NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

There are so many things to talk about around the use cases associated with the tool. There are so many reasons why I started with NetApp, and I am still selling it even after I started my own company. I have worked with the product's partner who used to sell NetApp. There is one use case for NetApp that only the technology people can speak about, and it is about its unification area.

To date, no other storage facility has been able to unify all the protocols for storage, specifically if you are talking about the NAS or SAN environments. NetApp has solved the problem of unifying different environments. When we talk about performance, NetApp's performance is flexible and not rigid. There is a lot to talk about the tool when I meet the customers. Not all people want to really talk about the tool's use case and prefer to speak more about their needs. In general, people talk about what they need to solve their problems.

We utilize NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays for banking data, hypervisors, and databases in our productive environment.

The simplicity of the project and the storage opportunities are valuable. Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market. We've implemented more than ten systems similar to this, and they all function seamlessly. We've even tested them with an end-to-end fiber channel over Ethernet on the six hundred series, and everything operated smoothly.     

Ideally, the organization is trying reduce the footprint. Our current footprint is all on Lazy Theta and flash hard drives with Flash Pools and so on. To have one consistent platform that takes the same amount of data in less amounts of space is key. It is just a matter of getting to that next level of datacenter integration.

The primary use case for our All Flash EF-Series is currently being used for Vidya, with all subjects, Zinap, using our server to allow us to increase performance of our user experience on Vidya. We have high use cases for SQL databases. Most of our business critical applications use SQL to allow us to complete the DoD mission needs, so we have been using the EF-series for about two years now and everything has been going smoother and faster. We currently purchased 20 efi 60s with 1.92 terabyte SSD drives and it has been pretty effective, so far.

I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse.

Having low latency is always key, so if I had to rate it, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 of getting the best out of what we can - the best performance and low latency.

My company uses the solution to store our files, virtual machines, and also our ERP tool, which is from SAP.

The most valuable features of the solution are that it has NetApp Snapshot capacity and it offers resilience in recovering files. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the best solution for storage purposes in the market if you currently face any storage problems.

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.

I normally work with customers. I'm a senior consultant so I'm responsible for giving information to customers and I make assessments for them about what technology is the best for them to use.

In terms of which features I've found most valuable, this includes rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas - their cloning tools.

Also, the deployment is very quick and very simple.

When we have certain standards for performance, the customer experience is much better as well. They expect to have that kind of performance maintained or improved in the future. If there's a glitch, for example, whether it's storage or network, that's where customers start complaining about performance and the business goes haywire after that, for a while, until we fix the problem.

NetApp maintains the very high performance that we want to have. We work very closely with their engineer to make sure that every update they have will line up with what we require, or to fix whenever we have found problems in the past. We don't want to run into issues where, this is the price to upgrade to a certain version, and there is a certain impact.

I like the performance aspect of EF Series. It basically provides everything that we are looking for as a solution, very low latency and very high performance. That's why we're using NetApp to run our business. For example, with databases. We run a lot of Oracle databases that rely on performance because we want to have the business application respond within a certain amount of time for business transactions.

The most valuable feature for us is its low latency, which is the main reason we bought it. We had performance issues before, and this was a great solution to those problems.

We run our data warehouse on it and batch processing needs to happen in a certain time frame. If we can’t deliver data processing in eight hours, then we have to keep the system closed for end users at that time. Ideally, we need it done by the start of business in the US, because if we finish late, people can’t start working until after that. Our batch processing time went down from 14 hours to seven hours with this solution.