NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

A disadvantage of NetApp stems from the fact that it does not have a product, like Isilon, that offers object-oriented storage.

NetApp needs to focus on making its product more compatible with other tools and curb the extra charges they attach to their standard licenses.

I have experience with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I have been selling the solution for the last three to four years. I am a reseller of NetApp products.

Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable. You can get a box from the same series of NetApp if you want one and a half petabytes of space. Owing to the aforementioned reasons, I recommend the solution to bigger companies.

The solution's technical support is not as good as it is supposed to be since you have to push them to get support. I rate the technical support a seven to seven and a half out of ten.

Neutral

I don't think NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays has advantages over Dell Unity XT because when I compare them technically, I feel Dell is better. When I sell five boxes of Dell, I sell one box of NetApp.

The deployment phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is tricker when compared to Dell. NetApp has a typical operating system that is known to them only.

Price-wise, NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is costlier than Dell. You have to buy a lot of licenses separately. The licensing model of NetApp is not intuitive enough.

I would say that it is an okay product that is not bad. A few people specifically ask for NetApp products.

The performance of the product is good.

I don't have any recommendations for people planning to use NetApp products since I don't like their solutions.

I rate the overall product an eight to eight and a half out of ten.

The most valuable feature is just the speed. Our databases perform much better since we moved over to it. That's really our value. We use it for SQL and Oracle. The DBAs are happy.

The end-user experience has improved the organization as a whole; the customers that the DBAs serve. All the application folks are happier, now that their databases are running better.

I guess the user interface could be a little more streamlined. There are too many different menus you have to go into. I've used other interfaces on other storage arrays that are just more streamlined, more intuitive. Overall, it's not that bad. It's really just a minor tweak.

Other than that, I really don't see anything.

We've had it up and running for two years and have had no problems with it; stable for us.

We haven't scaled it yet. We haven't added any storage to it yet, but I've worked with these arrays in the past, and I know they're pretty easy to scale out.

I haven't had the need to use technical support.

We wanted an all-flash array for our databases. We have a previous relationship with NetApp. We decided to just try it out, and it worked out.

Those actually were on a different vendor storage array. They were on SAS drives, and we moved it over to the all-flash from there.

Initial setup was easy. I've had experience with it in the past. Even if you don't, it's not that bad, really.

We looked at NetApp flash vs IBM. We compared EMC vs NetApp Flash. There were a few other smaller vendors.

We eventually went with NetApp because we had a previous great relationship with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability, direction, and service/support; great support. Those are the big ones for me.

I don't think anything's perfect. They could make a few minor tweaks with the user interface, and maybe a few more little things they can tweak, but other than that, it's pretty solid.

If you want cost-effective, fast disk, this is really a good solution.

We're able to quickly roll out close to 2,000 VDIs with very little setup. I've had familiarity with a different model of the NetApp device. It was mostly a matter of rolling it over to the new one. It was very easy to work with. The familiarity with it and the speed of it; I can't complain.

The most valuable feature is its speed. We had a bake off with another product in our data center, and it blew it away, without any question. It was about 100% faster than the XtremIO. It was just pure speed.

We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it.

At this point, we haven't really gotten that far in our stages of it. The scalability is what we need. The administration is really easy. The best way I can say this is, keep on keeping on. It's going to grow organically.

If anything else, I would like to see higher-capacity drives, as they come out; I have heard that 15 TB are out on a different NetApp series. Getting those on the EFs would be nice. That's maybe a pipe dream. The EF series doesn't have them quite yet. I don't think they're really designed yet for the EF series, from what I’ve heard from a couple of solutions engineers. If that happens, great; if it doesn't, great.

I have not had any stability issues with it. We actually have two shelves for over a year now. It does not give us any problems. We're not even really pushing it either. That's kind of the other good side of it. It's got a lot of capacity, a lot of IO availability, and bandwidth. It just works.

Everything we've wanted to do, scale-wise, it's done. We started off with one shelf, got about 2,000 VDIs on it; put another shelf in, not a problem. It was about as easy as you can make it.

Unfortunately, we have not used technical support. It hasn't had an issue for us to do that, yet. In the 15 months that I've been there, I haven't had to call support for that product.

XtremIO is a nice product, but it has so much more overhead. Deduplication involves a little bit more overhead than what the EF does. I kind of look at EF as a dragster as opposed to a road course racer. The EF just goes straight line. It does what it's supposed to do; not a lot of frills, but it does its job really well. XtremIO is a bit more tuned for a general-purpose workload; not so much speed. It's still flash, but the overhead on the XtremIO was more than what we need it for. The price point was better on the EF. You get more speed, better capacity, and better price. The EF was a better value.

The disadvantages of the XtremIO were the speed and the capacity. I think it was a very similar scale out for the XtremIO. It was very similar in size. It was a little bit smaller because there was more overhead; different metadata for the XtremIO. It required a little bit more controller size, and so on.

Also, it was a 4U brick versus a 2U brick. We basically get twice the capacity of two shelves for NetApp versus one brick from XtremIO. The scalability was one of the big features as well.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the one that provides the best value is the most important criteria; does it hit the most amount of needs that we have; once we determine what our requirements are, and how we go forward. What's the best for us? We may spend a little bit different money on something else, but that has to be of a specific need that we need to fit. Basically, what's the best value?

As I’ve mentioned, from familiarity with a different version of the product, initial setup was very easy for us. My cohorts and partners in crime are very familiar with it. They have no problem looking at it, either, and understanding what's going on with it. It's been a very good product for us.

If you can get a bake off, do that. Try to get the same type of test across the board. Put it through its paces. Definitely get your solutions engineers involved; almost pit them against each other. Ask a lot of questions, and really find out what the requirements are. Get them in there and try them out. You lose nothing, except a little bit of time. If you can spend better money the first time out, you look better as an engineer and a person that can influence purchasing.

I have not given it a perfect rating because, as I’ve mentioned, it doesn’t have some features. At the same time, I have rated it high because it does its job really, really well; what we require of it.

The majority of my clients wanted to establish a MetroCluster operation and wanted their business to be stable using multiple data centers. That is why they wanted storage that was going to provide a place for their virtual machines.

Some of the valuable features include MetroCluster switchover, in terms of disaster recovery, it is easy to use, and flexible.

I have been using the solution for almost one year. 

In my experience I found the solution to be stable. 

The solution is scalable.

There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster. In case of emergencies, when you need urgent feedback from the support, it is delayed because you need to make multiple calls. 

The initial setup for installation was straightforward. 

The installation took one day to configure.

Most of my customers pay for the license on a yearly basis. It can be expensive depending on the capacity number.

When you are dealing with a virtual machine or on-premise, one of the in-demand storage is NetApp. Veeam is also compatible with NetApp, you will not have any concern, it is a total package. 

I rate NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays a nine out of ten.

Cost: it's a lot cheaper. It's a lot cheaper than what the other vendors have for the same type of environment. It saves us money.

The ease of use is the most valuable feature; something that we can use for a flash and all-flash type of environment that we can really put a heavy workload on. It gives us an environment to where we can really push a lot harder. We have multiple vendors in our establishment. We have NetApp, EMC, IBM, HP; we have pretty much all of them.

We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications.

I would like to see a way for NetApp personnel that are used to the FAS and the CDOT systems, to be able to easier translate that experience and knowledge into using the EF series. There are some differences in there and it will throw off, when you're trying to train somebody, as far as bringing in somebody new into the group. When they're supposed to be responsible, it's another technology for them to try to learn. Something that would help port that process; make them similar in how the manageability of it is functioned.

Obviously, everything can be improved on so I won't ever give anything a perfect rating. But as far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve.

We have not had an outage with it yet. Other vendors, we have. We've had an actual high-end frame completely go down on us.

We haven't done too much with scalability yet in our environment, so I don't really know. From my point of view, I can't answer that one.

I have used technical support but to me tech support for the EF is the same as the tech support for the rest of the NetApp environments: pretty quick, pretty easy. It's a lot more fluid.

I requested it, but I didn't make the decision.

We knew we needed to invest in the EF series mostly because we have a lot of files, we have some CDOT systems that we have in there with the 8060s right now, and we knew that we had some environments where we're looking at XtremeIO and so on. We were trying to find something comparable to it and, honestly, within our company, there wasn't a whole lot of knowledge that there were more options.

I brought it up and said, "Hey what about these guys?" And they said something like, "Oh, they don't have it." And here it is. That was what brought it in. We were using XtremeIO and I wanted to move over to this, because of cost.

XtremeIO, when it got bought out by EMC, the cost went up and the support model for EMC is the same across all products. However, now it's even more, because you have to call EMC and then EMC points you over to a third party and it's troublesome.
The advantage of XtremeIO is the GUI system, which is extremely easy. It really is. It's based off of almost like the old XIV. The XIV system from IBM was an extremely easy GUI, just slide. It's almost like using a Windows system and they kind of ported that into the XtremeIO, which made it easier for that as far as the manageability side of it. However, as far as flexibility, it didn't have a whole lot there.

Besides NetApp and XtremeIO, we brought another one in-house and it didn't make it through the first stage. We pushed it and actually crashed it. You shouldn't see a flash crash but we did.

Reliability is the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with.

I was involved in the initial setup; I helped built it out in the lab.

We normally have the vendors come in and actually do the physical build-out of the systems themselves but then, once they start doing the next part, which is the configuration, they bring us in, it's simple. It was very simple. There wasn't a whole lot for us to do.

Make sure you truly test the possible solutions one-on-one against each other and not just let the vendor tell you the answer. A lot of times, their answer is dependent on the criteria that they use to give it.

We use NetApp for storage.

The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another.

Being able to partition different virtual volumes of storage is really valuable for us. It is pretty simple to manage.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any improvements other than perhaps better integration with some of our Cisco products.

The solution is pretty stable. We haven't had many issues with it.

I am not very familiar with how well it scales. Ever since I started it's been the same so we haven't really grown into it.

I never had to use their technical support, so I don't have any opinion about it.

I would probably switch to one of our new HyperFlex environments, which includes everything that we need. Right now with NetApp, we have to manage the storage and computer networking separately. With the HyperFlex solution, we could manage all three components in one place: storage, computing, and networking. That would be much easier.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The more you can make it integrate into one solution, the better it is. It is less of a headache than having to configure three or four different things. One solution and one GUI is just the way to go.

I would rate the solution about seven out of ten. It would be closer to ten if it supported integration with other products, not just Cisco.

The primary use case of this solution is for banking services. It is one of three of our production systems in which we store all of our customer's data. 

Thirty percent of our production traffic for our company is stored with this solution.

The deployment model used is a private cloud.

The main advantage of this solution is performance. 

This solution does not have any compression or deduplication, but instead gains better performance through concurrency.

We cannot share data in what is described as a trunk port, which is a disadvantage.

Technical support is an area that needs improvement.

In the next release, I would like to have staged access. The administrator would be able to connect to all of the storage and see real-time performance and issues, not only in the web interface. If the administrator is working on the console they should have access to all interfaced controllers.

I have had a couple of technical tasks, but I think that they have good technical support when you inquire about hardware. They have a problem when you ask about software-related issues. 

When you have a hardware issue, it is reloved within the time limit described and agreed to in the SLA. 

When it's a software-related issue, it is difficult to find an engineer that can help you. You spend time describing your issue to a person who then says that they can help you, but it will take time. A week later you explain it again. 

Only when they prioritize your request, will they assign an engineer to resolve your issue.

The initial setup was easy. I spent an hour with the setup. 

One of the last initial setups I performed was difficult. It was on IBM Storage and the manual stated that you could connect to an IP address. It was supposed to work but when you connected to this address it did not ping and you cannot connect to them.

We had to connect with the console and create a cluster manually. This took approximately five hours. In the last two years, since the deployment, I have not had any issues with it.

It is very easy, and even a person with a minimal background could do it with no problem.

We are not talking about using this for all of our data storage, as that can be very expensive. We have singular pricing for the solutions we use.

Vendors who provide all-flash storage have singular pricing that depends on a couple of factors.

If we compare this storage solution with Concurrent, the price is the same, but the performance is much better.

The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.