NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

• The compression
• Dedupe
• The speed

With the ONTAP, the flexibility is also a nice feature.

We've had quite a positive response since we've moved to the AFF for our VCD and our VDI environments. The feedback from the end users and the virtualization team that manages it has been very positive.

We have a fairly large vCloud, vCloud Director (VCD) environment, which we use for our AFF systems, that and VDI. We use it all for file storage.

It is solid.

It scales out very well. We have not had any issues trying to move anything around or when it comes to expansion. We haven't had to expand the AFF yet, but other ONTAP systems are very easy to expand.

They're very professional. They usually find the issues, within the first couple of calls. The software support for all the SNAPManager products, sometimes the support is a little iffy on that, but the hardware support and the ONTAP support have always been pretty solid.

We had some issues with SNAPManager for Exchange around Snapshots not getting deleted, and it's been an ongoing problem for us. We haven't really come up with a solution yet. That's still been a problem. It's gone around the block a few times in support. In support you get a new guy, they start over with a case, that's been the frustration.

It was all disk space, it was on a FAS system, it wasn't AFF. We switched because of growth. The amount of IO that we needed from our existing system just couldn't handle it.

I felt that NetApp was a little late to the game, but I guess that made them a little bit more mature when they got there. However, I've always been a fan of NetApp, an advocate.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.

We looked at Pure. We looked at some of the Nutanix stuff, but it just wasn't what we needed.

I have been an advocate of NetApp for a long time. It's a good company, has good equipment, and good support. I am more like to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experiences with AFF.

Our current AFF is not part of a cluster of NetApp FAS systems, we have other systems that are multi-node clusters.

Definitely, heavily look at NetApp and its AFF solution. It's a rock solid platform. That's my recommendation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability and longevity. That's why I'm looking at some of the other Flash providers out there. They haven't been around long enough really for us to know that they're going to be there when we need them. NetApp has been a pretty solid vendor for us.

• Performance
• Reliability
• Scalability

They're important because it's critical user data. As a global bank we need to make sure that users' data is accessible at all times; that there's no outage window or things like that. Performance is key.

The consolidation, the physical rackspace. For example, we've got a project ongoing at the moment in consolidating our footprint from 20 rackspaces down into two. I think we've got a 70-80% footprint reduction in going from old FAS controllers to AFF.

There's not really anything that's standing out at the moment.

Perhaps the node count on a block basis, even though we don't really use it that much for block, but that would be one.

The only other thing from our point of view would be, on the storage efficiency side, the compaction storage efficiency - there's no way of seeing that on a volume level, you can only see that on an aggregate level.

We've had All Flash installed now for coming up to two years. I think it was February, 2016 that we put in the first All Flash array.

The All Flash is very good. So far it seems more reliable, there's not been any issues with it.

Good. We've not really had much scalability, so far, to grow that much on the AFF, but what we have had to do has been good.

Very good. As an enterprise, trust me we've got quite a lot of the account team that were involved with this, so quite a lot of NetApp staff helped us out in the build, the design, the configuration, the maintenance, etc.

We were using NetApp. We were using FAS NetApp, and it was just the new system, the new growth that we needed.

Straightforward. No different to any old system that we've put in before, so an AFF is no different to a FAS.

Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM.

NetApp are our chosen vendor for IP storage.

The primary use case for our All Flash FAS is user data: Windows user file data, application data, NAS IP data. We use file storage.

We've just got a great partnership with NetApp. We've got NetApp installed in over 52 different countries. I think our hardware install base is over 600 systems globally. We've got a very good relationship.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage because of the reliability that we get with them, the support that we have with them, the infrastructure that they have available.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• Manageability
• The customer base that they have
• What enterprise accounts have they got
• Cost is the main thing

By manageability I mean how easy is it to manage the infrastructure. You don't want to manage a complex infrastructure and have multiple use cases, of having issues which are hard to manage. Having a single vendor and being able to manage it through a single support center makes it much easier.

My advice to a colleauge considering a similar solution would be: Depending on the work load that you've got, that you require your systems for, if you're looking for high performance NAS then you'd look at NetApp. But you've definitely got to be able to manage the estate that you've got, so depending on the size of the infrastructure that you have would determine the solution that you choose.

I like the speed and that it's easy to set up. We are now using the compression and the dedupe, which is very useful in saving a lot of data space.

As I’ve mentioned, we are using the compression to save data space. We do a lot of vaulting. We have our primary storage and our secondary storage. For our secondary storage, we always had to buy big SATA disks but now we can use compression to actually save buying monstrous disks and use compression to save our secondary vault for data.

I'm hearing about compaction, I kind of want to find out more about it. I guess it's another level of compression on top of things. I’d like to just see where it takes off from there. I know that the speed of the disks isn't going to be the bottleneck anymore. As far as the NAN technology coming out, I want to find out what the feature design is for NetApp on that, too.

So far, I haven’t seen any features in other solutions that I'd like to see brought in to AFF. I'm pretty impressed with the way we run things for what we have so far.

They could always improve the pricing. It is relatively expensive. When we priced things out before, it was priced by how many GBs you need for whatever you need, how many TBs. Now, it's terabytes compressed. You're looking at a compression tool, so you don't need as much hardware to get the same amount of space. It actually is saving space in our data centers, so we're getting a lot of improvements with heating and cooling, and with tile space; half the data center's coming back. For the past two years, we've been really ramping up on different technologies and decreasing our data center space. We've been looking at AFF now for over a year now. We've been running more and more of those in.

I've been running the AFF systems now for over a year.

We have not had any stability issues. We can do vault moves and everything else. It gives us flexibility, mainly in our VMware environment, because we're all NFS. We’re able to buy new equipment, retire equipment, swap things in and out very easily.

We have not had any scalability issues so far. It's scalable, depending on what your network switch is; we're running ten-node clusters right now.

Sometimes we use technical support. It depends on who you get. The last couple of people I had were helpful. We use professional services. For example, when we do an upgrade two or three levels up, we'll mostly use professional services or our contacts. For any kind of upgrades, we'll get recommendations from technical support, and so on. They've been great.

Our main kick off was our VDI environment, our work stations, heavy writes. Typically, we were running SAS disks and they were doing good but for the right performance, you really had to have huge aggregates to carry that load. With AFF, you don't really need that because the IOPS are there and it can handle it.

Initial setup has been easier and easier because we used to set older systems up with SAS and aggregates and everything else. Now, it's kind of, start it up and let it go. It's getting a lot easier, at least on the hardware setup.

We mainly run NetApp for our NAS environment but for SAN, we run some of the other vendors. However, that's kind of coming around. People are seeing what these AFF systems are doing and I'm actually doing some testing in our SAN environment for some of the NetApp stuff, too. It might be a good thing. We'll have to see.

We do a lot of work with our NetApp professional services or just design teams. Get help with them to start it out, so you have some kind of baseline. Don't just go run out there and buy something. (I guess if you have the money, you can go out there and try it.)

We've been working with a pretty good support team that we get to bounce things off of.

I can't find anything bad about them. It's been a big improvement for us.
When I look for a vendor, support is important to me. You want to be able to buy a piece of equipment, run a piece of equipment, you don't know anything about, and know that somebody can support it, so that when something does crash, they're not going to just say, "Oh, call somebody else," or run away from you. Support is very important; I would think so.

We have Cloud Volumes on top of our RDR instance and SnapMirror from on-prem to that.

We use AFF to replicate the data from our on-premises data center to the cloud.

The changes to the forms of our databases have been the most valuable aspect. We have a large healthcare information exchange in New York. It has better efficiency and good performance of larger systems. It's really noticeable.  

It has served to process data, serve our clients, and keep the systems up reasonably well. I'm trying to have data protection with everything incorporated into the systems in the environment.

It has good scalability and keeps the systems stable, performing, and running well. We have a lot of data. We're continuously testing a lot of data. We're expanding and growing. It makes sure that we can have everything running, keep uptime, and have everything protected and secure. It makes sure the data is relevant rather than being out of sync.

We leverage many features that NetApp has provided, like FlexPoint, to rapidly build systems. The performance is noticeable.  

AFF has helped to reduce our operational latency. Latency hasn't been too much of an issue, especially for large, higher-performing systems. We migrate most of our production to AFF. 

NetApp AFF helped reduce support issues such as performance tuning and troubleshooting combined with Active IQ; those things have made it. We don't have many issues with the AFF systems.

All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable.

Moreover, the simplified infrastructure has become easier to manage. We have a small team, so it's made it less difficult to keep things going. 

It's very intuitive to work with, and all the seamless tools and applications come together. Our team isn't big, so it's more manageable.

It's more about protecting data backups because the cache databases we use don't have any native controls like queuing for snapshots and stuff like that. 

We're working on trying to improve this with Ansible. More Ansible integration is the key right now. We would like to have more automation with Ansible and better ways to protect the data because we have application encryption. We need more leverage and native encryption tools that NetApp provides.

We have had this solution for three years. 

It's pretty stable. Our issue is growth. In terms of stability, it's very dependable. 

It is scalable. 

Generally, the support team is spot on, and helps us out a lot. The issues are few and far between. 

Generally, if we have issues, they're really specific, like Cloud Volume issues, replication, or tweaking because of our growth and data. 

Positive

There's an incentive to keep the uptime. Having it on high-performing hardware has improved and kept things going. There are fewer issues and we have higher processing.

NetApp has been the leading goal standard of technology in terms of storage. There was never an option of exploring any other technologies.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We are still going through some challenges because of application encryption. Challenges would be duplication and things like that.

I use AFF to boost performance for tasks like general workloads, virtualized workloads, and high-performance databases. It helps me manage costs while delivering better results in these areas. 

Additionally, AFF has significantly simplified my infrastructure while maintaining high performance. It simplifies the infrastructure by allowing us to easily migrate and adjust workloads using SnapMirror based on our environment's needs. 

With multiple clusters, it offers the flexibility to distribute workloads effectively and adapt to changing demands. AFF has also reduced support issues. Customers usually only complain about performance when it's a real problem, but with AFF's flash storage, we have had fewer complaints. When issues do come up, they are often related to other parts like the network, not the storage itself, which makes troubleshooting easier. 

NetApp AFF's flash technology offers great performance. This feature has been my go-to for managing data and ensuring speed and reliability.

In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better but it has improved a lot.

I have been using NetApp for thirteen years.

NetApp AFF is very stable. I would give it a ten out of ten for stability.

The support has been good, with responsive assistance, especially at higher tiers. However, there were some language and repetitive questions issues with the first-line support, but it improved as it escalated to higher levels. Having account managers has been beneficial.

The initial setup was easy, similar to other NetApp FAS installations.

The price is a bit high, but it is worth it because we have fewer performance issues to deal with and it saves us time. Using multiple NetApp clusters also helps us move workloads as needed, which cuts costs.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF as a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for SQL server-based applications.

The last customer I worked with wanted to improve the performance of SQL responses. They were having issues with multiple SQL statements taking time. Although it's not just a hardware-only solution, they had to do both, which meant replacing their previous hardware and, at the same time, improving their queries. That combination was most important for the customer.

Since I know NetApp's systems, staying with NetApp was one of the best features. For example, Flash is the solution for latency. It reduces latency. The SQL server benefits from all-flash storage, and NetApp is among the most responsive.

I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer.

The improvement I would like to see is not just about NetApp. Rather, it's about improving the hardware itself in terms of its lifecycle. How long is it going to stay as responsive, for example. Their rates have improved; however, there is still room to improve.

I'd like to see them continue with scalability and have the ability to scale more. Hopefully, it gets more compact than it actually is for the scale that we're looking for. 

When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage. That part either needs to have improved technology or improved visibility to the customer. Why should I use that instead of something that seems to be less expensive? They need to explain that more than simply saying ROI is good and the TCO is good. People need a little bit more. It's not easy in this space for people to choose a product. When you go online, you want to have a simple way to choose.

I've been using the solution for about five years.

The solution is stable. It's reliable. 

The scalability is good with NetApp. It's fine for most people. There would be some places where it would be difficult, whatever you do.

We tend to work with environments based on petabytes. 

I like NetApp support. They're very consistent. It's not only the NetApp hardware that you get support with. It's also within that area where NetApp's hardware is, and even software is involved in a total solution with third parties. NetApp's support cares about the total solution and is willing to help.

There are always issues of who should be the right person to address items. Sometimes there's making sure that whoever owns this error is the person you're working with. It takes someone with experience from the customer perspective to know that it will be better if you work with NetApp on that level. That being said, sometimes it can get difficult.

Positive

I did previously use another storage solution.

I have been using NetApp for more than 20 years, and I know NetApp's technologies and support. There is reliability that there is going to be a continuation of technology, and so those are reasons why I continue to choose the solution.

The initial setup process is okay. If you are experienced, it is fine. 

While it's not easy, with the instructions they have, it's straightforward. It just takes some level of expertise or experience in NetApp solutions to be able to do it.

NetApp AFF optimized our customers' costs - or at least, the customer believes so. I didn't do a first-time TCO or ROI.

The pricing of the solution could be improved to better favor the customer. 

Since we've implemented NetApp AFF our clients have not been affected by ransomware attacks. My customer is not in that position, as they would be on-prem and unconnected.

We do use other NetApp services, mostly around volumes and cloud solutions. I have not had any hands-on experience with object storage yet.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case for this solution is machine learning.

The performance of NetApp AFF allows our developers and researches to run models and their tests within a single workday instead of spreading out across multiple workdays.

For our machine learning applications, the latency is less than one millisecond.

The simplicity of data protection and data management is standard with the rest of NetApp's portfolio. We leverage SnapMirror and SnapVault.

In my environment, currently, we only use NAS. I can't talk about simplifying across NAS and SAN, but I can say that it provides simplification across multiple locations, multiple clusters, and data centers.

We have used NetApp to move large amounts of data between data centers, but we do not currently use the cloud.

Our users have told me that the application response time is faster.

The price of the A800 is very expensive, so our data center costs have not been reduced.

We are using ONTAP in combination with StorageGRID for a full data fabric. It provides us with a cold-hot tiering solution that we haven't experienced before.

Thin provisioning has allowed us to over-provision existing storage, especially NVMe SSD, the more expensive disk tier. Along with data efficiencies such as compaction, deduplication, and compression, it allows us to put more data on a single disk.

Adding StorageGRID has reduced our TCO and allows us to better leverage fastest NVMe SDD more, hot tiering to that, and cold tiering to StorageGRID.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and performance.

I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities. Drilling down to their active IQ technology, that's great if your cluster is online and attached to the internet, with the ability to post and forward auto support, but in terms of having an offline cluster that is standalone, all of those utilities don't work. If there's a similar way to how NetApp has a unified manager, but on-premises where the user could deploy and auto support could be forwarded to that, and maybe more of a slimmed-down active IQ solution could be made available, I'd be interested in that.

I need a FlexPool to FlexGroup solution.

I would like to see the FAS and AFF platforms simplified so that the differences will disappear at some point. This would reduce the complexity for the end-storage engineers.

I would rate the stability of NetApp AFF as moderate at this point. There were some unfortunate growing paints initially with the A800. Our problem was related to compatibility issues with the active optical transceivers, and it caused an outage within our data center. Our customer was not happy with this.

The scalability is very good and we have had no issues.

When we had our data center outage, we had an excellent NetApp engineer on-site. We went back and forth through it and eventually worked our way through it, but it was a multi-day problem.

We have been a NetApp customer for a long time. We just recently added a NetApp StorageGRID product for more object-store advantages in our data pipeline. It is adding more value.

NetApp is the number one leader in NFS, which is the protocol that we primarily use. We looked for a new solution simply because IOM3 modules were deprecated and moving forward from ONTAP 9.3 to version 9.6 required a full forklift upgrade, and a bunch of hardware was thrown out.

The initial setup was complex.

The move from older FAS systems with older disk shelves to the newer AFF A800 systems is a transition that is a nightmare in terms of rack space, moving data, and trying to do it online so that the customer doesn't experience downtime. It was a multi-day upgrade.

We used a reseller and a NetApp badged engineer, and our experience with them was very good.

NetApp has a good support team, good account management, good engineers, and they have the ability to stay ahead of what's trending in technology.

Ideally, the cost would be lower, it would be less complex, and the hardware compatibility would be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

NetApp is introducing All Flash FAS with the all-flash array. Our customers like performance, they don't want to deal with latency. Using an all-flash array, our customers get impact from performance.

I can definitely say it has helped our orginization. We have an SQL application server, which is in our NetApp storage. The records contain the number of transactions. Since my company is a financial company, we always look into transactions. NetApp all-flash array is faster than we're used to. The read and write, and the random IOPS are all up to speed. I don't see much of a difference when I run the 100k random IOPS with a 70% read and 30% write, and vice versa, 70% write and 30% read. That's a big improvement that we've seen since we started using this solution. It is a valuable asset.

They have come up with good back-end architecture. The features are the same as NetApp ONTAP. The only change is all-flash. There are no 7k, 10k, or 15k drives, only flash drives.

My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance.

We are very happy with the user experience from the all-flash array. Because their usual latency for the application depends on the critical application - they used to see four-millisecond latency with the non-all-flash array - with the all-flash array, they don't even see microseconds of latency. They might see microseconds, but that is not impactful.

To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash.

It's better with all-flash. 

Scalability is good. Compared to the different vendors, the scalability is very flexible, in the sense that you can scale up to whatever you want, expand your storage, expand your clusters, expand your nodes. NetApp makes it possible. Some vendors have come up with models that won't expand their nodes, which creates the need to buy different clusters. For example, let's say I have four nodes. My four nodes have the capability of taking one million IOPS, but my storage backend isn't complete, so I can't expand that. So the nodes are of no use. NetApp is not only thinking from the customer's point of view, but they are also thinking about every other prospective use and they include a lot in all-flash drives.

It's very good. I have never personally seen any issues with the technical support.

Our previous solution had performance issues. I see a lot of value in faster policies. I don't like when critical applications are running on drives with different speeds. When customers need to track all of their data and it's sitting on a 7k drive, the drive is working hard. The response is slow. With all-flash, it's better. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not complex.

We have connected to AFF public clouds but I'm not really dealing with it.

It took us less than two minutes to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF. 

We used NetApp, but we could've deployed it ourselves. NetApp Support knows the best practices. A good thing about NetApp is that even customers can easily deploy the storage. With other vendors, you usually have to entirely rely on them for deployment and all facets of the solution. 

We definitely see ROI. We save a lot more money with this solution.

Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%. 

Other vendors aren't as straightforward as NetApp when it comes to the deploying, installing, and configuring. NetApp works more efficiently. By saving time, you're saving money.

AFF has affected IT's ability to support new business initiatives. Nowadays, customers in financial companies are looking for more storage. From a business point of view, you need a faster response in order to compete with other financial companies. From the customer's point of view, they are looking for a faster response from their financial company. Using all-flash array, they can retrieve their old files within seconds. That's an important edge.

AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics on VMs. It helps us with records. We need to be able to calculate more performance matters. Customers have complained that the performance latency exceeds more than three milliseconds for some applications. They will have delayed performance latency. When I used the 7.2k drives, applications could only support 300 accounts per second. If it was more than that, it would crash. NetApp all-flash array gives us one million IOPS.

I would rate this product a ten because of flash. Because AFF is better for the customer, provisionally, deployment, and performance-wise.