NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

Our primary use case for AFF is for all of the filers. We're also doing a lot of workloads for virtualization. All of our virtualization workloads are currently running on All Flash FAS.

We use almost all of our virtualization workloads on All Flash. Before we migrated to All Flash we used to use a different vendor for NAS solution. Some were NAS and some were Block storage. Now, logging ETLs are maybe ten times faster currently than what they used to be. We are getting amazing speeds off of FAS that we never had before.

We also use a lot of the AFF for end user storage. All the shared file systems, all the file systems that a particular user has, as a G drive, E drive, F drive or shared drives between various customers and various departments are all running off of the All Flash File system. So now, the rendering of FAS is so much faster than what it used to be. On top of that, we used to do Block. We would take Block, we would do NFS or do Samba to share those file systems for the users. Now, because they are coming straight off of NFS 3 and 4, the speed is marvelous. They are almost five to seven times faster rending all their files, saving all their files, retrieving all their files. It's amazing.

I don't know how much IT support has any bearing on All Flash File system. Now the only thing that we have provided that is better now is the speed and stability. Now if you can add that to capabilities, then, of course, IT has provided additional capabilities of having faster rendering and just getting their work done a little quicker.

The biggest workload that we have is maybe 95 to 97% of all virtual workloads are now running on All Flash. It has dramatically changed the way all of our VMs work. Now, not only they are faster but a couple of things that are in addition is that we do snaps off of our flash storage. Not only are the workloads faster but if the virtual machine goes down, the restore is 20 times faster now than it ever used to be. We don't have to go to a spin disc, we can just flash off of our flash back onto a no spin disc and the restore takes almost seconds to come back.

Total costs of ownership have two different values to them. One value is just strictly the capital cost of it. Number two is the operational cost. You've got to look at the CapEx and how much it cost. That is currently a little higher than it would be in two or three years. Now, Apex is where things are getting really nice. The maintenance is less. The discs failure are really low. Data issues or corruption is really low. The CapEx is currently high and Apex is getting to almost insignificant numbers.

The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash.

We have not connected our AFF to public cloud yet. We are not sure if we are going to do it because of PHI. For any healthcare, it's extremely important to safeguard the security of your patients. We are looking very deeply into how we are going to either go to public or keep some for private. Also, because data analytics is coming our way we want to make sure that the data that we are going to do analytics on is not on public cloud. Because of ingress and egress, we don't want to pay a lot of money to pull it back. We are not there yet but maybe in the next year and a half we will think about it publicly.

Two things have happened with stability. Number one, the platform that renders the file system is so much better. It's ONTAP and NFS, they're much more superior. The stability of the file system is much better. Behind the scenes, the cache is better, the CPUs are better and of course, there are no spin discs, so it's all flash. That is way more stable than what it used to be. Coupled together, the stability is maybe six to seven hundred times better now than it used to be ten years ago. That's just the way it works now.

Scalability is almost a catch 22. It's excellent because you can quickly scale, it's ONTAP, you can keep adding clusters without a problem, both the nodes, the controllers and of course the disc or the flash itself. The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash. What a lot of people are doing is that they make part of it all flash but as the data gets bigger, the archival, the older, the colder, migrate onto a slower, less expensive disc. That's what we are doing as well.

So far NetApp is amazing. It depends on what type of team you have. What type of sales team that you are working with. Our sales team is phenomenal. Our support goes through them and they know all the right people to call and we get great support. Now, that is not true all across. There's great support, and there's some mediocre support. For us it's phenomenal.

The initial setup for AFF was very quick and almost painless. We had professional services come in, they put it together and before we knew, we were carving all our discs, all our LUNs, and migrating data. Of course, the data migration was also really fast for us. We used to have older infrastructure. A little less than a year ago, we got brand new infrastructure that's all flash and we migrated it less than a year ago. It was no pain whatsoever.

I don't think anybody is doing a NAS solution or a filer solution better than NetApp. If you only talk about NetApp's filer, All Flash, I would give you it a nine and ten out of ten. It's one of the best of the breed currently in the market.

The primary use case for our All Flash system is for databases. We use it to keep slave backups of our production databases running on-premise. We use it for file storage, not block storage.

Before we purchased NetApp we knew it was fast and could do a lot of great stuff. After we purchased it, we were surprised because we're trying to run replication on MySQL databases in-house. When we ran those on a regular FAS 8040, the replication couldn't keep up. We weren't able to keep copies of production databases on-prem.

Then, when we brought the AFF A300 on-prem, we were actually shocked that it even outperformed the replication that we were running on AWS cloud for database replications, that we run from different regions on AWS. It was actually replicating faster, which is amazing because you would think it would be faster to replicate a database that is running in AWS from another master database that is running in AWS. But our on-prem that's running in LA was actually faster by 15 to 20 seconds of replication time.

It has improved the way we function because it has given us the opportunity to run, as I said earlier, an on-premise MySQL replication database. Before, we couldn't run it on-prem, so we had to poke firewalls to give access to developers to do queries - which we didn't like to do - out onto AWS cloud. Now, it's all in-house, on-premise, and it's allowing us to no longer run those open firewall ports that we had to do before.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

For us, it'd have to be the inline compression that it does and the deduplication. We're able to run lots of copies of different instances, because we not only use it for databases, but we use it to copy other VMs that we run as well. The fact that we can make duplicate copies and save a lot of space is very valuable.

Some of the new features that are coming out with FabricPool are really exciting for us. The ability to be able to move cold data off to S3 bucket and do the tiering and the back-end, versus trying to do it with the customers or with our different departments. We have to tell them, "Hey, you need to archive this stuff. It's been over a year." We're really excited to see the FabricPool feature on AFF A300.

It's fast, all the other features that it come with it, with the snapshots and all that, it's just great.

I think eventually it's going to come out, but what I would like to see is, right now we have the availability with FabricPool to do tiering, but just with snapshots on our volumes. I'd like to see that happen with the data as well, not just the snapshots.

We haven't had any outages with NetApp so far. It's very stable, I mean fully HA pair redundant. We can SnapMirror stuff off of it to another filer, it's great. It's awesome.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

Scalability is great. Before we had the AFF A300, originally we started off with a 2552. We outgrew that, obviously, and we went to 8040. We were easily able to upgrade to an 8040, and then grow our cluster to add an AFF A300. Now, we have AFF A300, an 8040 in our cluster and it's just easy to scale up. It's a big feature and bonus for NetApp on that.

Before NetApp, we were using lots of cheap storage solutions. We were just running these servers with blocks of disks. They're made by another vendor, I can't remember the name. We would just buy these disks and use them up. Then, we ended up going with NetApp. Then, we do some on cloud stuff with S3 buckets. Really, NetApp was our first choice when it came to an enterprise solution, when we were ready to go.

Nimble was on the shortlist.

We are definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience of AFF because of the support. A lot of the features; NetApp's constantly providing and innovating with stuff, and it's reliable. That's the bottom line.

NetApp has been around for a long time. Their support is great, documentation is great as well. If you're a guy that likes to do it on your own, you can do that, read up the documentation. If you need support, they'll help you out every step of the way. It's great.

My advice to a colleague who is researching a similar solution would be to really look into NetApp and all the features that they provide, and to really consider NetApp. I think you can't go wrong.

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.

We use them for file services, email, as LUNs for servers, Exchange, Oracle, and SQL.

We've seen an overall boost in performance, going from a combination of solid-state and spinning disks to all solid-state. That has increased our ability to provide more performance and throughput for the services that we're hosting. That's the biggest deal for us. We do what we did before, but now we can do it on all-flash. It's just faster.

It accelerates virtualization and databases, which goes back to the performance. All-flash gives us the ability to provide the performance as it's needed and makes it easy to do and instantly observable.

The use of AFF with Oracle has made it much faster. It all comes back to how fast it is. And with SnapCenter, the backup piece is much better than it was before. We were using NetBackup, but SnapCenter allows us to back up with snapshots, which is something NetBackup did not allow us to do.

Also, the dedupe and compression reduce how much disk space we require. All of that really makes a big difference for us.

An extra benefit is that NetApp AFF All Flash FAS has really reduced support issues related to performance. When everything is going at solid-state speeds, it's a lot easier to find the problems, where there's slowness.

With all of it being in one software package, the ONTAP data management software has simplified our operations. We have the Enterprise licensing and that means we get all the tools that come with it. All of those tools, and their integration, make backup and restore very simple and very efficient.

The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get.

And everything that we use on NetApp that can back up with the NetApp tools—SnapCenter, SnapDrive, and SnapManager—makes our local and our offsite backup very simple and very easy to do.

I've been using NetApp AFF since 2007.

I don't know how to praise it enough. Parts of our environment are so old that it's amazing they even run, but they're still running. We had an overheating problem, the air conditioning went out, and they still ran. They're bulletproof, in my mind. We have many sites all across the country, and we really don't have any issues with the products. They just work.

We've never had an issue with scalability. We could scale as large as we want. We can go out and up, anytime we want to. I'm really impressed with their scalability.

NetApp's support is outstanding. Any question I have gets answered promptly. If it has to go back to engineering, they reach out to engineering and engineering comes back with the answer. They provide us with whatever we're looking for in a timeframe that is more than acceptable, usually above expectations.

Positive

About 10 years ago we used to have EMC. Then we had both EMC and NetApp, and we ultimately replaced all the EMC with NetApp. Back then, we went with NetApp because of the cost. We got more for our dollar.

The ROI is from the performance and the ease of backup.

NetApp AFF is somewhat pricey. If they weren't as pricey, that would be a big deal for us. It's worth it but if you could get a really nice car for less, you'd go for the "less."

If you can get a demo and run it in your environment, play it side-by-side against comparable workloads and you'll see the benefits very quickly.

The solution is primarily used for data protection and disaster recovery, business continuity, and cybersecurity.

We like the fact that we also use it and therefore can tell our clients about it from an actual user perspective, not just a sales perspective. 

No one has a price-to-earnings ratio that NetApp has, everyone's is inflated. NetApp's is below market, NetApp pays a two and a half percent dividend, NetApp stock has doubled in the past 12 months. NetApp's largest customer is probably the federal government, which uses more than 50% of NetApp, from my understanding, if you subtract cloud, although I'm not privy to understand how much cloud the federal government uses that is actually NetApp under the covers.

The fact of the matter is, if you need the top-selling, performing, file serving appliance to deliver your files to your end-users, NetApp pretty much invented the technology. While no one really can take credit for serving files, NetApp has been doing it for more than 25 years. They do it better than anyone. They have utilities around that. They can do three things that their competition can do with multiple different solutions. I'm sure there are some obscure things that they do in vertical markets that their competition does better, however, I'm not going to comment on radiology or genetics or things of that. They do a lot of things, yet, not like a Swiss army knife. They do a lot of things and are the best of breed of products put together.

Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10.

I'm not an engineer, so to a certain extent, it ain't broke, don't fix it. From my perspective, everything works well. 

They've already announced that they have some features in their next release that make the existing investment more usable, by adding software features to your existing legacy hardware investment. Features like the ability to add the S3 protocol, which is the storage protocol used by Amazon Azure and Google onto a NetApp filer for on-prem or co-located products.

I've been using the solution for a while. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches, really. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are a few things here or there that are minor, however, everyone deals with something no matter the platform. 

To a certain extent, we offer the client basic tech support, meaning if a disc drive has failed we can send someone to replace it. NetApp has a very large tech support organization for their premium customers, where they will support third-party products like Rubrik, like VMware, like Combo - all kinds of third-party products that touch NetApp. 

Not every storage or NetApp deployment is open the box, put the NetApp in the rack, turn the on/off switch on, and click the wizard. It's got to interface in a hospital environment, has to interface with the medical imaging department, so in that regard, no product is easier or more difficult than NetApp other than how the storage device interfaces with what it's storing.

All tech support isn't great if they didn't do a good job setting up and all tech support is great if they did a great job for you, and I've had positive and negative experiences with every manufacturer's tech support. I would rate NetApp as one of the best. It's usually in-country. I have customers that are in South America, that are in the United States, that are in the UK, that are in Asia. I don't stay up nights worrying about their tech support.

The partner community, such as myself and my engineering team, usually get involved if there is a tech support issue that is not a manufacturing defect or a bug as we can't control that. We can only control the environment that we helped architect.

The initial setup can be both straightforward and complex. It's like buying a big toolbox filled with a million different tools, and wrenches and spanners and screwdrivers, and things of that type. You could use that toolbox to install a doorknob or could you use it to build a house.

If you wish to use every tool in your big toolbox, it's a complex environment that requires sometimes more than one skill set.

I'm a reseller and my company also uses it.

I just provide them the equipment when they need it, so I don't run it. I don't have the responsibility for the operation of it, only my own clientele.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.