NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it for data storage for Citrix VDIs.

The improvement to our organization is in the ability to put more into the same storage platform. We came from EqualLogics and the ones we had didn't have that nice compression and deduplication to get a little bit more out of the storage.

Also, the protection of the data, being able to replicate between sites easily. We were a "backup shop". The replication doesn't quite back up so I haven't won that fight yet, but at least it protects us offsite, easily.

The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, so we get more out of our storage. The replication is also important.

I would like to see a little more flexibility in customizing some of the SnapMirror stuff. We have been having a little trouble and, in the first round with tech support, they say, "Well, this is how we do it."

It's not exactly throttled but it's limited in the number of connections it makes. We would like to be able to tweak that, to increase it a little bit, because we don't have half a dozen large areas that we are protecting, we have more like 40 or 50 areas. They run into each other a little bit and I don't want to spend time on them.

It's very stable. It's always there when we need it. With the Dual Controller, if one drops out, the other one comes right online. We don't use any iSCSI so there is a little bit of a latency break but, over the NFS, we don't notice that switch-on. We can do maintenance in the middle of the day, literally rip a whole controller out of the chassis, and do what we need to do with it.

We have not needed to scale it.

Technical support is generally very good, once they get a good idea of what the issue is. Occasionally you need to be a little more specific about your problem to get the right team working on it. But they're normally very good, very responsive, efficient, knowledgeable, and very patient. They're willing to take the time to make sure you understand their analysis and their recommended solution.

The reasons we switched were performance and the number of IOPS in the previous product. It was an older product which was dog-slow. Some of the larger file servers were the worst. And that played out to everything else that was sharing the storage with it.

There were a few initial setups. Two of them were relatively straightforward and one of them was a little bit more complex, the AFF8080. On that one there were a lot more network interfaces to figure out where they go.

We also leveraged the IP Spaces which was really good because we house some data for an affiliate, rather than somebody in-house, so that was amazing.

We used a reseller for the deployment. The only problem with doing it that way is that I find we did not have a good idea of the current roadmap. On some of the projects we purchased for, we might have made a different decision had we known what was coming six or nine months down the road.

Some of that was on us. We probably could have pushed for that, but having that reseller "middle-man" made it more difficult.

We haven't had the time to do a proper analysis of ROI yet.

The next closest option that we considered was Dell EMC.

Try to get behind the sales guys to the people who do pre-sales tech support to really understand the roadmap and other aspects of the product. The sales guys are great but they're sales guys. If you can get to the tech guys behind them and really talk to them about what your problems are, and what you are trying to attack, I feel that works much better.

It's great that software monitoring is all in one place instead of in different modules. It also provides us with real-time metrics.

We went from a FAS 2040 to an AFF 8040, and the evolution has blown us away. The deduplication technology that it gives us means that we are getting more storage for our money. It's a better value than disc drives.

Also, clustered Data ONTAP is valuable to us.

It gives us a platform that is reliable going forward. We only had one outage on the 2040 in five years, and we are expecting similar from the 8040. Our business is growing, so we don’t know exactly what to expect and we throw things at our network that are new. The new flash gives us the expansion we need later on without having to buy more controllers.

It would be nice to see a 1 GB portal for networking on the back rather than just the 10 GB that we can use as a backup. If we have an issue with the 10 GB, we can have the 1 GB cable as a backup while we fix the issue while running them in pairs.

We've been using it for three months for VMs, SQL, file storage, email, some Oracle databases, and SharePoint.

We've not had any issues with deployment.

We’ve done transfers, migrations, data copies in and out, and it hasn’t flinched. It's very stable.

It scales to our needs.

10/10. We haven’t had to use it yet for the AFF, but with the FAS they were excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We use HP’s servers and are happy with them, but when we upgraded to flash for FAS, we looked only at NetApp and the other options that were potentially cheaper, but decided on NetApp in the end because we were happy with them.

Initial setup was straightforward. There is only a small amount of NFS and the rest of it is CIF, so setup is very simple.

We used a vendor team who were 10/10.

It will probably be within 12 month when we make back what we spent on this product in terms of the storage increase we’ve got. It's given us an increase in overall performance, which means we utilize less resources because it's quicker.

With the networking changes, the costs were £140,000. There were some very harsh negotiations going on, and they got this order 12 minutes before the end of their deadline for their end of year.

We looked at Tegile, Violin, and Nimble. It came down to the management of the FAS itself, and the others seem slightly less mature in the market. It came down to trusting what we know works.

It's quite a jump for us from where we are coming from. Try not to think of it as a complex item. Instead, think of it in terms of what you want it to do and what the business needs it to do rather than putting the kitchen sink in it at the start.

NetApp AFF supports multi-tenant and private clouds.

With our previous spinning disk storage, we did have some "disk busy" problems. Since switching to NetApp AFF, we haven't had any issues. It has simplified the deployment of ONTAP because it's all the same interface. It's also easier to train people on ONTAP because they don't need to learn multiple interfaces. Switching from spinning disk storage to NetApp AFF has significantly reduced our operational latency. 

The biggest benefit of NetApp AFF is the performance. 

I have used NetApp AFF for around 10 years.

NetApp AFF is great. We haven't had any storage outages in 10 to 12 years. 

I rate NetApp support eight out of 10. We always get an answer quickly, and they seem to be knowledgeable about the product. The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now.

Positive

The setup is pretty simple. You put an IP on the box, log into a web interface, and it basically sets itself up. It requires a bit of customization for your environment, but it prompts you, so it isn't difficult. It takes 10 to 20 minutes.

I rate NetApp AFF eight out of 10. 

Our customers use the solution for its MetroCluster feature.

It would be helpful if they set up local warehouses for the solution.

We have been using the solution for five years.

I rate the solution's stability as a nine.

We have an enterprise company as our customer for the solution. I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.

I work as a support engineer and authorized distributor for the solution. Its technical support could be better as receiving the solution's spare parts takes a long time. When hardware failure occurs, we need to wait for its components to reach us from the metro city warehouse. It is a time-consuming process.

We used HPE and Dell as well. They provide better customer service than NetApp as they have local authorized partners. So we get a prompt response from them in case of any failure issues.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward.

Our customers deploy the solution with the help of an integrator. I provide consultancy and integration services as well.

The solution is moderately priced. I rate its pricing as a seven.

The solution is quite good. I recommend it to others and rate it as a nine.

Right now, we've seen a few different systems that we're running on the all-flash system, where we've seen performance increases with application functionality. We have databases running on there. The database query is running faster. The application is running faster in general. It has saved us by not having to tax the system to get the data access going quicker, less network usage. People using the applications are able to perform their tasks more quickly.

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

I'd say the biggest one for us, other than just being SSDs, was the compression; inline compression, inline dedupe. Previously, we used dedupe but compression in dedupe has helped a lot, just to be able to maximize our storage, not having to buy more disk and items such as that. That is the biggest one we've seen so far.

It’s difficult to say because there are already a lot of features that have been released that we didn't have previously, especially going from 7-mode to cDOT. ONTAP 9 sounds really interesting with better dedup and compression; the disk partitioning features that they are going to be doing with that. I'm eager to see what ONTAP 9 has. Right now, I believe were on 8.3, so we’re definitely going to be interested in upgrading that when it comes out.

I’m not sure if I see anything that's really lacking because there are so many features that we still have not taken advantage of that we could probably use going forward; no specific ones that I can see right now.

We've only had it about two or three months. We haven't had any issues since we've had it up. It's been in production and has been rock solid so far. I don't have a long-term say on that yet, but it's been really good so far.

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

We're not a huge shop. Our previous NetApps have always been a two-node setup. Right now, I don't really necessarily see us scaling out any more. We were pretty much a 7-mode shop previously; now, we're a cDOT for these 8080 AFFs. With cDOT, it's very nice how you can scale it out and add more nodes to it. I don't necessarily see us taking advantage of that anytime soon. It's nice to have the option there.

We've had 30-40 controllers for about five or six years now and we've previously had the NetApp 2000 series. We have kind of been a NetApp shop. We've had different vendors like Pure Storage previously come in just to talk about stuff. I think the main reason we went to All Flash was the price point.

When we were looking, we were doing a big project in which we were re-hauling a lot of our core infrastructure. We wanted to refresh the hardware on the NetApps. At the time, we were looking at doing a hybrid of spinning disk and SSDs; maybe doing flash pools and that kind of stuff. Then, working with our vendor and working with NetApp, we were going to need more space anyway so the cost of the new system plus additional shelves for the space was pretty much the same price at which they could give us an All Flash system. With the 4-to-1 compression and the similar features All Flash has to offer, it was kind of a no-brainer to move to that; a lot of performance increase as well, being on All Flash.

A lot of our workloads aren't really disk-intensive, so we don't really need all flash, so at the time it wasn't needed, but the price point that NetApp was able to bring it in at was a deciding factor. Also, at the time that we reviewed Pure Storage, a lot of our systems were using multiple protocols on the same controller; we were using fiber channel, NFS, CIFS. The Pure Storage systems, at least when we reviewed them at the time, they didn’t really support all of those protocols on the same controller. We would have to buy multiple systems to be able to cover all our protocols. That made them more expensive. That was definitely a disadvantage for them.

I was in charge of the original setup. I worked with our vendor to help actually do the install and configuration. It went really well. Coming from a 7-mode background to a cDOT was definitely a lot different with the lists and similar items to configure. It was very straightforward. We pretty much got it on the network within something like 30 minutes; got our VMware environment pointed to it and within a couple of hours, we already had data on it in the first half of the day.

I don't have a lot of experience with other vendors. We've reviewed Pure Storage, and even though we didn't officially have Nimble in, we've talked to Nimble at a lot of booths in some of the trade shows. They are pretty much the same as Pure Storage when it comes to some of their features, restrictions and similar items. EMC, I don't have any experience to speak for.

I've been using NetApp for a long time now, so I really like NetApp, especially with the new ONTAP features, with clustering going forward. Give a good look at NetApp. They have treated us well and their product has been really rock solid for us.

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.

Our IT department has two AFF clusters, but we also install them for our customers. We deploy them for tier-one use cases, like virtual machines, databases, and anything that needs fast, hot data. 

We've recently started using NetApp's cloud solutions, but our German customers are still reluctant because of the security, data management, GDPR, etc. Now, we have our cloud that we can sell to customers with Meta products. Cloud backup and cloud tiering are the two primary ones, but we also sell Cloud Insights to some customers.  Customers need backup services, but they often lack a separate data center where they can store their backups. The cloud is the most natural way to store the backup.

Our customers have latency issues or requirements for very low-latency applications. This is the problem they are addressing with AFF because it's the fastest system they can get. It's still the best solution for SAP or other databases.

We have checked other flash systems from different vendors, and the AFF is still the best because of the multi-protocol support, for example. Others only do block or file services in a very basic way. AFF does everything in one box. Now, with type 1, you don't even need to license the specific features. You can start with block storage and move to file later or the other way around. That's a plus for all customers.

I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features.

Our customers need reliability for the data. They don't want the data to go down if something happens to the data center. They need synchronous replication to another location, and the metro cluster is the only solution that works in these scenarios involving distances of 100 or 200 kilometers. 

Feature-wise, AFF is already a top-tier system. I think that sometimes, the price is an issue for some customers. It isn't so much of a problem now that there is the C Series and the ASA, both of which are a little better price-wise. That's not much of an issue anymore. In the past, that was a concern because not everyone needed a high-performance system for every workload. Some customers only required that level of performance for a small segment of their workloads, but they still needed to buy a bigger system. We can address that issue with the C Series. 

We have used NetApp AFF since it came out. My company has been a NetApp partner since 2004, and we were using the FAS systems before, but we started selling AFF to our customers as soon as it was introduced. 

NetApp AFF is rock-solid. The stability and performance are top-notch. It's hard to recall a broken NetApp. In 20 years, we've installed more than a thousand base systems, and we've never had user data corruption.

The scalability is good because it can scale out a cluster of up to 24 nodes. Usually, our customers only have a two-node cluster, so scalability is not so much of an issue with us.

I rate NetApp support seven out of 10. It depends on who you get. You can get unlucky. We usually do the first-level support ourselves because we are a partner. Sometimes, NetApp support could be better. When the customers escalate, it can feel like everything's starting from scratch. These are rare cases. I'm not directly involved in support, but that's what I hear when something doesn't work. 

Neutral

We've been installing fast-flash systems for 20 years, so I'm highly experienced with them. The complexity of the deployment depends on the customer's environment. Some storage systems from other competitors might be easier for the customers, but we are a service provider, so we do the installation and train the engineers. From the end customer's perspective, it doesn't matter if the system is easy or not because they don't need to install the system. 

We do the training, installation, and heavy lifting. The system is a bit more complicated to install compared to other competitors. We can offset this because we are highly trained and have all the experience required.

I'm not familiar with the financial and operational details. I'm more of a technical guy. However, our customers wouldn't buy these products if they didn't see a reduction in TCO.

I rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. 

Our primary use for NetApp AFF is backup for our production. It's more for our database for all of our retail for Nordstrom. We've got to keep it running every day, so we've got to make sure that we have all the databases backed up for three years, or more.

We use NetApp AFF for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, and there is no latency that I can see. It has been pretty solid.

This solution is pretty simple when it comes to data protection and data management.

After we implemented NetApp, we noticed that the deduplication and the latency changed a lot. Rather than buy more disk space, we now compress a lot of stuff and we have more storage. Overall, we have more storage and less latency, which saves us money. I would say that we save between half a million and three-quarters of a million dollars, yearly.

We use our data in the same way. This solution benefited us in that it was hard to convince our upper management to buy more disk, so this helped out.

The thin provisioning helped a lot, and it was probably the biggest key. We noticed that we were short in certain areas and we needed to add more room for VDI. With thin provisioning, we weren't using as much, and with not much latency on it.

Being able to move large amounts of data from one data center to another has helped us. We have a data center in one office and another one that is about a hundred miles away. We share a lot of data between these two sites. There is almost no latency, so it works out perfectly. When we have an incident, such as a power outage at one site, we automatically have a backup on the other end. Also when one side is down, we're still available, although we're limited to certain things on one side. Overall, the backup is pretty good.

We are currently discussing the possible relocation of resources.

I would estimate that our application response time has improved by twenty to thirty percent. For example, our photo studio application is faster.

At this time, we are examining out data center costs and considering a different data center.

Using NetApp has helped alleviate worry about storage being a limiting factor. Had I been asked this a year ago, it would have been a different story.  The additional storage means that things are easier and running more smoothly, and we don't have to worry about it breaking down.

The most valuable features for us are controlling the snapshots, the ease of reverting back, and scheduling.

NetApp AFF is very good at cleaning up your storage.

The stability is good but there is room for improvement with other options.

Stability is good, although there is always room for improvement.

We are working on scaling this solution right now. It is a big part of what we want to do, including moving to the cloud.

Technical support for this solution is good, and I've never had a problem. They are straight to the point and give you a lot of detail on what to expect or what you might run into. Whether you call or get support online, it is pretty good.

We started looking into NetApp AFF because our previous solution was outdated, and we were having storage problems. They were older FAS storage, also by NetApp.

We were interested in getting something a little better, including improvements in the storage and the latency.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's always been very easy with how everything works, and their support has been pretty solid too.

We worked with partners for implementation and deployment. Our experience with them was pretty good.

Having our VDI work better is important to us because our work-from-home employees can work a lot better, which helps save money.

We only evaluated NetApp, and we are slowly looking at VMware, VDI, and the cloud.

We went with this solution primarily because of the stability. I also see reducing a lot of storage and cleaning up a lot of stuff. It is pretty good at this.

We are looking into a cloud version in the future.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to consider several things. If they are trying to save money, think that they'll have to buy more disk, or want to clean up what they have, I think that they should go ahead with NetApp AFF. It makes a big difference, especially if you see the thirty percent improvement that we have seen. It's a pretty big jump.

This solution is very good, but nobody is perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.