NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

I like the speed and that it's easy to set up. We are now using the compression and the dedupe, which is very useful in saving a lot of data space.

As I’ve mentioned, we are using the compression to save data space. We do a lot of vaulting. We have our primary storage and our secondary storage. For our secondary storage, we always had to buy big SATA disks but now we can use compression to actually save buying monstrous disks and use compression to save our secondary vault for data.

I'm hearing about compaction, I kind of want to find out more about it. I guess it's another level of compression on top of things. I’d like to just see where it takes off from there. I know that the speed of the disks isn't going to be the bottleneck anymore. As far as the NAN technology coming out, I want to find out what the feature design is for NetApp on that, too.

So far, I haven’t seen any features in other solutions that I'd like to see brought in to AFF. I'm pretty impressed with the way we run things for what we have so far.

They could always improve the pricing. It is relatively expensive. When we priced things out before, it was priced by how many GBs you need for whatever you need, how many TBs. Now, it's terabytes compressed. You're looking at a compression tool, so you don't need as much hardware to get the same amount of space. It actually is saving space in our data centers, so we're getting a lot of improvements with heating and cooling, and with tile space; half the data center's coming back. For the past two years, we've been really ramping up on different technologies and decreasing our data center space. We've been looking at AFF now for over a year now. We've been running more and more of those in.

I've been running the AFF systems now for over a year.

We have not had any stability issues. We can do vault moves and everything else. It gives us flexibility, mainly in our VMware environment, because we're all NFS. We’re able to buy new equipment, retire equipment, swap things in and out very easily.

We have not had any scalability issues so far. It's scalable, depending on what your network switch is; we're running ten-node clusters right now.

Sometimes we use technical support. It depends on who you get. The last couple of people I had were helpful. We use professional services. For example, when we do an upgrade two or three levels up, we'll mostly use professional services or our contacts. For any kind of upgrades, we'll get recommendations from technical support, and so on. They've been great.

Our main kick off was our VDI environment, our work stations, heavy writes. Typically, we were running SAS disks and they were doing good but for the right performance, you really had to have huge aggregates to carry that load. With AFF, you don't really need that because the IOPS are there and it can handle it.

Initial setup has been easier and easier because we used to set older systems up with SAS and aggregates and everything else. Now, it's kind of, start it up and let it go. It's getting a lot easier, at least on the hardware setup.

We mainly run NetApp for our NAS environment but for SAN, we run some of the other vendors. However, that's kind of coming around. People are seeing what these AFF systems are doing and I'm actually doing some testing in our SAN environment for some of the NetApp stuff, too. It might be a good thing. We'll have to see.

We do a lot of work with our NetApp professional services or just design teams. Get help with them to start it out, so you have some kind of baseline. Don't just go run out there and buy something. (I guess if you have the money, you can go out there and try it.)

We've been working with a pretty good support team that we get to bounce things off of.

I can't find anything bad about them. It's been a big improvement for us.
When I look for a vendor, support is important to me. You want to be able to buy a piece of equipment, run a piece of equipment, you don't know anything about, and know that somebody can support it, so that when something does crash, they're not going to just say, "Oh, call somebody else," or run away from you. Support is very important; I would think so.

Backups are the most valuable feature, because our company has very intensive backups; we need it forever. They have to be fast, so we cannot keep them on tapes.

Actually, we are looking for better Oracle backups. In production, it takes about 24 hours to run the online backups. We decided to take the backups in the DR. Currently we do the backups in DR, we do not back up production. We were looking for some solution from NetApp; it could be SnapCenter. We are looking at that.

That would make backing up faster. In the next six months, maybe, we plan to implement that.

For the last two years, we haven’t had a major outage; so far, it looks stable.

The cluster mode is really, really scalable. Before that, we used to have 7-mode. We are migrating everything from 7-mode to cluster mode, and we are seeing huge benefits in our company.

Before, we had a 7-mode cluster, and we were having CPU issues. We could not migrate a volume to another node without an outage. Now, we have something like six nodes. When we have a performance issue, we can just migrate the volume to a different node.

Technical support is 7/10. I’ve had good experiences and also bad experiences.

For example, we were in the middle of a performance issue, and we called support. The support person takes all the information, and then he confirms it that he received everything. He said hew would analyze the logs and get back to us. After two days, they started asking for more logs – "Can you send me these logs? We didn't get it." – even though we had confirmation that they had received them. We lost two days. Then, we had to escalate it, and only then did we get a response. We had to be proactive on our end too.

We previously used EMC products for backups, then we migrated our data to NetApps because of the SnapDrive, which is really easy to restore. I am not comparing it to EMC; but we are more happy on the NetApps regarding the backups. We see a big difference between NetApp and the EMC solution we were previously using, and it's multi-protocol. Right now, there might be many products are offering it, but NetApp has been offering multi-protocol for years. We use NFS, we use CIFS, we use iSCSI, we use fiber channel; all in one really. It's got everything in one solution.

Setting up cluster-mode, initially, close to two years ago, was a little bit difficult, but after I started using it and after I went for NetApp training, I now feel it's easier than 7-mode.

I haven't checked the new startup companies, but we compared NetApp with Oracle and EMC. NetApp costs a lot less than both EMC and Oracle. We looked at Exadata, and we ended up buying all-flash because it offered a better ROI. Exadata was not even all-flash, but it cost more than the all-flash.

We compared it to other vendors, and also with the return on investment we were expecting. This is cost efficient. We went to all the vendors to see how it would impact our IT budget.

We have been using it for a long time. As our storage increases, we keep on adding NetApps because we are happy with it.

I have been working with NetApp for something like 10 years, and I have worked for about a year with IBM and EMC. The choice depends on the company and the user. For some companies, NetApp might not be suitable for different reasons. For example, my previous company used fiber channel more.

Every company thinks that NetApp is a NAS solution, not a SAN solution. In that case, if they need a SAN solution, they think it has to come from a different company. My previous company thought the same way. However, we implemented some SAN on the NetApp side, and they're happy.

It's fast. That's all it needs to be is fast.

We use it for virtualization of the Xen desktops and also our VMware systems. That's it.

It doesn't improve the way I work. I don't get to use it, really.

It's faster than spinning disk. I don't have people complaining about it being slow. We're still ramping up in the production but our busy season is a little bit later this year. Right now, it's faster than spinning disk.

In the GUI, I'd like to be able to click a button that says "sync load-sharing mirrors". There are certain configuration things that you can't do if your load-sharing mirrors aren't synced. It would be easier to click that in the GUI, rather than actually issue the command line every time. It's burnt me a few times on configuration.

When we did our upgrade, if we could have done it without doing a whole migration; the migration was painful. Going from 7-mode to CDOT is painful. To make that easier is the only way to get the rating higher.

We have been using it for six months.

We haven't had any stability issues yet. It's only six months old so I would hope there's no hardware issues with it yet.

We haven't had to scale it yet, so right now it's a relatively new install.

Their technical support's good. Most of the questions haven't been in regards to the AFF hardware; it's all been more configuration with the ONTAP, the CDOT. They've been helpful. We're getting through the issues.

This was just a hardware replacement and the promotional deals that NetApp had to offer basically made buying an AFF solution comparable to buying an old spinning disk solution, so it was a combination. We have two nodes that have spinning disks and two nodes that are AFF. To have the whole thing spinning disk, the difference in price made it a no-brainer going with part of it being AFF.

The networking is extremely complex. They advertise it as pretty simple but you have to get through a big install phase before it becomes simple. That's my impression.
To prepare for that install phase and make it a little less complex, make sure your NetApp partner knows what they're doing, by talking to people.

We go through different vendors depending on what we're looking at. Last time, it was Hitachi, EMC and NetApp. One reason we decided on NetApp was that we were replacing a NetApp. We had high confidence it was going to work. Then, its pricing.

The NetApp partner you're working with is important. Understand what you're trying to do and the networking stuff, to make sure that it fails over and everything works from a networking standpoint. I'm guessing it's probably where it's the weakest, so it's the most frustrating for me.

When I look for a vendor for a solution such as AFF or spinning disk, we put together requirements, check them off and weigh the requirements against the vendors. In the end, we make a decision and we also make sure they're comparable in regards to pricing. Quotes are pulled from multiple vendors.

The requirements depend on the application. We buy our storage for specific stuff. As an example, I work at Jostens. We store billions of images. The NetApp product line really wasn't a fit for that, but for our home directories, some of our virtualization desktop stuff and our VMware stuff, NetApp was a great fit.

The performance gains over traditional FAS systems and spinning media make it invaluable for an organization. We specifically have deployed it to troubleshoot storage performance. We don't really have a use case for it other than to troubleshoot at this point. It's allowed us to validate that there are no problems with the storage and to leverage the All Flash system to show that storage wasn't the issue.

It's reducing troubleshooting time to identify which major functional area the problem has been in. We're able to identify quickly now that, whether storage is or is not a contributor to any troubleshooting that we have going on.

At this point, I don't really have any comments on room for improvement because we don't have a lot of use case in our environment right now. We don't actually have a use case other than troubleshooting. Right now, we don't have any high-performance data that needs all flash at this time.

Obviously, keeping the scale and leveraging higher-capacity, solid-state drives is great to reduce power and cooling and space in the data center. That's not really a NetApp thing, that's more of a Samsung thing, who are our flash vendor. It’s absolutely something we’re looking forward to improving on. They're essentially getting rid of SAS in our environment as they grow. We purchased it with the 3.8 TB drives and they've done well to reduce a lot of space. All Flash FAS has been touted as something to get rid of SAS, and we like the fact that it's able to mask some of the issues that we have inside of applications just due to the performance gains that we get. I’m really just hoping that they keep on that, providing higher stability for applications that have had problems in the past.

Pricing can always be improved. We noticed that the pricing on it was very similar to the caching pricing, which is held at a premium even though this is storage that's not for caching only. It's not like a flash pool where you've added it to an aggregate to increase performance. This is your base disk. This is actually where you're storing data not just for caching. That's one thing that we saw in the pricing, but as solid state prices come down, the pricing is going to get better.

There isn’t anything that I wake up in the morning and think, "If only had just did this," or, "If only this was a little bit easier to use, that would make my day." We keep a very simple environment by design, and so we really try to eliminate any complexities that are out there. We're all file-system storage so we don't have any fiber in our environment. It just keeps everything simple. As far as the interfaces, our group has been using the NetApp interfaces for years and we’ve grown used to them.

So far we haven't had any major stability problems with the platform. There was no real trouble with installing it or migrating to it. We don't have any problems at this time, but we don't have a lot of performance data on it right now, either.

Scalability seems great. We purchased an AFF8080 with only one disk shelf, so we're able to scale much larger than we are right now.

As far as NetApp technical support, we've had one case open with them for the All Flash FAS. We haven't used any professional services, but we've used the support group for one small issue with deployments. They were great; they had a fix with us faster than anyone had expected.

To a certain degree, I was involved in the decision process to invest in the All Flash FAS. I recommended of it and then obviously, higher up the food chain, they decided to go with it.

We weren't previously using anything else with all flash. The company I was with was a NetApp consumer long before I got there. No real big changes on the commercial side of what we bought; just kind of investing in the new technology of all flash.

The decision to invest in it in the first place was strictly for performance testing, to make sure that applications weren't running into performance issues with spinning media.

Initial setup was done through me in combination with professional services. We had them do the racking and cabling through a VAR that we use, but then we specifically had joined it to the cluster and configured it.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to leverage some of the documentation on the NetApp site and get through it in under a week so.

We weren't really considering any other vendors. We have a very good relationship with NetApp and we've been really happy with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the support infrastructure; we have to have good support. For business-critical applications, if there's downtime – it happens – but we need a support organization and infrastructure that can help us. We'd leverage a support account manager to get the best out of support and we've had very good success with NetApp so far.

I can't really give any advice because I don't really have anything to compare it to. We've deployed and it's worked well for us, so I would definitely recommend it but I can't recommend it against anything else.

We haven't seen any issues, but it's software and hardware so there will be one at some point.

The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases. We saw it in terms of our workloads for our customers for our products that demanded high-performance transactions for, specifically, our Microsoft SQL databases.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases. We saw it in terms of our workloads for our customers for our products that demanded high-performance transactions for, specifically, our Microsoft SQL databases. 

I think for us, improvement would probably be the changes in how the flash is actually used inside the system and how we manage the actual disk and stripes within the system. That's what I'm being told. That's where I think the improvements will be realized in the system; how the data is compacted inside the system and realizing greater opportunities for your storage on that medium to get higher and higher disk usage inside of that. Today, I think we've been told you can get up to four-to-one ratios. We're hoping we can even realize that even higher inside those disk subsystems. Also, we're going to get more TBs of storage inside of it in terms of the 15-TB drives. We've heard 30-TB drives are on the way, maybe even the 60s and the faster adoption rates of those disk technologies, as they come through.

We're looking at probably about a three-to-one ratio right now in the environment; it's highly transactional in our databases. Four to one would be a great improvement. We think we'll be better as time goes on. We're on the early release of the 8.3 series but until the next release of ONTAP, I think it'll just continue to see improvements as it moves forward.

I did not encounter any scalability issues. How we're seeing it right now is that it's going to be very scalable in terms of architecture. It's going to be scalable within the data center because it's actually a smaller footprint for us. I think overall durability of this infrastructure will be really good as well. I think overall, it's going to reduce our operations because we're going to spend a lot less time troubleshooting performance; we’ll have a lot more time to be more forward looking in the design and implementation.

We're very happy with the support that NetApp brings to us as a company. When we challenge them with our current problems that we have or our customers that we service have, I'm very pleased with what they do for us. We have a broad scope of problems and NetApp has a broad scope of customers. That's why we chose them as our vendor.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

I've been using this the whole time I’ve been with this company; this is basically everything we've run all along.

I was not involved in the initial setup, just basically the attainment of the technology for our teams, for them to deploy it.

It's expensive right now. Customers probably have different viewpoints on it. It's expensive but we think over time all the prices are going to go down. It's going to continue to be driven down as technologies for SSDs continue to be released with NVMe coming out and the adoption of that technology. Spinning media will probably be relegated to archive solutions inside of our data centers from here going forward, as we end-of-life it.

I do see prices going down; I don't think it has a choice. I think the businesses will drive it that way because I think the market will drive it that way, as you see all other companies fight the big cloud providers using SSD and driving the technology down as well.

If you implement AFF, find the right workload solution for what business problem you're trying to solve initially. For us, we found the problem and a solution for it. Does it help everything? Maybe not necessarily. It depends on what your application is and what you're doing. It'll help but it might not help everything. It depends on whether the price point is right to solve that problem. For us, the price point was certainly right. We're going to continue to work toward it. As we go through time, we acquired it. We've got a taste for it now. Our customers certainly do. We'll probably be buying more of it over the next 18-24 months.

We think there is a time envelope where we're going to fully adopt it, but right now we're not too aggressive with it. We think we're just aggressive enough with the implementation. I think there's going to be a curve where the decline of spinning media will occur with the uptick of SSDs in our environment. An inflection point will happen where the price per GB will hit right in the middle and it'll be advantageous for us to do just SSDs only.

When we look to work with a vendor, the important criteria are support from that company, along with the thoughtfulness of the implementation when they bring it to you and when you're bringing problems to them and they bring a solution. You're looking for them to look forward with you and address those problems or feature sets you're looking for. They brought the all-flash array out to us to address our business problems.

I think as we continue to use it and the product matures, as we realize probably ONTAP 9 and the next feature set and versions and it grows, I think it'll continue to evolve and get better and better over time.

The most valuable features are the low latency, high IOPS, and the ability to have a very small footprint with a large amount of data. The free controller upgrade program is a plus.

We've taken the conversation around performance out of the picture now, and brought it more onto the application side.

Simplification is probably the key thing right now; making the interface and the user experience a lot simpler, more streamlined, more like a lot of startup companies now do, so that there aren’t as many bells and whistles, knobs to tweak, so that you basically have a single pane of glass to do all your work. I see that getting better in this product, but not there yet.

Started in 2014, using a FAS8080 with all SSD storage.

Stability is excellent. We haven't had any issues with it.

It works pretty good. When we need more storage, we just add another shelf or just add additional controllers to the cluster if additional performance is required.

Excellent

We have used technical support on occasion. It’s been pretty good. It depends on who you get and when you get it. Overall, it's been good.

We were not previously using something else; we were always a NetApp customer before. We just wanted flash. We were using and we still are using spinning discs.

The All Flash storage was a direction from the upper management: This was before the All Flash FAS was available. Reduction of the physical footprint of storage by going to SSD storage from traditional SAS or SATA drives. Reduced power and cooling requirements.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, because we actually did an all-flash FAS before there was an All Flash FAS. We bought a FAS system with the SSD shelves and made it into an all-flash FAS before NetApp had an offering. Since that time we have bought additional NetApp All Flash storage and deployed AFF systems to various datacenters across the globe.

We ended up going with some other vendors for our SAN environment; we went with Pure because at the time there was not an offering from NetApp on the flash for the SAN side of things. Now there is, the All Flash FAS, the SolidFire, or something like that. At the time, there wasn't, so that's the reason why we went to Pure.

The advice I’d give depends on what the need is. If you're looking for a NAS-type device that's all flash, NetApp's still pretty much the king in the NAS environment.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is cost, and then of course whether or not they're a willing partner. That's one reason why we stayed with NetApp as long as we have: They're not always interested in selling us something as much as coming up with solutions for some of our problems.

The ability to recover your data really fast is valuable, as is the availability and accessibility of the data.

It helped us a lot with our storage infrastructure because we were using another vendor, XtremIO. prior to this and things were really slow. We used to have to fight fires every day because users were not able to access their files or the files were not responding the way they should.

I see room for improvement everywhere because the technology is here. We are using it and every day we are trying to improve. That's the reason why I haven’t rated it higher.

Specifically, the current pricing bothers me; pricing is very high. It's expensive. That's the reason why I can't just provide a review and hope that people would jump onto it; pricing is usually a driving factor for a lot of companies. It’s a major issue, even though my company had the money and they spent it. Nonetheless, we had to prove that it was the solution we were looking for. A lot of other companies would not be able to afford this type of solution, so they would have to look for alternatives. Those alternatives would be other companies, start-up companies that are pretty much doing the same thing. Sometimes they are better than the ones that were the innovators.

It's been really stable as long as you have it configured correctly.

As with stability, it's been really scalable as long as you have it configured correctly.

Technical support is very good. I like the call home feature, where we don't even have to do anything. Most of the time, we don't know that anything’s broken and we receive an email saying, "Hey, go fix it." So, it's good.

We didn't really evaluate any other companies. This was the one everybody else was using. All of the reviews actually helped somebody make the decision. This solution had proved to be working; it was proven to be working at the time. We're very happy with it but we find it expensive.

Do your research. Find what would work for you. Find what's affordable to you. Most of the time, we purchase stuff without thinking about the maintenance. Maintenance is usually a killer when it comes to all these things because once you own it, you think you are done with spending money but maintenance becomes a very big issue for a lot of companies. After a while, they drop the support and everything. At that point, there's a new version that's out there and you can't use it, so that's when you have to dump all the money you just put in and start with something new. Study your environment. Make sure you are getting what you want. What you need.

It's simplified operations because our storage team is so used to managing all of our stores using a single platform and by just adding flash to that same platform – the existing platforms – simplifies our day-to-day operations.

Their technical support needs improvement.

Stability is 100%. We haven't had any issues with NetApp over all of the years we've been using them; it's a great, stable platform.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give it a 10 for scalability.

With technical support, they need a little more help in there. I would give them an 8 out of 10.

Initial setup it was straightforward. Because we're so used to the FAS systems already, it was easy to add the All Flash FAS system; it was so much easier to deploy.

We did a PoC against other vendors. The decision came down to the simplicity of the platform.

We tested an EMC, an ExtremeIO, and we also did a Violin as well. As far as performance metrics, Violin actually beat all the other vendors but because of the stability and the financial turmoil with Violin, we felt a little skeptic about investing in a company that we didn't know what they were going to be tomorrow. Again, because we're a NetApp shop, to us, that made it so much easier to make the decision based on that.

Look at the simplicity of the operations and the scalability of the products. Being a small company, we're big in storage but we have a small operations group, so I think simplicity just makes our team more efficient. Adding different tools or different storage vendors is just going to add a lot of complexity into our environment.