NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

This solution provides storage for our entire company.

We have a unified architecture with NAS and SAN from both NetApp ONTAP AFF clusters.

This solution reduced our costs by consolidating several types of disparate storage. The savings come mostly in power consumption and density. One of our big data center costs, which was clear when we built our recent data center, is that each space basically has a value tied to it. Going to a flash solution enabled us to have a lower power footprint, as well as higher density. This essentially means that we have more capacity in a smaller space. When it costs several hundred million dollars to build a data center, you have to think that each of those spots has a cost associated with them. This means that each server rack in there is worth that much at the end. When we look at those costs and everything else, it saved us money to go to AFF where we have that really high density. It's getting even better because the newer ones are going to come out and they're going to be even higher.

Being able to easily and quickly pull data out of snapshots is something that benefits us. Our times for recovery on a lot of things are going to be in the minutes, rather than in the range of hours. It takes the same amount of time for us to put a FlexClone out with a ten terabyte VM as it does a one terabyte VM. That is really valuable to us. We can provide somebody with a VM, regardless of size, and we can tell them how much time it will take to be able to get on it. This excludes the extra stuff that happens on the back end, like vMotion. They can already touch the VM, so we don't really worry about it.

One of the other things that helped us out was the inline efficiencies such as the deduplication, compaction, and compression. That made this solution shine in terms of how we're utilizing the environment and minimizing our footprint.

With respect to how simple this solution is around data protection, I would say that it's in the middle. I think that the data protection services that they offer, like SnapCenter, are terrible. There was an issue that we had in our environment where if you had a fully qualified domain name that was too long, or had too many periods in it, then it wouldn't work. They recently fixed this, but clearly, after having a problem like this, the solution is not enterprise-ready. Overall, I see NetApp as really good for data protection, but SnapCenter is the weak point. I'd be much more willing to go with something like Veeam, which utilizes those direct NetApp features. They have the technology, but personally, I don't think that their implementation is there yet on the data production side.

I think that this solution simplifies our IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments. In fact, this is one of the reasons that we wanted to switch to this solution, because of the simplicity that it adds.

In terms of being able to leverage data in new ways because of this solution, I cannot think of anything in particular that is not offered by other vendors. One example of something that is game-changing is in-place snapshotting, but we're seeing that from a lot of vendors.

The thin provisioning capability provided by this solution has absolutely allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. I would say that the thin provisioning coupled with the storage efficiencies are really helpful. The one thing we've had to worry about as a result of thin provisioning is our VMware teams, or other teams, thin provisioning on top of our thin provisioning, which you always know is not good. The problem is that you don't really have any insight into how much you're actually utilizing.

This solution has enabled us to move lots of data between the data center and cloud without interruption to the business. We have SVM DR relationships between data centers, so for us, even if we lost the whole data center, we could failover.

This solution has improved our application response time, but I was not with the company prior to implementation so I do not have specific metrics.

We have been using this solution's feature that automatically tiers data to the cloud, but it is not to a public cloud. Rather, we store cold data on our private cloud. It's still using object storage, but not on a public cloud.

I would say that this solution has, in a way, freed us from worrying about storage as a limiting factor. The main reason is, as funny as it sounds because our network is now the limiting factor. We can easily max out links with the all-flash array. Now we are looking at going back and upgrading the rest of the infrastructure to be able to keep up with the flash. I think that right now we don't even have a strong NDMP footprint because we couldn't support it, as we would need far too much speed.

The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning. For example, we make use of FlexClone. We're making more use of fabric pools, which is basically tiering of the storage. That way, instead of having just ONTAP with this expensive cost, if we want to roll off to something cheaper, like object storage, we can do that as well.

The cost of this solution should be reduced.

SnapCenter is the weak point of this solution. It would be amazing from a licensing standpoint if they got rid of SnapCenter completely and offered Veeam as an integration.

This solution is very stable. We have had downtime, but only on specific nodes. We were always able to failover to the other nodes. We had downtime from a power outage in our data centers that was mainly because we didn't want the other side to actually have to take a load of an SVM DR takeover because we knew it was going to be back up in a certain amount of time. Other than that, we have had no downtime.

It seems to be almost infinitely scalable. Being an organization as large as we are, it definitely meets our needs.

We have onsite staff that is a purchased service from NetApp, so we do not directly deal with technical support.

Prior to this solution, we had all these different disparate types of storage. It was a problem because, for example, but we'd be running on low NAS but there was all the extra storage in our SAN environment. The solution seems a little cheaper, but when you added the whole cost up, it was cheaper for us to just have a single solution that could do everything.

We have seen ROI, but I can't quantify how much.

This is a really good solution that definitely meets our needs. It integrates well with all of the software that we're using and they have a lot of good partnerships that enable that. There are a lot of things that can bolt right in and talk to it natively, like Veeam and other applications. That can really make the product shine. I just wish that NetApp would buy Veeam.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

To accommodate growth, we invested in the technology to manage data that must be retained for at least six years to comply with legal requirements. Consequently, as our data storage reaches capacity, the overall size of our storage grid has significantly increased.

NetApp has been essential to our data management for the past ten years. Our environment includes FAS 8200 and AFF 300 systems, with a storage group dedicated to aggregating clinical data for use in New York State. This enterprise-level solution has served us exceptionally well, and we rely on it heavily.

The utility of the SSDs with the AFF series. We have some high-performing databases and high-performing active computational use from those systems. So, that's been pivotal in terms of performance. We ingest a lot of data, and having the ability to deliver that data for our analytics is paramount.

Our company is constantly evolving, with new demands and features emerging. This solution helps us maintain momentum and stability.

The AFF series SSDs delivered the most value to our business. We definitely needed the horsepower. I would rate them nine out of ten. It is a high demand in our environment. So once we know that our developers and DBAs need that, everybody wants it. That's the only caveat, not giving it a ten because now, it's a demand that we need to get as much as we can regarding scalability. We also have other technologies that help out the storage grid because we have a whole storage box. Additionally, we must retain clinical data for a certain number of years to comply with state regulations, which prevents us from purging old data.

I am trying to take advantage of all available features to protect our data, especially considering the high risk of ransomware. To ensure data security, we will explore various options, including replicating data to our disaster recovery site. NetApp can help in these endeavours by focusing more on security.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I would rate NetApp eight out of ten.

Given the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI, we are freshening up our cybersecurity, and AI is an initiative our senior management wants us to look into.

We were part of another organization that separated, and they always had NetApp.

We are investing in additional hardware and increasing our focus on NetApp resources to address expiring tools and facilitate expansion.

We expect the expansion to positively impact our organization, allowing us to scale our business.

Our company always has initiatives to expand its capabilities, and NetApp can help with that.

We use the solution to host the system data for VMs.

The solution's most valuable features are pricing and speed.

They should improve the solution's features for disaster recovery. Also, they should provide easier integration with multiple systems.

We have been using the solution for one and a half years now.

It is a stable solution.

We have 1500 solution users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The solution's customer service is good.

Positive

I have worked with HP in the past. In comparison, NetApp has various protocols like NFS and CIFS. Also, it is much easier to use and integrate than HP.

The solution was easy to deploy and took half a day to complete.

Initially, I implemented the solution myself. Later, I took help from a reseller to review it. Also, two or three executives are required to maintain the solution.

The additional license for the solution costs 45k. It is relatively cheap compared to other vendors.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as nine. It is very stable, reliable, and cost-effective.

Our primary use case is running NFS exports for our local on-premises VMware and our CIFS for local shares.

I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it.

The reliability of NetAPP AFF is another valuable feature.

Blue XP has made it a single pane of glass so that we can see both on-premises and the cloud. We don't have to worry about going back and forth. It has made everything seamless in terms of the look and feel for the admins.

We use other NetApp Cloud Services solutions such as FSx, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, BlueXP, and Cloud Manager. We're just starting to dip our toes into FSxN. We run all of our student services, our general ledger, and all of our classroom-related items off of CVOs. It has been very reliable for us.

We've been using NetApp AFF since 2019.

We have been running NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) since 2019, and we've not had one unplanned outage since then. It's been a reliable workhorse for us.

We've had to upgrade our available storage three times, and it was all seamless. There is a cost every time, but there hasn't been an outage. It's been quick and seamless, and we haven't had any issues with scalability.

We have 8,000 undergraduate students and 2,000 graduate students, and we facilitate another 5,000 university staff. We run all of our campus-wide phone systems and CIFS on it, along with our local VMware environment. We have about 10,000 to 15,000 people relying on NetApp AFF every day.

Whenever we have a problem, the technical support staff usually contact us before we contact them. We've never had an issue with technical support, so I'd give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

As far as a return on investment, it's freed up a lot of our time so that we do not have to worry about the little things that usually take up the majority of our day. Our time can be spent in other areas, whether that's helping with other products, developing new ones, or helping end users.

It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) at ten on a scale from one to ten.

The first use case is having normal CIFS and NFS shares use Active Directory integration with antivirus integration. Another use case is for VMware VCF in a TKG environment using NFS and a SAN protocol.

I am implementing the NetApp product for customers. I deploy CIFS and NFS shares for file access purposes and block access for VMware infrastructures.

NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use.

The deduplication is the most valuable feature. When you have multiple systems with almost the same data, the deduplication helps save on capacity. It is why the box can be overprovisioned. This is very useful in the case where immediate space is required for an application or teams. It also provides good efficiency when provisioning deduplication compression. These efficiencies are very useful compared to other products.

AFF has helped simplify data management with unified data infrastructure (UDI) across SAN and NAS environments. This is very important. Nowadays, UDI is gaining market share for NetApp. 

Its virtualization knowledge is very useful. Also, the Active IQ technology of NetApp is very useful, which uses AI to give suggestions to customers.

The ONTAP data management software has simplified our clients' operations to an extent. The auto support feature gives unique notifications, which simplifies the management. Plus, there have been enhancements in the GUI compared to previous versions, which has simplified things. 

We use synchronous replication with SnapMirror. We can failover and failback very easily. We can failover the site to another, which is good.

It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good.

When we create a LAN, it has taken away the feature. For example, in older code, we used to be able to select the LAN volume for LANs to be placed in. In the newer code, it does not allow the volume to be selected. It creates a volume automatically based on a round-robin. 

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It is a stable product. I have not faced many problems with the box. Wherever I installed or implemented the solution, it is running very smoothly without any issues. I have not received any complaints.

It is scalable. I can grow my data. When it comes to NVMe, it is also scalable in terms of capacity and scaling horizontally. For example, we can add multiple nodes in a cluster as well as multiple expansions. I feel the box is very capable in terms of scalability.

I implement it, then there is a separate team who works with NetApp support. From an implementation perspective, I have not gotten involved much with the support.

The documentation of NetApp is very good. When there are some issues, they can search the documentation and knowledge base. Therefore, you can get very good support before going to NetApp support.

The initial setup is straightforward for the customer. We require more in-depth disk management and understand how the disk will be distributed. Otherwise, it is simple.

The implementation of NetApp with CIFS and NFS is quite quick to deploy. When they came out with the latest models, they provided us with three protocols. Going forward, this will be very useful.

It takes one to two days to deploy NetApp AFF. Apart from the basic configuration, there are many things that need to be done for the integration part, like antivirus integration, LAN configuration, and NDMP configuration. Those all take time. So it can be done in two days, but it might take more time depending on what needs to be done.

We need to do planning for the IP address, cluster names, and all the stuff that NetApp provides for the cluster planning workbook. Once it is deployed, we do IP address assignment to the nodes, local tier configuration, and protocol configuration, then a company can start using the box.

Many customers are purchasing this NetApp solution, which is good.

Normally, I work on IBM storage. Compared to those, this solution's efficiency is good. The IBM solution is an all SAN-based solution. 

Whenever we require block or file services, we only go with NetApp. As of now, I have not implemented any IBM Boxes for file services. Previously, there was the V7000 Unified, but it is not there now. Lately, we have migrated from IBM Box to the NetApp ONTAP Select system, which was serving IBM file services. We needed to move to NetApp because there currently is no system for file services when it comes to IBM.

Oracle ESSWebservice and Cloud Object Storage have huge tasks, making it difficult to implement them. 

I would suggest customers use the box so they get a taste of NetApp. Then, they can compare the product and start using it. If NetApp supports them in their environment, that is very good.

I would rate NetApp AFF as nine out of 10.

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.