NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

The most valuable features for us are the secure multi-tenancy to Data ONTAP and High Availability built into Data ONTAP that provides almost no downtime.

With Data ONTAP clusters, we've been able to unify our servers and have unified management of them. We can also scale freely.

I'd like to see a web-based front end in addition to the CLI.

We've been using it for three months, including the proof of concept.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled just fine.

Customer service is great.

We previously used EMC, but we switched to take advantage of clustered Data ONTAP.

The initial setup was just fine and straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

• SnapMirror
• Migration abilities
• Easy backup solution
• Snapshot ability

It's certainly better than our previous Pure Storage system. It’s a flash array that works seamlessly with other NetApp products. They have the ability of other FAS as well as of flash.

In a metro cluster, the bridges are fiber heavy, limiting the performance. This is its only disadvantage.

We've used it for two months.

So far so good. We've had no stability issues.

It's met our expectations, and we still have room to grow and scale out.

7/10 due to having unsolved tickets.

Over the last year, the quality of their technical support decreased, but it's getting better again.

We previously used Pure Storage.

It's very easy. We've been using NetApp products for five years so its just another NetApp system for us.

We did it in-house.

I would say if you need high availability across different sites, then think if the right product for you because of speed limitations.

Snapshot, SnapMirror, FlexClone, and deduplication are features we use a lot of and which are valuable to us. We're also using light compression, which is a new thing on the AFF.

For us, it's brilliant to have all the functionality that NetApp gives you out the box. We've been a NetApp customer for 14 years and it's great now that we can get that on all-flash and have the performance to go alongside the functionality. We've always wanted that performance. The really good thing for us is we're already cluster-mode so we can just slide the AFF into the existing cluster and migrate all our data across relatively seamlessly.

For us it's about getting stuff on the website faster and more reliably. Currently our existing filers are struggling on the load. So it's all about performance really; it could have better performance.

We've been looking at it and talking about it for probably about three months. We've ordered it, and it's in the data center now. We've got the kit, it's just not in production. We'll hopefully deploy and put it into production this year.

We didn't have issues with deployment.

We expect it to be stable.

I think our experience has been a bit hit-and-miss. From a technical point of view, we were early adopters of clustered Data ONTAP and cDOT. We found that the support was limited on cDOT. We were using cDOT for the better part of three years and it's only now that it feels like the support team at NetApp has caught up. That was a challenge, and again there's been a lot of changes at NetApp around the sales side of the business and I think we've suffered a bit at the hands of that.

It should be straightforward because we know it; it should be straightforward.

To be honest, we spoke to a lot of people. We spoke to Tegile, XtremIO, Pure Storage, SolidFire, and Nutanix just to understand the market because it felt like the storage market had moved on quite a lot over the last three years. Clearly, with us being an NFS house, it's all we've used. It came down really to Tegile or NetApp.

We chose NetApp because it was an easier deployment for us because we already know it. We've got the skills. We know that it works and, I guess, NetApp has just got a bit more experience in the market. Their ability to execute is kind of a known for us.

It's interesting as in it's come down at a price-point now to where it's much more feasible than it was even two or three years ago, to go down the old-fashioned road. It doesn't mean necessarily it's the right thing to do, I don't think. I think it's important that as a customer you understand what your requirements are.

For us in the health care sector, the most valuable feature is quality of service because we're able to stop the workloads from taking over other workloads that are more important.

We have storage virtual machines at work, so we're able to segregate and distinguish between different workloads. I think local HFL might as well form the natural process side of things, which is an improvement from 7-Mode.

We're able to treat more patients now because our workloads are performing faster.

I'd like to see online duplication, which I believe will be available with 8.3.2.

We've been using it for the past four months or five months with lots of clinical applications that deal with healthcare, and VMs with SQL.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no crashes. We have experienced a couple of problems based on configuration and books. I believe these issues are going to be addressed in an update, but for now I think they are just focused on the reiteration of what the best practices are.

It scales to our needs.

7/10, as there were a couple of issues which took technical support some time to handle.

We have used Fusion-io for flash but nothing in SAN. We were looking to address performance issues, and NetApp addressed them.

I think we took about two weeks to get up and running. We performed initial tests and diagnostic tests, all the results of which surpassed our expectations. We were able to get 400,000 IOPS from our system processor.

We used a mix of three days with NetApp, another three days with a partner, and everything else was done in-house.

We won't have a number until we've fully migrated, but so far it looks good.

We were looking at Pure Storage and a couple of other vendors who had all-in-one solutions.

I think it fits a lot of peoples requirements, but I'd recommend waiting until v8.3.2 just for the additional features and to resolve some books. Other than that, it's great.

The GUI that does the daily maintenance and system manager with SnapMirror and deduplication are very useful for us.

We used the system manager for developed distribution.

Also, the latencies are extremely low, below 0.5 milliseconds.

I'd say we're using only about one fifth of the formal capabilities of the systems. We're still running Oracle DW and 50% of the system is consumed, but this is not causing any issues during daily business.

We're also able to move volumes across aggregates.

We've used it for about three months for Oracle EW and VMware. We have it with 50TB flash and an SSD shell.

We've had no problems with deployment.

It’s very, very stable, no issues at all. The primary system is flash, which is very responsive, with latency very low, below 1.5ms. We are early adopters of it.

The scalability is excellent. We still can grow a lot into it and add more databases.

The level of technical support depends on the ticket. It’s generally good, and sometimes excellent. Some cases are not as completed as I would like them to be. On average, it’s 7 out of 10.

Previously, we used EMC.

Deployment was really very easy because we were somehow experienced with moving the system into other data centers. We went into a similar exercise about the end of last year where we moved into different areas of the data centers and have been running two data centers. We used Data Guard for Oracle workloads so the downtime was very low because we simply had to switch over during migration. The skill set was already there in the company. We almost did not need any system administrator. They provided the amounts for running NFS.

We got a partner to do the setup. Their knowledge was there and we had no issues.

It's working as expected, but we didn't calculate an ROI.

We did not, and when I joined, I proposed using NetApp and this was accepted.

I would absolutely encourage everybody to implement such a system because it's really, really performing so good and latencies are just excellent. We're on the SSDs which have been productive for three months.

The most valuable feature of AFF is that it has a very fast response time. This is a very crucial performance for us.

It needs higher IOPS. Pure Storage is better with that.

We've been using it for two months.

We had no issues with deployment.

It hasn't crashed, so it's been stable so far.

It scales to our needs.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is very good.

We were running on NFS.

The reason the initial setup was straightforward is because we've got clustered Data ONTAP on their hybrid system, so we know how to do the installation on our own.

We implemented it through NetApp.

We looked at Pure Storage, but only on paper.

It depends on your workload, as you have to add an SSD, so take it only if you need it because the whole thing is expensive. On the other side, if you do need this solution and it does not meet your expectations, you should change your settings, and move from NFS to fibre channel.

SnapMirror is definitely the most valuable feature for us. It allows us to have a snapshot in minutes and we can use it to restore quickly from a backup.

Also, the speed of AFF is great.

We use it for automating cloud deployments of SAP applications and products.

They have issues with deleting big data.

We've been using it since September.

We encountered no deployment issues.

It's generally stable.

It scales to our needs.

Technical support were helpful, but it took time to find the right person to help me. It started with a service rep in India, and was passed to three people until we found the right person with the correct knowledge. I give them a 7 out of 10.

It's our first flash storage solution.

I wasn't involved, but those who were told me it was easy.

Don’t implement if it's not needed because it’s quite expensive. We need it because of the demanding features.