurity.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity throws a wrench into innovation. We only have so much money, tools, and people, but it's what you have to do. You can't just say that we're not going to do it, and we're going to develop a new product line.

We're not fully utilizing NetApp's Converge BlueXP, but it's a great help. It integrates on-prem and cold storage and provides disaster recovery. We'll see more benefits as it improves.

We implemented SnapCenter for SQL, which we provide to our customers for free. It provides hourly point-in-time recovery, which they weren't expecting, and we already had the license. They got it for free.

NetApp's price could be improved. All storage is expensive. NetApp is not cheap, but we can't return to anybody else now. We'd lose too much value. We'd be, reinventing ourselves.

We have used NetApp for 10 years.

We came from HPE and considered Dell EMC, but we're not in block storage anymore. We want the flexibility of NAS, and it wasn't hard to decide on NetApp.
It's come a long way, and we can train new employees that have never touched NetApp. They can get going in a week and start being administrators quickly using all the GUI tools. 

We've had instances before where we were on block storage with VMware. And if it fills up or anything happens, you have downtime. NetApp now gives us more alerts, so we expand it on the fly. It will auto-expand on the fly. So I think that's definitely a big outcome.

I only made the decision at the technology level about whether it would fit into our stack and provide for our needs. I never got involved in the cost, so I don't know if cost was a deciding factor. When we adopted it 10 years ago, NetApp was a different storage creature than everybody else. It was an easier decision. If we wanted to stay with block storage, we could go with anybody else, and they were almost identical at the time.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10. 

NetApp allows us to provide resiliency in operations. We had some data center outages before, however, our operations under this service offering were untouched, unscathed. Due to that, we're deploying more of the product in our infrastructure.

We had many issues with our current NAS offering with the competitor's product. With some enhancements to the Apple stack, we're able to provide a better service. It also allows us to tier off older data at a cheaper cost.

We use StorageGRID, which is now our go-to archive platform. We're able to use that tool to archive a lot of other third-party arrays from Dell EMC and Data Domain, and specifically with the PowerScale platform, we're able to archive using their native tiering tools to the NetApp platform.

We're keeping our data archive for more than seven years. We needed a cost solution that was better than AWS. We looked at different vendor offerings, including ECS and VAST, and we chose StorageGRID over them.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI influenced our technology decisions. We wanted something that would integrate with some type of malware protection. And we did a POC on Cloud Insights, and then, used the BlueX Blue classification tool to identify the data, figure out who owns the data, and to provide some governance around our data. It's a really good product. 

Once we automate the provisioning process through our cloud portal, we're going to be presenting this as a better offering to our customers. Right now, it's behind the scenes. It's word-of-mouth. We still have a ton of studios and tons of other segments wanting to get on board with our tools. 

We had some issues with some of the product's POCs; however, once the bugs are all ironed out, everything is golden. We had a lot of issues with two-factor authentication using, for example, Okta.

We looked at a few other solutions, including Pure Storage and Dell EMC.

We chose this solution based on integration with automation tools such as Ansible and the native tools of fabric cooling, and native tiering within the product.

Our next goals would be to add some type of QoS to the platform and also be able to integrate with other cloud providers as we migrate stuff back from the cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's really, really good.

While our main driver is innovation, upper leadership's concern is always cost. We're always pushed towards cost. We found a good solution with this product.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and optimization, cybersecurity, and AI. We're doing all three at the same time. We'll have to get the go-ahead from upper managers to pursue AI initiatives. At the same time, we're getting a big push from global security to do malware intrusion protection. 

We want a way to dedupe and replicate our data. We were using filers using SnapMirror, and now we're taking our snapshots across data center support on StorageGRID. 

It's helping us achieve our budget constraints while allowing us to work in other areas.

We are a semiconductor manufacturer. We use the solution for our data for manufacturing, design, research, and development. Our customers are satisfied. We deliver products on time, sometimes ahead of time. For our customers, the solution has contributed to the stability and the performance has contributed to the way we actually roll out our products. Partially our customer satisfaction is coming from the fact that we are always on time and our quality is high. And of course, storage reliability is one of the components of that.

The performance, reliability, and stability are all very good. 

NetApp has helped to streamline our internal operations and adapt to changing market conditions. Storage tools and protocols, like SnapMirror or FlexCache, have enabled us to move data more quickly and with more ease and handle distributed data pretty much without any additional hassle.

Over the years, the main features have been great, and the introduction of Snapshot has become really big. Most recently, it's been the addition of FlexCache.

We'd like to see data move faster. We have distributed data around the world and we'd like to synchronize and move data faster between our locations.

We'd like to have faster reaction time to particular needs.

We have been using NetApp since 1996.

We plan to deploy more servers to more locations and enable FlexCache for most of our data.

The customer support, the amount of experts that the solution has as a company, and then making them available to us, has been great.

There are a lot of competing companies, in particular, EMC and Pure Storage. We have the most familiarity with this product since we've been using it for over two decades.

We haven't tried everybody in the world, and we probably don't want to say that the solution is the best since we don't want them to rest on their laurels. That said, I would easily rate NetApp nine out of ten.

Now, all other companies are copying that solution's success.

The most important aspects of any solution are cost and innovation.

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.

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.

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.

We're using NetApp to make sure everything is secure, in a single location, and easy to maneuver and manipulate when the time comes for it.

The storage solutions that we use allow us a lot more peace of mind.

We've had situations where our HVAC unit became unreliable, and we've had a number of occasions where we've had to shut down our services in order to preserve what data we did have. This solution has allowed us to maintain our data securely and safely, and we don't have to worry about it. We simply brought the service back up, and then all of our data was still there and intact. Our customers appreciated that.

The solution helped streamline our internal operations. It's pretty much allowed us to focus on larger tasks on hand versus constantly wondering how our storage is going to be. For example, we never worry: "Are we going to run out of it?" or "Are there any configurations that we have to consistently change?" Being able to focus on much larger tasks on hand and not have to consistently worry about our storage solutions has been a big plus. It's also allowed us to streamline things and put our focus where we really need to put it.

In terms of improvement, they could help with knowledge transfer. I'm working on sitting down and getting familiar with the different storage solutions and technologies that are already available and just need to keep myself abreast of what's coming up. 

One of our chief priorities is expanding our storage to the cloud. That's one of the biggest aspects that the client is working towards—putting a lot in the cloud instead of having an on-prem setup. It will be more agile, if you will, and allow our customers to effectively do their jobs with little to no interruption.

We haven't had any real challenges with it. Everything's been pretty smooth and straightforward. Of course, if we've had any issues, we can easily get on the phone with our reps, and they'll give us an answer nearly the same day or within 24 hours of us asking. They're really responsive. We've had very few issues, if at all.

When I came on board with my company, we were all already pretty waist-deep with this particular product. This solution is the only one we've used before, and we'll probably continue to use it in the foreseeable future. 

Future investments will be prioritized around AI. AI is one of the big aspects that we're working on. That, of course, eats up a lot of storage and, of course, working on shifting to the cloud instead of just on-prem. That's one of the aspects that we're chiefly working towards and making headway on. So it's a matter of just getting to the finish line. 

Our priority for our client is to be able to provide that service quickly, effectively, and on budget. Having our customers able to go forth and do whatever they need to do with little to no interruption or hiccups along the way is important. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I haven't really gotten too deep into it. I've gotten deep enough to know that I trust this trust this material. I'm pretty sure if I've had a lot more experience, it'll be a ten, sure enough. It is definitely a very solid system. I would recommend NetApp to anyone.