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.

For sure, the most valuable features are the compression and dedupe on there. We gain so much more back than we thought we were going to get; that was one of the biggest things. I don't have to worry about any kind of disk utilization problems because of the spindles or anything; that's what we've always experienced.

We shrunk our footprint and get a lot more power for the same thing; makes it simple.

I would like to see compaction, the new feature in ONTAP 9. We haven't gotten that yet. We just got everything to CDOT.

Stability’s great. I have zero worries, unlike the 6080s; that thing was unstable as heck. This thing's great.

I like the scalability, too, because the footprint is small. You just add shelves, add to it, swap it out.

We've called technical support many times. It's good. We're very hands-on in our organization, so the first level usually isn't that helpful. We usually give them about five or 10 minutes to work on it, then we say, “OK, let's escalate this; let's not spend an hour here”, but they're always helpful. It's just a matter of the first level being the first level; they don't have the insight to do any more.

We knew we needed to invest in the All Flash FAS because we were on 6200 series with 300 GB drives. We were very obsolete and we didn't want to go to a large platform, so we went to that. The price point was easy because they priced it so cheap.

I was involved with the initial setup; did the whole thing. We build it, from the time they ship it. Once they get it to us, I take care of everything; networks, the whole nine yards. It’s straightforward. It's very easy, but of course we've been doing this for years, so it could be complex and we wouldn't care.

The price keeps coming down and it's going to keep coming down.

I did not evaluate other options; that was it.

It depends on their feature set. If they just need a niche product, they may want to go to a different platform; not that they need to, but they could consider that. If they're looking for something that covers everything, then the All Flash FAS will be enough.

All of it's pretty simple. All the feature sets are very straightforward to me, coming from the FAS environment.

I have given it a perfect rating because it's easy. Nothing's wrong with it. I don't have any problems. It's easy to set up. I'm good to go. I don't have any issues with it. It's very easy to use.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they consider our needs instead of trying to shove something down our throat.

With any new technology, it comes down to the user experience. Once the system is up and running, I feel that the user experience itself sets it above several of the other competitors.

For us, it's mainly about being able to transition data from one location to another rapidly, and even do incremental updates. So, that aspect of ONTAP allows us, as well as our customers, to be able to leverage great geographic distances in order to seamlessly still present their data in one location.

The one thing that could promote NetApp's ONTAP product line to the next level would be a single pane of glass to manage all of the storage and networking resources involved. That's the big one. That would absolutely be a life-changer.

Stability has not been a concern once the system is up and running. However, before the system is up and running and during the installation, we've had some instances, but those aren't necessarily all a NetApp caveat. Those could be different hardware that's being installed in, different steps need to be taken. Getting through those sometimes is cumbersome.

We've put in several requests for some different scalable options because we provide one type of hardware. I would say that scalability went in the wrong direction when we went to NetApp Select. We had a meeting set up with the CTO at a recent conference and we were hoping to discuss different options going forward.

They actually decreased the ability to scale with the new Select platform.

The pain point specifically is with our customers. They're needing to be able to take big data with them. Most people have that data center mentality and believe that I can always reach back into the data center. However, in some of the environments we work in, it's a DIL environment, which is Disconnected, Intermittent or Limited bandwidth. In those environments, taking some of that big data with you and being able to sync at a later time is paramount. NetApp ONTAP gives us that functionality.

For me, it was the actual installation onto our company's hardware. There are several instances that came down to the unknown. The NetApp engineers, as well as my engineers, could not necessarily predict the installation difficulties. Once we overcame those, and started creating application notes for both our company, as well as NetApp's company, I believe it will help others down the road. It could help the software engineers to program different options into the installation.

We have pretty much considered everybody, from a Nutanix perspective to a Cisco perspective to a VMware solution and a couple other smaller mom-and-pop stores that are trying to get into the big data realm.

We decided to go with NetApp over the competitors because for a lot of the customers, their experience with NetApp, is what has driven us to use NetApp in a lot of our solutions; because of their experience in terms of support and in terms of usability; because we're not having to retrain on a new platform. That's a big one for them because that's more dollars they're having to invest.

The customer support is obviously a huge win for NetApp, even the pre- and post- sales staff. Then, the actual customer service representatives themselves do help. I would say that's probably one of the big ones. Once it's operational, as I’ve mentioned, it's very intuitive and very easy to use. Some of the setup steps, you get past those and it's easy to use and operate, and that's what they like.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor are ease of use and management. And the reason why is because, as we take more technology and compress it into a smaller space, the knowledge base required for one engineer to be able to manage and operate that environment becomes very large. So, the ease of use and ease of management would be the one key thing I would focus on.

Given NetApp's strength, size and customer base, they bring a wide array of knowledge to any solution. It's just trying to find the right solution within the NetApp portfolio that will meet the customer's needs. Instead of overselling the solution, find the one that meets their requirements the best and pursue that. The NetApp sales team, as well as their support, has done a good job at helping us to realize where those little niches are, to fit in the problems.

Performance; that's the whole reason we use it. We have both FAS and AFF. Everything on our production site's running on AFF. That's the pure and simple reason: we need the flash, we need the IOPS. That's what it gives us.

I've had no issues with it. As a storage admin, it makes my job easy.

We get increased performance; a lot more stability. We don't have to worry; when Black Friday sales rolled around and our website goes down because we can't handle it. We were storage-bound in the past and AFF fixed it.

As far as my role's concerned, everything is handled pretty easily, especially with ONTAP; management's simple.

Compared to other systems I've used, the UI is much easier. I don't have too much of a problem with it, as long as you follow the documentation.

The GUI's pretty simple to me. I don't think it's that bad. I try and use command line whenever possible, but the GUI's not bad. I'm sure if I sat down, I could think of some things I would really like to have added to the GUI, or maybe make a little simpler to see in the command line. There's always – once in a while – some command that's formatted really stupidly in command line and it's hard to get an accurate view out of it.

As far as NetApp, we have not had any stability issues from it.

Scalability has been good so far. We have several data centers. We have no problems scaling it out.

I have had to use technical support a few times. They're always good. We even have a resident on-site with us and the resident's been great, helping us find new solutions, things like that.

We previously had a FAS and then we also had an IBM flash storage array. The IBM was not as reliable. We had several hardware issues with it. Then our NetApp sales rep came to us with the AFF. We had a pretty long-existing relationship with NetApp already, so we decided just to try and concentrate on NetApp solutions. It's worked out very well for us so far.

My role in the initial setup was only plugging it in, basically. It's pretty straightforward, especially with the fancy little map you get with the hardware. It was pretty easy.

We have an architect who looked at something from EMC, as well, but we're very well-ingrained with NetApp right now.

Follow best practices. Your best practices do a good job of laying out the very best way of doing it, usually, for most environments, at least.

When I’m choosing a vendor, I look at the amount of storage I’m getting for my money, the features I’m getting with that money, the support that we're getting with it, ease of use, management, and so on. What are we going to have the ability to do? What's controlled by the software/firmware? That kind of thing. We found all of those things in NetApp with AFF. As I’ve mentioned, management's been really easy for us; the ONTAP software's been great.

We have some specific workloads that are pretty demanding that struggle on spinning media. We're looking to leverage All Flash FAS to meet the workload demands of some of our real high IO clients. That's primarily why we're looking at it.

The benefits are yet to be seen. We're currently putting it in right now. It's not in production yet. It's still being installed. We tested it. We're expecting a significant workload increase from our previous-generation platforms, but we'll find out soon enough.

We just have experience with it in our testing. We tested it. It was a lot faster. We haven't put a full production workload on it yet. We expect it to be much faster.

I think it is on the product roadmap already, but I would like to see more of the cloud pools and tiering. Obviously, some workloads need the speed of flash, but some workloads also have pieces of it that don't. They'd be able to leverage the speed, but then age data moving off to object, spinning media or whatever would definitely be good for the future. It’s currently lacking that right now, but it's on the roadmap that I've seen, so I think they're heading that direction.

I’ve been probably using it for a good nine months. We had some thorough testing and looking at what workloads we can fit on it. Then, we've been through a six-month install process. That's an internal thing for us.

We haven't used it much in production yet, but as far as we can tell, it is stable.

We haven't really scaled it yet. We expect it to be scalable.

We have not used technical support specifically for this product, but in general, it's hit or miss. Sometimes, when we first call in, we get some medium-level resources that don't really solve our problems right away. Once we get to the escalation or higher-level guys, they're usually really, really good.

Our production environments are currently normal, non-flash FAS appliances. They are stressing the hardware significantly, so that's why we looked at All Flash. They run thousands of compute nodes. They want to run more but they can't right now, because the system is already maxed out. We're hoping they can scale that and run a lot more on the all-flash array.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward. Especially hardware-wise, it's not much different than what we currently have; we're pretty used to installing.

We considered quite a few vendors before deciding on NetApp. We considered EMC Isilon and a couple other smaller vendors. We eventually chose the FAS, primarily because we already have the equipment and the environment. It doesn't really change our support structure. We don't have to learn anything new. Obviously, cost is a factor, too.

When selecting a vendor to work with, they have to have a good product, number one. They have to be a good partner. Cost is obviously a factor for everybody, but it's got to be something we need that solves our needs and meets our requirements. They have to be a good partner; it's not just, “Here, you figure it out.” They work with us to make it work, which NetApp does a pretty good job of, and then make it affordable for us.

Look at TCO. Most people look at flash and just look at it as being expensive: “Can we avoid it and use something cheaper?” There are other savings besides just the straight-out, raw cost.

I think it does what we need pretty well. I can't give it a perfect rating because we haven't thrown a giant production workload on it to see how it scales and works. So far, it's doing what we need it to do.

The most valuable thing I have seen since we've got it is that predictable performance has stayed below a millisecond, which was not the experience we've had with spinning disk. So, I was looking forward to that coming in and giving my customers predictable performance, and it’s proven to be doing that for us.

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We're having a hard time deciding what goes on flash and what doesn't now. When we're doing replication, where you have an all-flash array and we're replicating between sites, we want this flash but we want to have SATA for replication, as well, for a target. So, we're having a hard time deciding, should we go FAS or should we go all flash?

While at the recent Insight conference, I talked to some of the more senior technical guys. They were able to give me the difference in impact on performance from a FAS running SSD and an all flash running SSD. There's not that big of a gap. And so, that gave me more confidence that we could go hybrid if we need to on our smaller sites, and then still get the replication done on low cost and not lose the big performance that we got out of flash.

It has been very stable, just like the other products that we've had from them in the past.

We bought small and hoped that the efficiencies would bring in what we need, and it did. But with everything going on in our environment, we actually increased it so that we can have a little more capacity. Right now, it's probably 2% utilized, which is completely different than a spinning disk, which is 70% utilized. So, the scalability's just easy to do; it's incredible.

Support, I think could use a little bit of help. We can't seem to get to the backend guys fast enough. We've had conversations with them about that. So, we would love to see some of that going on and get better support quicker, to the right guy.

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Initial setup was very straightforward, with the new optimized arrays that you can purchase and they come in with a 10-minute setup. That did take away a lot of the steps that we used to do before. So, it did come in, we were able to just plug it in and in 10 minutes have it up and running.

We were already a NetApp shop, so for us this was just adding it to the cluster. And it was time for us to do that with a hardware refresh, so we really didn't compare to others.

The most important criteria when I’m looking for a vendor are stability and availability. Cost is always thrown in there, but it's not the first one. And then support is becoming more and more important to us; being able to get to the right person at the right time.

From the All Flash, from being a NetApp customer for quite a while, having all protocols in one box is very powerful. And so, I would say, that would be a great thing to consider when you're considering the all flash array is, most of the all flash arrays out in the market today are block. They do have the file protocol, they're leading in the industry with it. And we've switched over to the file protocols quite some time ago. And we're seeing much more savings in operational costs because of the file. We take out the zoning and all of the block stuff that comes with it, and we're being very successful with file and we've reduced our operational costs significantly because of it.

I'm very happy with it and the low latency has been good. It's met the mark.

I would say the speed is the most valuable feature; the performance. It's a lot faster than any other drives out there.

I don't know if we will be looking at more features because our company, the in-house environment, has been looking into going cloud, so it's not just NetApp. We need to look at cloud-based solutions, too.

See my initial setup answer as well.

I have been using it for almost one year.

It's been pretty stable. We've been using NetApp for 15 or 20 years now and we are more or less used to it. It's been stable; a lot of filers. Even when they go off support, sometimes we keep using it and they keep running.

Now with the CDOT solution, they definitely have made it scalable.

We use it in a lot of other venues, engineering or non-engineering. Earlier there was an issue where you were limited but after introducing CDOT, I don’t think scalability is an issue now.

Technical support depends on what kind of support you buy from them. If it's a four-hour response time, then definitely, we have been given pretty good support. I think we have been getting consistent support.

It's not about finding one guy on the phone; you have the whole team behind it. If something is not acceptable to us, then we go ahead and escalate it to our sales team and then they drive it through. Sometimes you have to take some exceptions and escalate it.

In the pre-CDOT era, upgrades were a nightmare. Replacing a node was not an easy thing to do and getting downtime was not an easy thing to do. After CDOT, I'm hoping we won't be running into that situation.

We've been using NetApp for a long time and our environment is already using all the NetApp features that they have been providing so buying AFF from them was an easy pick actually.

When I select a vendor such as NetApp to work with, I don’t look just at the performance; I look at reliability, scalability, replication, disaster recovery; to be able to do this all efficiently, plus their SnapMirroring and snapshotting capability. We've been used to whatever features NetApp provides and when we look at any other storage company, they have certain pieces here and there but they say, we don't this or don’t do that.

What we see is that NetApp supports all of protocols that we need: NAS, SAN, iSCSI. It's all in one, all together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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