NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Our primary use case for NetApp AFF is performance-based applications. Whenever our customers complain about performance, we move their data to an all-flash system to improve it.  

We have our own data center and don't share our network with others.

We have moved all of our AI and machine learning applications to all-flash to improve their performance. Prior to this, they were SaaS or on disk. The latency has certainly decreased.

Data protection is a big part of NetApp, and we are using SnapMirror as well as MetroCluster. We did use SnapVault before, but we moved to SnapMirror and we want to take advantage of the synchronous replication in MetroCluster.

I would say that NetApp has helped us to leverage data in new ways. Because it has the PowerShell modules and workflow automations, we have been able to create volumes, give access to them, and automate workflows.

I think that we have been able to reallocate resources that were dedicated to storage because of the automation tools that NetApp has. It helps to speed up our day-to-day tasks. What used to take us thirty minutes, now takes us five minutes.

Our application response time has increased, but it is hard to quantify with a number. I can just say that it has improved in general.

Using this solution has helped to decrease our worry about storage issues. We normally limit our customers' space, giving them less. We try to ask them questions about the type of data and the applications that they have. Sometimes, they will say that they want ten terabytes, but don't really know what they are going to use it for. With regard to our storage, we are not worried about limitations at all.

It is easy to manage data through the GUI by using Active IQ and the unified manager.

Being a non-storage guy, I think that it was quite easy for me to pick things up and learn this solution. They way they are built is really good when it comes to people who want to start fresh. cDOT is a really good OS.

The most valuable feature is the performance.

This solution is getting cheaper over time.

I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation.

We have been using this solution for about one year.

When it comes to stability, NetApp as a whole is good. We have never had any of these kinds of issues.

At the end of the day, we always have the replication going on, so if there is an issue on-premises then we still have our DR site. The replication is still there and everything is up to date.

We have expanded a lot. We had an eight-node cluster and now we have a twelve-node cluster. Scalability is really easy when it comes to NetApp.

As storage space is getting cheaper, we wanted to move to newer hardware.

NetApp does the initial setup when you buy the equipment.

We have a NetApp resident who works with us on-site. I would rate their service and our experience with them a ten out of ten.

We did have some applications that we were using in the cloud, but we came back because of financial issues.

We do have performance issues from time to time that we have to deal with, but it is not specific to AFF. Sometimes the application is not well-managed by the application teams. The load may not be being handled correctly, which is not related to the type of storage but could be related to users not selecting the correct storage options for their applications.

We have not tested the recent graphical update yet, but if it works well then I think that it will be one of the big advantages this solution has. We used to do the upgrades using the CLI.

My advice to anybody researching storage solutions is to go with NetApp. My experience with the vendor is good. The AFF is a good tool to have, whether the client is a small business or a larger enterprise like a bank.

I think the problem with smaller companies is that they don't always understand the importance of data. Perhaps they don't see storage as a solution, but rather just an expense.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case for All Flash FAS that we have is pretty much everything. It is the go-to storage device that we use for block fiber channel devices on our heavy SAP workloads as well as user base files and file shares for databases. 

AFF improves how our organization functions because of its speed. Reduction in batch times means that we're able to get better information out of SAP and into BW faster. Those kinds of things are a bit hard to put my finger on. Generally, when we start shrinking the times we need to do things, and we're doing them on a regular basis, it has a flow on impact that the rest of the business can enjoy. We also have more capacity to call on for things like stock take.

AFF is supporting new business because we've got the capacity to do more. In the past, with a spinning disc and our older FAS units, we had plenty of disc capacity but not enough CPU horsepower and the controllers to drive it and it was beginning to really hurt. With the All Flash FAS, we could see that there are oodles of power, not only from disc utilization figures on the actual storage backend but also from the CPU consumption of the storage controllers. When somebody says "we want to do this" it's not a problem. The job gets done and we don't have to do a thing. It's all good.

All Flash FAS has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs which are enterprise applications. It powers the VM fleet as well. It does provide some of our BW capabilities but that's more of an SAP HANA thing now. Everything runs off it, all of our critical databases also consume storage off of the All Flash FAS for VMs.

For us TCO has definitely decreased, we pay less in data center fees. We also have the ability with the fabric pool to actually save on our storage costs. 

The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer.

The user experience from my point of view, as the person who drives it most of the time, is a really good one. The toolsets are really easy to use and from the service offered we're able to offer non-disruptive upgrades. It just works and keeps going. It's hard to explain good things when we have so few bad things that actually occur within the environment. From a user's point of view, the file shares work, everyone's happy, and I'm happy because it's usually not storage that's causing the problem.

I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once we've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to.

One to three years.

Stability with AFF has been really great. We blew an SSD drive which we thought may never actually happen and it just kept on going. We've not had any issues with it even though we actually went to a fairly recent release of data on tap as well that just works.

Scalability is a really cool part of the product in terms of growing. We don't see that we'll actually need to do much of that. We'll take more advantage of fabric pool and actually push that data out to a lower tier of storage at AWS and our initial projections on that suggest that we've got a lot of very cold data we're actually storing today.

AFF tech support we've had a couple of calls open and it's always been brilliant. I really like the chat feature because one of the things that annoys me is the conference calls that usually come when you have to contact the hardware vendor. You get stuck on a webex or a conference call for hours on end where it's just easier to chat to the techo at NetApp in real time and if he isn't able to help you he'll just pass you on to the next one and you end up staying in the chat which means that I continue working while dealing with a problem.

We knew it was time to switch to this solution because it was costing us a fortune in maintenance, especially when our hardware was getting over the three to five year old mark. With spinning disc, it's not like we can neglect that because drives fail all the time and the previous iteration of storage we had was a NetApp FAS, so we've gone from NetApp to NetApp.

We implemented in-house. It was dead easy. All you have to do is throw it in the rack, plug in the network and fiber cables, give it a name, and away you go. There is very little that actually needs to happen to make it all work. I think we managed to get one of them up in two or three hours.

We also considered Dell EMC and Pure Storage. The biggest reason we picked NetApp was the ease of actually getting the data to the next iteration but also the other vendors don't have a product that supports everything we needed which is file services and block services. It's a one stop shop and I didn't really want to have to manage another box and a storage device at the same time.

I would rate AFF a ten out of ten. If I was in the position to tell someone else about All Flash FAS and why they should get it I would simply say just do it. I think everybody in the storage community is pressured to live on more with less and this product basically enables that to happen.

We use it for our VWware environment. We run virtual machines and our plan is to migrate all of them to the All Flash platform.

The improvement for us has been space savings on the All Flash FAS platform. The data space savings are almost three times better than the what we have right now, a two-to-one ratio.

Regarding the user experience, it's pretty fast. For applications where they require a high throughput, this platform is pretty solid. It also helps improve the performance of enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs because it's pretty fast. We are on a different level of tiered platform, where the All Flash is completely hybrid, SSD aggregate, so it tripled the performance for the customer.

The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe.

The system is pretty stable but most of the ONTAP versions are not really stable. There have been multiple bugs in different ONTAP versions. The hardware is really stable but we see some glitches here and there with the software. That's how the system works.

Right now, we are on a pretty stable version: 9.3.8.

We have not had to scale it. We have a two-node cluster.

Technical support has been pretty good. We have had to involve them two or three times per month.

Our old solution was working fine but the system was going out of support so we needed to do a refresh.

It is straightforward. The whole cluster configuration is pretty straightforward. Just bring up the node and add to the existing clusters. We didn't see any difficulties.

It takes us one day to set up and provision enterprise applications using this product. Migration takes a lot of time but provisioning is setting up the cluster and that takes one day.

We used NetApp Professional Services and they were pretty good.

Because we are government, it is an open contract. People have to bid on government projects. We don't have a say in the options.

I would say this is a good solution but talk to the NetApp guys and see how it really fits in your environment.

We do not connect it to public clouds at the moment. We have plans to do so in the future, depending on the use cases.

I rate the product at seven out of ten. Their system is pretty good but we are still facing a few issues, mainly on the software side where there is an SVMDR. We had it in the previous configuration. We did an ONTAP upgrade but had some issues replicating the whole configuration. There are a few other glitches here and there. Other than that I would say it's pretty stable.

The most valuable features are inline deduplication and compression.

It's enabled us to move all of our database tempdb locations to the AFF and save 70% on storage costs.

It's greatly improved our tempdb access. In our environment, we tend to use and abuse tempdb and as such moving our database tempdb locations over to that device has improved performance quite dramatically.

Beyond the setup complexity issues I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of the things that I wanted to utilize – transparent vol migration, transparent LUN migration, reassignment of volumes from one HA pair to another – have all been solved with either cluster mode or 9.0. Those are things that we do on a daily basis.

It's just as stable as any other NetApp device, that is, very stable.

We haven't done a whole lot of scaling yet in our AFF solution. However, it appears to be quite scalable and now, with ONTAP 9, you can go up to 12 SAN nodes; it's been quite dramatically increased.

In general, I have not used technical support.

I was involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. We decided to go with an all-flash solution for our ESX environment specifically because we had a business initiative to virtualize our database platform. In doing so, it was not performing as well as we would like on the spinning disk. Moving to an all-flash solution has dramatically decreased the OS latencies and increased performance of the OS, which in turn improved the performance of the overall application.

We were previously using a NetApp FAS with the 10,000-rpm SAS disks; the 2 1/2" ones, the little ones.

A cluster mode setup is quite complex, generally speaking, and quite involved; not as intuitive as I would like it to be. A one-click install would be nice, something where you can just have a GUI-driven system where you put in the IPs you want to use and the interfaces you want to install them on and call it good.

We went to several different vendors; the two top contenders were NetApp and Pure Storage. Ultimately, we went with NetApp for a couple of reasons: 1) the scalability of the clustering system, and 2) we're already a NetApp shop and so adding on to an existing NetApp environment made it quite a bit easier, especially with replication and data management techniques that NetApp already employed. The storage grid that NetApp is deploying across the infrastructure makes transparency and migration of data from one device to another environment a lot more seamless. Whereas Pure Storage is fast, NetApp is faster and their devices are data islands. Taking a step back, we just didn't feel Pure Storage was going to work for us in the long run.

Our only experience with Pure is the demos that they brought us; nothing more than that. We talked to several of their customer bases and although they claim a lot of nondisruptive operations, they tend to be disruptive.

We've worked with NetApp and it's kind of tried and true. We do upgrades, we do hardware replacements and everything is transparent and doesn't affect the users, which is really nice, especially considering we're a software-as-a-service company. The less we can take our customers offline, the better.

If you've already got NetApp, you can't go wrong.

It's a fantastic system and it's solved a lot of our issues for application performance and it's probably one of the best storage systems I've worked with and yet the only reason I dock it a few points is because there's still the future. There's problems we have yet to solve, unknowns. There's always going to be issues in the future, we just don't know what they are yet, whether it's NPS storage, whether it's migration to the cloud. We have a business initiative to move to the cloud.

There are a few oddities, only because some of our systems are legacy. We have the 7-mode system, which is our primary platform, and moving to the cloud is a little bit painful for that system. You have to spin up the 7MTT tool to get it to transfer the data and the 7MTT tool was not designed with cloud in mind. It was designed for migration of a 7-mode system to a cluster mode system within the same environment. When you're trying to move it from one environment to another environment to a different site with a whole new IP scheme with a whole new infrastructure, it's just a little bit on the kludgy side. There are things that don't make a lot of sense on that front. For example, it limits SnapMirrors to four per cloud ONTAP instance. We want more than that. We want hundreds. By default, the cloud instance is supposed to support 50 and yet we can only do four with the 7MTT.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a storage vendor to work with are going to be speed, reliability and support. The better the support is, the easier they are to work with, the more likely we are to choose them.

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. 

NetApp AFF supports multi-tenant and private clouds.

With our previous spinning disk storage, we did have some "disk busy" problems. Since switching to NetApp AFF, we haven't had any issues. It has simplified the deployment of ONTAP because it's all the same interface. It's also easier to train people on ONTAP because they don't need to learn multiple interfaces. Switching from spinning disk storage to NetApp AFF has significantly reduced our operational latency. 

The biggest benefit of NetApp AFF is the performance. 

I have used NetApp AFF for around 10 years.

NetApp AFF is great. We haven't had any storage outages in 10 to 12 years. 

I rate NetApp support eight out of 10. We always get an answer quickly, and they seem to be knowledgeable about the product. The response to basic problems could be faster. They usually respond fast when there are critical issues, but you always want it right now.

Positive

The setup is pretty simple. You put an IP on the box, log into a web interface, and it basically sets itself up. It requires a bit of customization for your environment, but it prompts you, so it isn't difficult. It takes 10 to 20 minutes.

I rate NetApp AFF eight out of 10. 

We are using NetApp AFF primarily for file servers.

NetApp AFF has helped our organization because they're reliable, and the file shares are available to everyone all the time.

The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company.

NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature.

I have used NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) within the past 12 months.

I rate the stability of NetApp AFF an eight out of ten.

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future.

I rate the scalability of NetApp AFF a seven out of ten.

I rate the support of NetApp AFF a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of NetApp AFF is straightforward.

NetApp AFF is a good investment, but it is expensive.

NetApp AFF is an expensive solution.

I would recommend this solution for NAS but not for SAN.

I rate NetApp AFF a seven out of ten.

The primary use case for AFF is for use in our production environment. Within our production environment, we have a number of different data stores that AFF serves. We use a number of protocols from NFS to CIFS, as well from the file system protocols, and in the block level we use iSCSI.

We are a fully on-prem business as far as data positioning data sets. 

We don't have real-time applications that we run in-house, being a law firm. The most important thing is the availability of our environments and applications that we serve to our client base. We don't have real-time applications that we could be measured in real tangible form that would make a huge difference for us. Nevertheless, the way it goes: the faster, the better; the more powerful, the better; and the more resources you can get from it, the better.

We have had issues before on our infrastructure where 20 to 30 percent of the people would come to us pointing the finger at the storage technology or storage back-end. That is now virtually zero.

We have one program that has been running for about a year. It is called Nakhoda, and it is an AI application (written in-house) based on AI technology. As far as latency, it is not visible nor noticeable because these machines throw hundred of thousands to millions of files per second.

For DR, we use the SnapMirror technology that ONTAP provides us on based on these platforms. Then, for the local backups, we use snapshots mainly. We are currently implementing SnapCenter for Exchange and VWware to utilize the backup features that the solution provides us.

AFF gives us a number of really valuable features. It ranges from a full flash to all-flash product. So, the speed and resources that we get from AFFs is just unparalleled in storage environments. Also, we utilize all the OCR features that AFF gives and has built into its ONTAP environment, like dedupe, snapshotting, data compression, and the number of the other things. 

Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid.

We have been seeing some challenges around the application layer implementation. We are having some teething problems now with the cooperation between the application layer and backups to things, like SnapCenter. This may be a question of product maturity. Overall, for the pure back-end, we are not seeing any issues whatsoever.

With our previous storage solution provider, we had the availability of synchronous mirroring. SnapMirror is asyncronous. I would just like to see if NetApp has any plans to implement synchronous mirroring for DR solutions into the tool in the future.

We were early adopters of the cDOT environment five or six years ago. In the early stages of deployment (five or six years ago), we saw some challenges around cDOT. However in the last two to four years, the product has matured incredibly. Ever since the introduction of ONTAP 9.X, we haven't seen any issues in terms of availability and performance.

We are upgrading to ONTAP, which will give us a data encryption level at an aggregate layer of the ONTAP environment. We are looking forward to that.

We are using SnapMirror and not seeing any issues. Let us hope it stays like that.

The technical support has always been really helpful. 

In recent times, the first line of support has moved and is now concentrated in Bulgaria. If they are new to working with your customers, we have seen some slight challenges in terms of speed when transferring higher priority cases to higher levels of NetApp's support structure. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

Once I reach the second or third line of support engineering, the support has always been good.

Before moving to NetApp, we were with their major competitor.

In simple terms, you just rack the hardware, you load your codes, and it's ready for configuration. That is pretty straightforward.

We benefited from implementing all-flash by reducing our data center footprint. We took it from 30 racks to just over five. This is one of the biggest savings for us.

NetApp is the largest storage vendor in the market, purely based on storage technologies. I hope it stays that way.

We have been really happy with the product. It is a robust, strong, solid platform.

I would rate the product a nine and a half (out of a 10). The product is robust, solid, easy to manage, and provides a number of features with speed of operations. The resources are okay, but they are not unlimited. They are at a very high level.