NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it for high performance, block storage, and file storage. 

The highest performance need apps are usually deployed on AFF. We're using adaptive QoS to identify what applications require higher performance and moving those volumes over to the AFF.

We are able to offer higher performance to meet the business needs. We see far less issues with applications complaining about not getting the throughput they need, the IOPS, or that they are getting to high of a latency. We put it on AFF and the issues go away.

The user experience with AFF is fast and secure, with continuous access to data. Our users typically don't know where we're putting their data unless we have some benefit in telling them. If they say, "It's not fast enough," we put it over here, and they say, "It's good now. We're happy." Though, we have to be judicious in how we move it, because storage is a bit expensive. Although, the higher storage efficiencies somewhat compensate for it.

The solution is providing IT more headroom so we can give higher performance to more applications. Like every business, our data footprint is growing. Our applications account is growing, and we're just able to keep up with it now somewhat better than we were before.

We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there.

• It has extremely high performance. 
• The storage efficiency is far superior to a typical FAS.
• The administration is ONTAP, so it's not like you have a new platform to learn. Everything is consistent with what we have been doing for years.

On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release.

Like every NetApp platform, it's very stable. Occasionally, we hit a bug, but you encounter that everywhere. We've never had any problems specific to AFF. Overall, our problems with NetApp products have been minimal. It is a solid platform.

It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out.

As with all NetApp tech support, it's outstanding. It is the best in the industry. It is very easy to escalate.

We didn't technically switch solutions. We just augmented it because we have been a NetApp customer for awhile. Thus, we're going from FAS to AFF, which is just a natural progression.

The initial setup was not complex. Even though it's a higher performing platform, you run it, manage it, and administer it the same as you do any FAS.

We have a VAR, Tego Data Systems, whom we work with closely. They know our environment as well as we do. So, when we come to them with a need, we don't have to spend a lot of time feeding them background. They're ready to hit the ground running.

Our TCO has probably stayed about the same per terabyte of user data.

We looked at other vendors (Kaminario, Pure Storage, Dell EMC, and IBM), but decided that it made the most sense to stay with NetApp. 

I would look at the performance of AFF, its reliability, and its outstanding tech support. 

AFF is the wave of the future. Spinning disk will be going away and it just makes sense to go where the industry is going.

AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away.

To set up and provision enterprise applications using this solution is quick. We're integrating it with ServiceNow, so it is a hands-off storage allocation. A user submits a request and can have storage in five to ten minutes.

We are not yet connected to any public clouds.

The most valuable features are the performance, speed, and that it is easy to manage. The most important one is performance. We use it for SQL, Oracle and SAP.

It makes the applications faster for production. There are no complaints from users about slowness. Performance is the main benefit of the All-Flash FAS.

It has made us more efficient, because we are an oil and gas company. Most of our applications depend on Oracle, SAP, or SQL, where it needs good performance. We have 24/7 operation. We cannot stop for any reason, because we need to produce oil, always.

There is room for improvement with the price. I’d like the price to go down.

At a recent NetApp conference, I attended a lab for Data ONTAP 9. I don't know everything about it. I need to spend some time to go through it; to see what they can improve.

Other than that, I don't have anything in mind.

It's very stable; no issues. We have had it installed for the last 12 months, and there have been no issues up until now.

We have already decided to buy more of them. I think, by end of this year or the beginning of next year, we will release the order for this.

About 90% of our data center is sitting on NetApp, either All Flash, 8080 or something else. VMware is also sitting on NetApp. That’s also good; no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good. But we are also very good; we have solid knowledge of NetApp. I have been using NetApp for the last 12 years.

We previously used HPE, but that was a long time ago. Since we moved from HPE to NetApp, we’ve only been working with FAS.

Initial setup was straightforward. Installation is easy, but we spent a long time proving it's good; convincing our users, which are application developers or DBAs, to move to this one. But the initial setup is piece of cake.

As a storage admin, I just need to install my storage. I don't want someone to call me back and say, “Oh, there is an issue.” Right now, we don't have complaints from users. That means less stress, which is fantastic.

The interface is pretty good. It’s really easy to use.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability; how much they improve the technology; service; and support. All of these together are very important.

Multi-platform support is one of the most valuable features. It has lots of data protection solutions and cool new features, such as vol moves and FlexCloning. That's very useful for database refreshes.

We heavily leverage the FlexClone features to clone databases for various environments. We use the multiple protocol feature to support different operating systems and platforms.

It allows us to be more flexible with customer demands and needs. It has not allowed us to save money, per se; there are other solutions that are probably cheaper in the flash arena, but this was a nice transition from our NetApp 7-mode to CDOT platforms.

I’d like better performance management tools and a federated provisioning tool to manage our storage. They're working on that right now. They don't have anything out of the box that comes with that at this time that I know of.

I've been using AFF Flash for about eight months; we tested it 12 months ago.

It's a very stable platform; so far, it’s been very stable.

It scales very well. I'd give it about a 9 out of 10 on scalability.

They have strong technical support. We've had some issues in the beginning with the technical support because it was a fairly new product, but they seem to be scaling up in terms of their support engineers.

We evaluated Pure and Tintri. We're an incumbent customer of NetApp’s 7-mode product, so for the migration from 7-mode to CDOT AFF was easier than transitioning to Pure or Tintri.

Some of the competitors did not offer multi-protocol solutions, so the architecture for those solutions would have been a little bit more complicated.

Me and my team did the initial setup. Setup was more complicated than their 7-mode platforms, but it's a necessary evil to provide the new functionalities within CDOT and AFF.

Moving to a flash solution was definitely beneficial.

If you're not already in flash, you should probably start thinking about just buying just flash. Flash helps relieve some of the performance capacity management overhead that comes with traditional spinning disk platforms.

What I would suggest to people that are looking at flash is to make sure they're able to do proper sizing. With buying flash, you need to also make sure your controllers are able to support the workloads you expect the flash to handle. I think flash removes the disk as the bottleneck, but then that pushes that bottleneck down to other hardware components, such as either the network SAN or storage controllers. Make sure that the rest of your system can handle it.

That's what I would offer in terms of evaluating a flash solution, and to look into scaling out versus scaling up for flash.

Snapshot, SnapMirror, FlexClone, and deduplication are features we use a lot of and which are valuable to us. We're also using light compression, which is a new thing on the AFF.

For us, it's brilliant to have all the functionality that NetApp gives you out the box. We've been a NetApp customer for 14 years and it's great now that we can get that on all-flash and have the performance to go alongside the functionality. We've always wanted that performance. The really good thing for us is we're already cluster-mode so we can just slide the AFF into the existing cluster and migrate all our data across relatively seamlessly.

For us it's about getting stuff on the website faster and more reliably. Currently our existing filers are struggling on the load. So it's all about performance really; it could have better performance.

We've been looking at it and talking about it for probably about three months. We've ordered it, and it's in the data center now. We've got the kit, it's just not in production. We'll hopefully deploy and put it into production this year.

We didn't have issues with deployment.

We expect it to be stable.

I think our experience has been a bit hit-and-miss. From a technical point of view, we were early adopters of clustered Data ONTAP and cDOT. We found that the support was limited on cDOT. We were using cDOT for the better part of three years and it's only now that it feels like the support team at NetApp has caught up. That was a challenge, and again there's been a lot of changes at NetApp around the sales side of the business and I think we've suffered a bit at the hands of that.

It should be straightforward because we know it; it should be straightforward.

To be honest, we spoke to a lot of people. We spoke to Tegile, XtremIO, Pure Storage, SolidFire, and Nutanix just to understand the market because it felt like the storage market had moved on quite a lot over the last three years. Clearly, with us being an NFS house, it's all we've used. It came down really to Tegile or NetApp.

We chose NetApp because it was an easier deployment for us because we already know it. We've got the skills. We know that it works and, I guess, NetApp has just got a bit more experience in the market. Their ability to execute is kind of a known for us.

It's interesting as in it's come down at a price-point now to where it's much more feasible than it was even two or three years ago, to go down the old-fashioned road. It doesn't mean necessarily it's the right thing to do, I don't think. I think it's important that as a customer you understand what your requirements are.

NetApp's performance in India is excellent. I have been in this industry for 26 years. The support and services are also excellent. My downtime is minimal. The support for their solutions is superb. Years ago, we all used tape drive backup. We approached NetApp about an alternative, and they offered a good ROI compared to what we used to use. 

It was a game-changer for Salesforce. We also use NetApp as object storage for Rubrik. We've streamlined many things in those areas. We use many workflows, and the performance is good. 

NetApp has improved our performance based on our business requirements and streamlined our production activity. I rate NetApp's technology 10 out of 10. Availability and performance are key areas in which NetApp has improved us as an organization. It raises our performance by two or three times and provides additional space. 

NetApp's All-Flash storage solution has delivered the most value for our company. All-Flash is an excellent technology that delivers high performance for our workloads. We are happy with that.

NetApp could improve its security and AI features. In the latest version, I would like to see some ransomware protection.

I have worked with NetApp solutions for 26 years. 

The significant difference between NetApp and competitors is support, price, and performance, which are all excellent.

I rate the NetApp solution 10 out of 10. 

Our whole storage environment is based on NetApp. We provide an enterprise network that offers storage for various entities that require on-demand storage, including databases, web pages, and other large-scale storage requirements. We are also getting into AI-generated content, which requires even more storage space.

NetApp provides an opportunity to scale out if necessary. Because NetApp has so many different systems and products, we can provide as much storage as needed. We could implement it anywhere because it always has backward compatibility.

The organization I work for adopts Zero Trust and prefers NetApp for that. It's embedded in pretty much everything we do. We also use other competitors, like Dell, but in terms of storage, nothing is as good as NetApp. We're getting into the AI realm because the organization I work for understands that it's coming fast. We're talking to them about storage possibilities for AI-related resources that will soon be needed. 

NetApp offers the best value in terms of storage and compatibility. The solution is compatible with every product we use, including Dell and Cisco. NetApp is at the forefront of innovation. They've been doing this for a long time, and they provide excellent support to their partners. 

We once lost some virtual machines and we could restore the virtual machines quickly from our NetApp backup. 

We don't have any challenges with NetApp. We only need to update it on emerging software and versions that are put out or any enhancements that they've included or things that they've deprecated. NetApp's product is superior, so our engineers must stay on top of all the features and things that they've taken away.

We've used Dell EqualLogic and VMware vSAN storage. Dell EqualLogic servers may not work with other server types, whereas NetApp is compatible with everyone. We've already spoken with our NetApp sales reps, and they're in the process of getting us quotes on the new AI-focused systems. Our organization must scale fast and avoid a bottleneck where we can't scale as needed on demand. 

I rate NetApp solutions 10 out of 10. We are using maybe 50 percent of NetApp's capability. There's so much more that we don't touch on. Coming to these events, you learn about the new and upcoming software they've been working on. 

We have a workload class that requires better performance. 

The tool has lowered latency. 

In the current atmosphere, private cloud is improving. NetApp AFF needs to provide flexibility in terms of hardware and capital expense. 

I have been working with the product since 2017. 

NetApp AFF does a good job in terms of support. 

The product's deployment is straightforward. 

The tool's ROI is primarily on the performance workload. We have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

You need to be careful with the licensing since it can become expensive 

We evaluated Dell, Hitachi and Pure. 

NetApp AFF has improved efficiency and sustainability. It has simplified our infrastructure and reduced the costs for staffing and equipment. 

The product has doubled performance. 

We also have Dell Storage. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

NetApp AFF handles tier-one workloads, including home drives, departmental shares, group shares, and application shares.

The product has size limitations on fax volume. They have increased from 100 to 300, which is still less than other vendors. Or flex groups are not supported. 

I have been working with NetApp AFF for five years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The tool offers good support. 

Positive

We chose NetApp AFF because it has advantages over other file platform vendors. 

NetApp AFF's deployment is easy. The tool's representatives were very helpful. 

The tool's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap. It is cheaper compared to other platforms. 

We had no challenges since we constantly refreshed NetApp AFF technology. 

We are working with NetApp AFF and Amazon representatives to move our workloads to AWS. 

We have fewer issues with the product compared to other file platforms. 

The tool has reduced operational costs by 60-70 percent. 

I rate it an eight out of ten.