NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it in the healthcare industry.

It's helped with latency. It has improved our job flows.

It's fast and reliable.

I would like to see more functionality with the external software, SnapCenter. There should also be more integration with the flash side of things. But overall, it's been pretty good.

My impression of the stability is that it's good. 

It's pretty scalable. When you add more to the environment it helps things, overall.

Technical support has been really good. NetApp support has been really helpful. We have a SAM that we use as well, and he helps us with issues that come up, bugs, etc.

We were pushing what we had too far on performance. It wasn't so good, so that's when we looked at All Flash.

It was really straightforward, for the most part. We were used to working with FAS already and this is just adding All Flash and SSD to the mix. It's a lot of the same standards we had already.

For the installation and configuration, we've done the recent ones directly through NetApp. Our experience with them has been positive.

We'll have the solid-state drives around longer so we won't be turning over controllers or disk as fast.

Our shortlist was really just NetApp, in our situation. We're pretty much all NetApp. We didn't evaluate anything else for this particular project.

I would recommend NetApp.

I rate it at nine out of ten, and close to a ten. We've been pretty happy with the All Flash.

• The Flash component for performance
• The management
• ONTAP
• The features that ONTAP now has with the availability to work with the cloud.

We have seen a speed improvement, and our applications are a lot faster.

Probably on the management side of things. It is very complex.

Probably six months.

Not really.

It is pretty scalable.

Tech support is very good, so give it an eight out of 10.

It was an older system. It was a disc based system. So, we were looking for performance improvement.

It was a natural progression from the previous system, so it was just more of an upgrade rather than a new system.

It was reasonably straightforward. We received a lot of knowledge on the net about ONTAP systems, so the setup has improved.

The NetApp ONTAP system is a very good system to work with and use. Very versatile and once you know how things work in the NetApp world, then it makes it very easy to keep the systems for a long time, to work with them, and they work very well.

It is a brand new system, and it works extremely well. Performance improvements are as expected.

Clustered Data ONTAP

Low latency

My company uses mostly NetApp products, so I have existing knowledge of using their products.

We're still testing it, but I expect it to provide us a lot more speed because of low latency and clustered Data ONTAP.

They still have to reduce in price when compared to their competitors. Also, the current version has some problems with global deduplication.

It's not yet in full production, but I have been testing the product for few month now with VMware.

I've had no issues deploying it in our test environment.

We do not expect any issues, and have had none so far.

It has problems with deduplication when done globally.

Their customer service is one of the best, and I am a demanding customer.

• Tier 1 – room for improvement as they hold onto tickets for too long
• Tier 2– much more serious

From my experience with NetApp products, initial setup is going to be nice and easy. We are very techy, so it was easy for us.

The majority of work was based on existing knowledge, but we also got help from the vendor.

We considered Kaminario and XtremIO. We chose NetApp in order to utilize current resources.

It has better adaptation than pure flash solutions such as XtremIO. It’s important to learn the weak spots of the suppliers in the market, and I can say that I have great expectations for the migration of the flash array to disc via cluster.

It is very user friendly. Someone in my position needs to be able to bring up and shut down the system quickly, efficiently, and shut it down if there's a power outage quickly and efficiently without having trouble. It also supports VMware, which is what we use; but we use the NetApp as our only filer.

I am trying to understand it more, so I can employ it better during high tense situations.

I have been able to manage the system easily myself since we got NetApp four years ago.

The Ilom's graceful shutdown feature is no longer there in the version that I have. I believe I'm using 7.0.x, using the FAS 2040 and also the FAS 2020. I don't know where to say it needs improvement because I'm just not that versed in it yet.

It is excellent in terms of stability. I've had no issues during the last six years that I've had NetApp. Just recently, on one system that's been out and had a lot of controversy about, we had a filer fail on us. We were able to get a filer the following day. It was excellent.

For what we do, I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems; and everything works, no problem. I am currently trying to find out where we’re moving ahead from here.

Technical support is excellent.

I was involved in building it. I found it a little bit grueling to get my certification to build it, but I really can't speak to the NetApp filer documentation. The documentation that we use for it is different from what NetApp uses.

I didn't evaluate anything. That is done in the organization at higher levels than I am. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right because we’re not going to give a contract to anybody for a bad product. Right now, I'm concentrating on our collapse-down strategy in which we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I'm here. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer: whether the filer is going to need to expand; whether we're going to be migrating to a new filer; and so on.

For the All Flash FAS, performance is the number one feature, above the reliability and scalability. First of all, the All Flash FAS is extremely fast. We're serving something in the neighborhood of a trillion transactions per month in SQL. We are getting great performance, submillisecond. As far as scalability, we can extend to new nodes and move data around at will. It's been a really good solution.

We are a customer-driven solution. We're running the environment and have some very demanding customers that require zero downtime, extremely good performance, and the solution has worked out extremely well for us.

We have a software that is a learning environment for schools, higher education and corporate businesses. User software for learning environments. And they use our class as their learning environment.

We need everything to be reliable and to work fast, and we have absolutely found that with NetApp.

I'd like to be able to move volumes between virtual machines, for one thing. That’s a little thing that has bothered me. I think I'm pretty happy with what the feature set is right now.

We had some bumpy roads early on, but it has been very reliable. We're doing very well with it.

With the ability to move data as soon as needed, we can expand and contract as we need to. It works out pretty nicely. We’ve had no issues in terms of scalability.

NetApp’s technical support is second to none. I have worked with other vendors that have not been quite as reliable. But, getting support to come out is easy and reliable, and it's always top-grade help.

I believe we have gone through EMC and Hitachi. I think that's it, actually. I personally worked with IBM. IBM’s support was pretty good, too.

If I was selecting a new vendor today, support would probably be the most important criteria for me. That has been the big differentiator for us; always pushing P1s for us. It's very easy to get support and prioritize it as needed; they help us extremely well.

I wasn't involved in that decision-making process, so I'm not sure what the driving force was. I was actually hired after the fact because I worked with NetApp in the past.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I think the team found it fairly straightforward. We had good support from NetApp. We worked very closely with our account team. They walked us through very well and we had no issues getting going, as far as I know.

I've been a NetApp advocate for many years, so I definitely say, look into it because of the performance, the stability, the scalability, the support.

The most valuable feature for us completely depends on the workload. We've run it on various environments, including VMware. We were able to migrate to VMware with clustered Data ONTAP. That was important for us.

Stability was something that was really wanted to improve on, and we've been ale to do that with AFF. Previously, we had to reprogram every three months or so, so not having to do that with AFF is huge.

Secondly, we do a lot less daily maintenance than we used to. It's a fairly trouble-free system as we simply configure it and pretty much leave it alone.

I had a few issues, but they were easy to fix. I would like for it to be more scalable as the number of shelves is limited.

We installed it in July.

Scalability is difficult. The number of shelves is limited to 2 or 4, and the number of terrabytes we potentially have doesn't match to this limit.

We don't have a lot of contact with technical support because our engineers handle any issues. But the product itself has been excellent.

The initial setup wasn't easy, and in fact took about 6 years. It was a slow start, but of course it was new back then, and it takes time.

We were one of the first and even the engineer had some trouble configuring it for us.

We can't decide for ourselves so we ask the market, this is what we want to do, what should we buy? Then markers come with the products. There isn't a lot of choice.

We've had a good experience with it so far. Right now, we're using it for our customers, but if we were to also use it for ourselves, it would be too small. I'm sure they'll improve in the future, but we'll just have to wait for the solution to support ten to fifteen thousand users.

It’s really reliable and fast. My customers have several other NetApp systems, but here they really needed the low latency.

Also, clustered Data ONTAP is valuable.

It sped up our data queries and we can work more efficiently. These queries are now done in seconds rather than minutes, affecting everything we do on a day-to-day basis.

I haven’t encountered anything the customer needs that this solution can’t do.

We've used the 8080 for eight months and the 8060 for two months. They're used mainly for VMware products and SQL databases.

I haven’t had any stability problems yet with our current customers.

It scales to our needs.

8/10

We haven’t needed to escalate to NetApp’s tech support.

I went from working with NetApp FAS to AFF, so I stayed in the family. The customer was satisfied with their FAS system but needed lower latency, so it was a clear choice.

The initial setup was very straightforward. When you've worked with NetApp for a while, it is very easy to setup their new systems. If you are new to the system, then there is a learning curve, but NetApp provides great documentation.

I implement it for our customers.

It’s a great choice, and you are on the right path using this product.

We have a multi-tenant shared solution that we use with Quality of Service to provide bare metal as a service and IP storage to our customers. We keep it very simple. It's an automated solution which customers configure on a portal and then it automatically configures storage for them.

The solution has drastically and positively affected IT's ability to support new business initiatives. It's a very easily automated solution using REST APIs.

Combined with OnCommand, the solution the solution helps improve the performance of our enterprise applications.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS and keep customers from harming other customers in that solution.

It's very stable. We have not yet had any issues. All solutions have issues, but we have not yet had any with this one.

We scale up to 64 nodes in a cluster and then we just keep scaling clusters. We've had no issues with scalability.

We've been a partner of NetApp for a very long time. Their support is very good. We use a lot of direct NetApp engineering resources, as a partner at our scale. We tend to work hand in hand with NetApp.

For our use case, we were automating what we were doing so we chose to use the All Flash REST APIs.

Our initial setup involved a lot of development. It was complex mainly because we had to make it simple. We had to simplify it for our own customers, so it was complex for us but it's a very easy solution for enterprises.

The solution is too new for us to see ROI yet.

Dell EMC was our other option. Both Dell EMC and NetApp are partners of ours. We went with NetApp because of relationships and ease of set up.

It's a pretty stout solution. NVMe is coming and pretty much everything we want is on their roadmap.

In terms of connecting it to public cloud, we are a public cloud so we connect to ourselves. When it comes to setting up and provisioning enterprise applications using the solution, it depends on the customer use case. Some are quick, some are really complex.