NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

The primary use case is availability, performance, bandwidth, and throughput with respect to our applications.

We are currently using an on-premise solution.

The user experience is fantastic. I'm looking forward to the AFF 800 storage box, which is all-flash with NVMe technologies. This will certainly give a boost to our applications, and make for a better user experience.

The most valuables features is the response time that we are receiving from the AFF storage box. We are looking for performance and delivery times of the response from the host, which we are happy with.

We are looking forward to the all-flash NVMe which is coming out.

Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size. It also needs more fine tuning in regards to all-flash and AML workloads.

Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability.

One of the key features of the AFF storage box is its horizontal scalability.

Our new business initiatives, which are coming, demand more IOPS and performance. Our applications are scaling, which demand more performance in a very short span of time. This solution will improve technology driven things.

The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them.

Our previous solutions were Hitachi, Siemens, and NetApp. We switched to AFF because it had all-flash, better performance, and better response times. It also scales better.

We used to do applications running on mechanical disk. With the introduction of SDDs and AFF All Flash, this has given us substantial improvements in our applications' performance.

The initial setup was easy for us. The consultant was always there to support us. They have always been helpful in understanding the technical points, how it will help us going forward in terms of implementation, future scalability, and possible upgrade of storage components.

We used a NetApp consultant for the deployment, who we have also used for the sizing. Our experience with them was very good.

It does have good ROI.

We are able to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF quickly. We have seen tremendous performance, stability and growth in it. 

NetApp met our requirements.

It is the first company who introduced NVMe protocols, which is end-to-end. It also has very good response times.

The NVMe technology that we're evaluating will certainly help us with artificial intelligence going forward.

We use it for medical systems.

NetApp has always been very reliable. We have never had any data losses. They are a work horse.

I found the reliability of it to be the most valuable feature because it supports all the patient critical systems in our hospital. We have had the NetApp system for 18 years with no downtime.

I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated.

We have never had a failure.

Over the past 18 years, it has been extremely easy to upgrade to newer products and technology. We can upgrade as we move along. So, we have been able to keep up with the newest technology with zero downtime.

The scalability is endless. There have been no limits that we have come across yet.

Technical support has been excellent. We have local technical support. If we give them a call and need somebody onsite, they could be there within ten to 15 minutes.

I think we were previously using IBM FASt100 in the 2000s. From there, we moved on to NetApp.

I never found it to be complicated, but I have a lot of experience with NetApp setups.

After upgrades, it's very intuitive and easy to pick up. 

A NetApp support person did all our installations, upgrades, etc. Our experience with them was excellent.

We have been able to utilize and leverage equipment which was purchased a decade ago up until this past year. So, we were running disk shells for 13 years and all we were doing was upgrading the filings and controllers, and using the same disk shells. Therefore, we were able to do something where we didn't have to invest that much. Recently, we had to upgrade all our disk shells, but it was a lot less because the technology had changed a lot since those times. It is faster now, and we have SSDs. We have larger drives that are 4TBs and 6TBs. Everything can condense so we are saving disk shell space and rack space. We are paying less now than we did at that time. So, we've gotten our money's worth out of it.

Look at the different options that NetApp offers. Look for a model and option which fits your needs correctly. Don't buy a low-end product for a high-end job.

NetApps offers a lot of different options. Just take your time and work with the consulting teams. Lay out what your needs are to ensure you are purchasing what will help you be successful.

We have put our trust in NetApp, and they have given us the customer support and a stable, reliable product.

Sometimes, I have to get rid of the equipment and upgrade because it is no longer supported. It's not like we are getting rid of the equipment or upgrading because there's something wrong with it. It will last forever. I have had disk shells that we've had to just let go, which are still working, because they aren't supported.

Flexibility in some of our big things. We're constantly doing new projects or new directions in IT, because it obviously changes all the time. NetApp has been great working with us, being flexible on having to do migrations, if we want new solutions without taking any of our applications in our current systems down. That has been a good benefit. And they've grown over the years to get better at that.

For us, it's probably along the lines of keeping everything up and running, critical, 24/7. DR's been a big push for us over the past couple of years with the environment. Different things happen and you need to keep all of your critical systems up and running. All the new technologies that NetApp has come up with, helping us do that, has probably been of the biggest benefit for us. The flexibility and being able to change on the move.

Some of the applications have changed over the years. Their complexity was there before, but moving forward we've seen a few features being taken away in some of those applications, that we had grown to love. But that happens in any type of software. You get stagnant, you like a feature, change comes along. It can be a little bit difficult to do.

Very good. I don't know if I could say anything bad about it for stability. I've never had any issues.

Very good.

Personally, I have not used tech support, but guys on my team have used them. They've always been great. We have a special account manager who has helped us elevate critical cases if need be, and our sales team and all the people we work with there have always been available for us all the time.

We use it for our high demand applications. Mainly email, our critical systems, that is what we're using our all-flash array for, tiered storage. We have some non-flash, where we store archival data and things of that nature, but the flash is performant for our tier-one applications. We use it for book storage and file storage.

We've been an NetApp customer for nine years now, so as they've grown, we've grown with them and implemented any of their new solutions, software or hardware based. We've been a great customer.

If you want an all-around company that can meet your needs, whether it be scalability, performance, the software application availability to interact with your applications, NetApp is a great place. We've looked at other storage vendors over time. They didn't seem to have all of the pieces that NetApp can bring. Some storage vendors might have something you like a little bit better, but NetApp can bring it all together much better than others, and that's why we have stuck with them.

With the AFF, we can run VMs with databases now. That was one of the big features with the AFF, we needed the speed for databases. By moving them over, we can put VMDKs housing databases on there and use them on the VMware infrastructure now.

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

The AFF we have, we use the in-line compression. The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files. We got a lot of compression, a lot of efficiency out of the dedupe because a lot of the VMware are similar with the OS, VMDKs, etc. It makes it really compact. You can put a lot of stuff in a little space.

That's a hard question to answer off the top of my head. I'd have to go through and evaluate everything. Right now, it fits our needs. I'd have to evaluate what else I'd like to see, I guess.

While not for AFF specifically, for clusters in general, it would be nice to be able to have volumes everywhere. For example, now you have volumes tied to a node tied to an HA pair. It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch. Then, they have a volume owned by something and have it should be able to move around to anywhere based on ownership of a volume, as opposed to between HA pairs. That would be a good improvement in their infrastructure.

The NetApp AFF itself, the FAS's, they're stable. They're in a cluster mode, they're HA, so we fail them over, we have upgraded fail back. We've never had an outage due to NetApp in the 12 years that I've been there.

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

Scalability, it's like anything else. The ability now to take out and add shelves, pull out shelves from the middle of an array if you want, to upgrade them, to pull heads out, and put new heads in as a non-forklift upgrade. All that functionality and scalability is one of the things that makes NetApp really good for our environment.

We use tech support for everything. Since it's a cluster, something that's not specific AFF, it's just nodes in the cluster. But we use support all the time.

Tech support is like everything else. It's hit or miss. It depends on who you get and what the subject matter is. We had a Support Account Manager (SAM) at one point too and, when we had the SAM, it was a lot easier to work with their support through the SAM. We've dropped the SAM stuff.

Sometimes it's difficult to escalate correctly and get the right people involved. It's not been as bad as it was before we had the Support Account Manager (SAM) though. Our SE helps a lot as well. It's pretty good support. We just had a support call yesterday with him and the guy we got was knowledgeable about what our problem was, so it worked out pretty well.

We've been a NetApp customer for 10 to 12 years now. We use their non-flash stuff a lot. We use hybrid flash, and after that, hybrid arrays. All Flash was the next logical move. Our next move is going to be the object storage, as well to spin off some of that data, the snapshots, on to object storage, because they've got flex groups.

I was involved and it was seamless. We had a two-node star cluster with AFAs on them. NetApp did the install. A few years ago, we used to do our installs ourselves, as a company. Then we started using NetApp installation services to do them. They did the install. They inserted it seamlessly into our cluster. It came up, we had the arrays, and we could create aggregates on it, pretty much right after they got them installed.

We're using NetApp now as our hybrid storage. We have VMs on there. They wanted to put databases on the VMs. We said, "Well, we don't have the speed to put your databases on there. If you want to stay on the NFS structure with NetApp, the next logical solution is just to put you on All Flash, so we just throw some of those in the cluster and do a motion of your volumes over."

For All Flash, we have a SAN infrastructure and a NAS infrastructure. We use the EMC for the SAN infrastructure, for the block. NetApp is the only NAS we have. There's not much else we can look at besides Isilon. Isilon just isn't fast enough. It's slower than what we had them on at the beginning. NetApp was really the only logical choice for that particular environment if we wanted to use NAS.

The primary use case for our All Flash FAS (AFF) system is pretty much VMware and its servers. It's just for file storage right now, for NFS, for the VMware stuff. We're investigating using it for other things. It's also used as a Zerto, a web application depository for some of the Zerto replication for the VMware stuff.

We use it for our mission critical stuff right now, as our VM infrastructure.

The most important criteria, when selecting a vendor to work with is functionality. I look at the functionality of the systems, what they provide us, what the features are, and where they're going, and what we need. Then, after that, I'll look at support. Of course, my company wants to look at market share and similar thing to it, but I look at the those things last. I look at the functionality first.

I give it a nine out of 10 because nothing's perfect. It works really well for what we want to do with it. It may not work well for other people. But in my experience, nine is where I would put it. It's functional, it's expandable, no forklift upgrades, and no disruptive upgrades, even for the OS or for the hardware itself. The flexibility of moving things around. All of its features, including its SnapMirror functionalities, make it really good for our environment.

All the features and their flexibility is where I would give it the bigger rating. What would make it a 10 out 10 is better support.

Regarding advice, it's the same advice you give to everybody. Evaluate what your criteria are, then look at NetApp. If you're looking for NAS, even for block, NetApp to me is mid-to-high level block. If you're looking for certain things in block, something else might be better, as opposed to FAS. You can look at NetApp for their other products. Look at NetApp for their file system for; FAS, look at their block stuff. Look at their stuff because all their stuff is available for use, it's just that the FAS itself is not suitable for everything, but they have other stuff that is.

The most valuable features are its fast performance and that it runs on a native ONTAP operating system, which is the coolest thing.

If you are looking for high-performance, reliable, multi-tenancy supporting equipment, then this is a very valid, legitimate solution with a proven background and history.

If you have a system administrator doing workflow that you have defined, then it is not going to save you time or money. If you have some kind of automated system, even though you haven't paid for those services, then it is going to make a lot of difference. It will save time because this is a high-end, high performance solution.

See my comments regarding technical support.

The tool is stable. Over the past several years, ONTAP has proven to be very stable OS solution. People may have experienced latency issues, but my workflow and workload is significantly small, so latency happens on the fly and it is easy to fix quickly.

Based on what I've heard, this tool is highly scalable. Even though I am using it in our relatively small environment, the tool is highly scalable. Any medium to large size company can afford it and it will be a good fit.

We do have premium support or regular support, whatever they call it. Every time we have an issue, we call technical support, and they get online right away. I have found them very helpful. The NetApp technical teams are pretty excellent in offering services.

SolidFire is in the same boat as NetApp in terms of supporting this product. It is a fairly new technology for them as well. Comparatively, the level of support for this solution takes a little longer, but it’s all relative. It takes little longer to get support for this tool than it takes for any other FAS system.

I was partially involved in the setup. It followed the same setup process for any other FAS system. It is pretty slick. The setup is pretty decent.

I know it uses the same OS, so I don't see why it would be different than any other FAS system. It has a different flavor, but it is not completely different. It is not using an “out-of-the-blue” OS.

This is proven technology. You cannot question its reliability and its high scalability. It is a very solid solution. If you are looking for high performance storage gear, it is definitely a very strong solution.

We have been a long-time consumer of NetApp solutions. The reliability with NetApp is very valuable to us. We don’t want to put that at stake by trying another solution.

I currently use several other NetApp systems, such as cDOT. We are pretty much a NetApp house.

We are also using a number of systems in parallel with this tool. We have a EMC VNX unified converged solution, IBM DS, and IBM Storwize V7000.

If I were a decision maker, I wouldn't go with only one solution. I prefer to diversify. That gives me more flexibility to keep vendors competitive and then they can offer me more. I don’t want to get locked into only one solution provider. I prefer to work with multiple vendors so I have more flexibility with price.

For me, the most valuable feature is the simplicity of being able to have a pool of storage and not worry about: How many IOPS do I need? How many disks? Or carving up aggregates. Everything can just share. I can just go with the simple features of the GUI to allocate storage quickly and not worry about anything.

The management tools with NetApp really need improvement, in general; just giving good, simple tools for evaluating performance and performance headrooms, and seeing where you're about to run into things. ONTAP 9 seems to be taking steps in that direction, from what I've seen of it. This is my first ONTAP 9 system. I think they're making progress there. Until I have some more problems with the system and see how the tools serve me, I can't really give better insight on that.

I have been using it for about a month.

So far, it has been very stable; no downtime. We had some random error messages but no downtime issues; just getting used to the new ONTAP 9.

It looks like it will meet the company’s scaling needs moving forward. We don't have a high-performance need out there, so it's more about a simple solution than scalability, in this particular case. So far, it looks like it'll meet our needs.

We found NetApp support to be a mixed bag. Sometimes, it's real good; sometimes, it's real bad. It can take a while to get things escalated to the people you need it escalated to. I'm not terribly different from most of the industry, I'm sure.

We get our support through Datalink. We have to go through Datalink first and then get escalated to NetApp support. It adds another layer there, but costs a lot less.
For this project, the support has been pretty good. So far, I’m happy with how it's going.

It's a simple setup. What we spent our implementation time on was getting the fiber channel LUNs presented to the host; that went really well. The problem is, we need to configure it in Wisconsin and then we shipped it across an ocean and had some non-IT people install it into a rack and turn it on. That was the complexity. We all added it ourselves. With that said, because it was a simple, one-shelf system, they were able to get through it and get it done. There was one cable that wasn't connected right. Support helped me track that down, and then I had them go plug it in right. They turned the connector upside down and then it worked; what a shock...

For this install overall, for NetApp's part, it was simple; we have the complexity.

We looked at Hewlett Packard, EMC, a Nutanix solution, and probably a couple more I can't remember. Nutanix had been way out there; just a totally different way of doing it.

When selecting a vendor to work with, for whether or not we talk to them, I think we look at those things like reliability and reputation.

As far as who we choose, once we've got that process started, it tends to be the vendors that are willing to work with us in the sales process and give us lots of answers; give us lots of demos. We like to get a feel that they actually understand what we need; that the tech teams and the local teams that we're working with are capable of understanding what is going on technically; and they're not just fly by night: "They've been working here for three months and now they're going to move on." We try to figure out whether they have capable folks in the field. Does the sales team care enough about us to make a deal versus just saying, "Here's a price. You can take it or leave it."?

Unfortunately, we don't have budget, so a lot of our decisions do come down to dollars. We spend a lot of time looking for teams that can do both. Who's going to come in cheap, yet still give us all that personal attention and support, and feel like they're going to be partners with us in the process, rather than just a reseller that's going to kick us over to support? We want people who are invested in making us successful, and not everyone's willing to do that.

We needed something that could do multiple protocols. We had a need out there for CIFS and NFS and fiber channel storage. NetApp was one of the few vendors who has a solution that's capable of handling all that and is easy to use.

Performance is the number-one most valuable feature, for sure. Flexibility and the multi-tenancy are also valuable.

The compression we needed, the rates we get, are inline with the performance, which is the reason we bought it; we have a lot of applications that use it. The compression and the dedupe stays in storage but on our other products, we'd lose performance because of that. On the All Flash FAS, we don't have any performance issues at all, so it's a big differentiator for us.

It provides financial benefits, because we don't have to spend as much on storage, because of the dedup and the compression and the performance it gives us. We don't have to buy anything else because of it.

There’s one thing that would make it easier to work with. There are differences between using the OnCommand: the GUI vs command line. There are still differences. There are things you can do from the command line that you can't do from the GUI. If they could make the GUI do everything that the command line does, that would be the best. That would earn it a perfect rating, for sure.

There are certain configurations/settings on cDOT that you can only make by using the CLI. My point for room for improvement was that, if they could make all the configurations/settings available in the GUI, then you would be able to pick one or the other for managing the cluster. Today, you either have to only use CLI or a mix of GUI/CLI.

We've had no stability issues. We've never had a problem. We've only been using it for about six months, but we haven't had a single issue of any kind. We're happy with it.

We've added on shelves to it. That's one of the reasons we bought it too. We bought it for a certain set of applications and we've already expanded that now; used it for other things too. That's why I bought more storage on it. The flexibility we have, all the connections it has, it's helped us without having to buy either more storage systems or other products. We've just been able to grow what we have.

We've previously had several other vendors. We used Hitachi. We used their HNAS product. We had Celerra from EMC. We've had a couple of other older vendors that aren't even around anymore.

We switched from HNAS because of the performance, both in application and backup performance. It was not nearly what it needs to be. Their storage pools and the way we could grow the HNAS environment was nothing compared to what the NetApp does. All of those things together made that an easy switch.

It's definitely saved us in storage costs. It's saved us in reliability, in downtime. We’ve had downtime with our HNAS, a couple times. That was the factor that got rid of it in the end. We invested in that product, and it was a pretty important feature of some of the applications that used it. We kept going with it and staying with it because we invested in it. But we had too many outages, too many problems with it.

In the end, we decided that it was not worth it, financially, to keep it. We got rid of it, and invested in NetApp, and all those reliability and performance issues went away. It's been 100% since day one.

We've had other vendors, and we've used their solutions. The performance hasn't been what it is on NetApp or the compression dedup rate hasn't been what it is on NetApp; with those other vendors, we get one of the two. We get both of those with NetApp; better performance, better compression, all of those things without sacrificing performance.

Look at NetApp first. The flexibility they offer, the performance, and all the features they have. I can't think of anything that we can't do with that product. That's where we go to first now. We have a lot of other products. We have a lot of other storage vendors: Hitachi, IBM, EMC. We've had other NetApp FAS products, not just the All Flash one. We still have other NetApp FAS products.

Since we've had the All Flash FAS, because of its reliability and everything that goes with it, it’s the first thing that the application people ask for. When we talk to them about needing more storage, they always ask for NetApp first. It's kind of the standard now, which is fine by me because I like it.

It's reliable; it's fast; it does everything that we need it to do; it's relatively easy to work with.