NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

For us, the most valuable features were the SnapMirroring, deduplication, and inline compression. Now with 9.0, the compaction system, that's actually the big thing that sold us on it besides just the price in general. It was a very well-priced system for what we got. The data dedupe and inline, we're getting substantial rates. I think it's about 60-65% in general. That's a massive savings over what you would get if you didn't have any of that stuff.

We have a job system that runs all the time; people can run what they call campaigns. It drastically increased performance. It decreased times by three times the amount. The amount of the CIFS shares increased from about 128 Mbps – it was only a 1-gig line anyway, to a 10 gig – to about 800 Mbps. The engine actually can't pull enough and it has caused a little issue here and there, because it's basically causing a race condition. We've had to program around race conditions because we haven't had a system that was this fast.

It saved us a lot of time as well, substantial savings.

If they could do the tabbing for the nodes, that would be spectacular. On 9, they offered more insight, so I can't really say that. We haven't upgraded both nodes. We have HA pairs, and one of them is still running 8.3.2. We upgraded our DR solution to nine first just to see if it causes any issues. So far, we haven't seen anything. They have a lot more insight into that; I wish they would have it on 8.3.2 but, what are you going to do?

So far, stability’s been excellent, and the update process was actually incredibly painless. We've upgraded twice now and I am surprised that it didn't cause any issues at all. Usually, you have to have some kind of user intervention. For this product, you just throw the image on there, click update and it's done. You come back about an hour later and you're happy.

The GUI is really good, but if you don't find the option in the GUI, then the CLI is amazing. You can hit Tab and just tab out. The only thing is, they haven't done that on the nodes themselves but I was told they're working on that.

We don't have that big of one yet. We originally quoted out a system of eight nodes, and it was going to be something like 12 GBps. That seemed like substantial amounts, considering what everyone else quoted. However, it actually was going to come in at about the same price for the AFF compared to everyone else's quotes for disks. The reason they went with it is because of the trust with the vendor they were currently using and they just didn't want to leave.

We were using NetApp before, but we evaluated EMC, IBM, HP, Pure Storage, XtremIO and Nimble.

It came down to XtremIO and NetApp. NetApp offered much, much more storage. And the cost difference to buy XtremeIO was huge compared to NetApp. NetApp just totally blew it out of the water on price. We got something like five times the storage for the price. It was really worth testing on that.

Try out what you actually want to do, because that's actually the problem we had; some of our people swore up and down that NetApp wouldn't be able to do compression at the new rates that they got, or that we got. They said that Oracle doesn't compress and so on. We ended up getting them to stick some of their machines on our NetApp, and we showed them that you actually do get it.

We actually bought ours and then we tried to show those other people before they got to the bidding table for theirs. They didn't really want to listen to the facts. They went with IBM. I wouldn't say they were not unhappy or anything. They realized that they could've gotten a lot more if they just went with our ideas instead of their idea. Actually, I was told it was more of a management thing; they actually didn't even want IBM, they wanted Oracle. It all comes down to what the boss says.

Our primary use case for AFF is for databases.

The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp.

The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price.

I have been using NetApp AFF for eight years.

In terms of performance and stability, AFF is good for our current needs. However, if we require higher performance, we may need to invest in new hardware.

NetApp AFF scales well for our needs. We can continuously add more storage and capacity to expand the system, which has been a viable approach for us.

The support is great. When issues arise, the support team quickly addresses our questions and resolves problems efficiently. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have previously used Hitachi, but it is very slow.

The initial setup of NetApp availability can be considered medium difficulty. If you have experience with NetApp systems, it is relatively easy to medium in complexity. However, if you have never installed such a system before, it can be quite challenging.

NetApp can be expensive. It is worth noting that the cost isn't just in the hardware but also in the support, which can be a significant portion of the overall expense.

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

We are a multi-cloud provider and we use NetApp All Flash as the base for providing the cloud services.

It gives us the power and agility to spin up VMs as quickly as possible.

We have also standardized on NetApp. All the storage that we have for our services runs on NetApp. Being standardized, it's easy for our Operations. We can train them on a single platform.

It helps improve performance for enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. With the power of flash, we moved from a traditional hybrid storage to all-flash. Having the full-fledged power of flash, and the controllers, it has doubled the performance compared to what we used to get.

Finally, our total cost of ownership has decreased by approximately 10 - 12 percent.

The most valuable feature is the efficiencies that all-flash brings. It helps us reduce costs and be competitive in the market. It's quite easy to operate and monitor, to do business as usual.

Whatever they talk about it delivers. It's fast, it's efficient, it's agile.

With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage. The features we require today are present in ONTAP.

It would be great if they had a single pane of glass or a single dashboard where all the NetApp ecosystem storages could be viewed and monitored simply. That would help my Operations.

Being a service provider, we cannot afford any downtime. It's working fantastically as of now. It's sturdy and just rocking.

It's an all-flash so you just add more clusters, nodes, and you're done. Scalability isn't an issue. That was one of the evaluation criteria, we needed something that would scale out.

Tech support is not just for AFF, we have a long-standing relationship with NetApp. Overall, the support guys are very proactive. They help us with new fixes and patches - we keep up with them. We have a very good relationship.

We haven't really had much of a need to escalate issues. We don't actually get into "escalation mode." We just talk with senior management and things get done. We're happy with the support.

We did not have any other flash solution. We were running a tiered storage approach but because of market demand, where our customers wanted efficient performance, agile cloud storage, that is what drove us to evaluate the newer technologies. With all the technical evaluations we did, we settled on All-Flash.

We chose NetApp because we had the SolidFires in place and we already had the standardization. We also went with NetApp because of the partnership and the support that we get from NetApp. In addition, it proved that it was technically better than the competitors in the benchmarks.

I was involved in the technical and commercial analysis, but not in the actual environment setup. That was taken care of by another team. The initial setup was straightforward but there was definitely a lot of planning that went into getting it deployed smoothly.

Being a services provider, every customer has unique requirements, which makes it more complex for us. We took a good amount of time to understand, evaluate, and come up with a proper deployment plan so we wouldn't get into trouble at the deployment phase.

We had an in-house team do it.

I haven't calculated ROI because, being into the OpEx model, since we're providing serivces, typically the ROI is 36-plus months. We're not there yet.

We evaluated Nimble, 3PAR, Dell EMC. 

You should definitely look at NetApp AFF and evaluate it.

In terms of how long it takes to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF, we have a back-end provisioning tool so it's all automated. I cannot define it only with respect to AFF because the entire orchestration works. But on average, we take about five minutes to provision a VM.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It has definitely helped us bring our costs down and gives us a powerful storage at the back end to serve our customers. It would be a ten out of if they brought my TCO down even more.

We use NetApp AFF to support our VMware environment.

We have been happy with the performance and it has not given us any issues.

I like the simplicity of data protection and data management. We use snapshots for our FAS recovery, and we use SnapVault for our backups.

NetApp definitely simplifies our IT operations by unifying services. We only use this solution on-premises, but with NAS, we don't need Microsoft Windows to create a share. It's all on our NetApp platform. I like it because we do not have to switch.

I wouldn't say that we have reallocated resources that were previously dedicated to storage operations, although it does give us time to do other things.

We have used NetApp to move large amounts of data between data centers. It has made it easier for us, and RPOs are shorter because of it.

With respect to the response time for applications, I can definitely say that it has improved, although we have not done any benchmarking. I perceive the improvement through monitoring the applications.

This solution is pretty expensive, so I'm not sure whether it has reduced our data center costs.

NetApp has helped eliminate storage as a limiting factor in our business. My customers are happier because they have no issues with performance or accessing their data.

The most valuable feature is the ease of management. You just set it and you don't have to worry about it.

During a maintenance cycle, there are outages for NAS. There is a small timeout when there is a failover from one node to another, and some applications are sensitive to that.

We are in the process of swapping our main controller, and there is no easy way to migrate the data without doing a volume move. I would like a better way to swap hardware.

Technical support could use some improvement.

Stability is very good, although we do have some NAS outages during maintenance.

Overall, I like the scalability. It can do NAS, CIFS, and fiber channel all in one box and it's easy to manage.

I would say that the technical support is hit or miss. Sometimes you get somebody good, but other times, you have to just escalate a couple of times to get the right person.

Our previous solution was spinning disk, and our application demands more in terms of storage and performance. NetApp AFF just seemed like the natural route because we didn't want to get left behind.

One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license. For example, we can use NFS, CIFS, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, etc. It's all included in the package and we don't have to pick and choose.

We purchased the license for a five-year term.

We evaluated other options, including solutions by EMC, before choosing NetApp. The reason for our choice is that we already had NetApp in our environment, and the price-point is also a little better than the competing products.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to test and compare all of the products. Overall, I think that AFF is a solid store system and it's very easy to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for back end storage of vSphere virtual machines over NFS.

This product was brought in when I started with the company, so that's hard for me to answer how it has improved my organization. I would say that it's improved the performance of our virtual machines because we weren't using Flash before this. We were only using Flash Cache. Stepping from Flash Cache with SAS drives up to an all-flash system really had a notable difference.

Thin provisioning enables us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. Virtually anything that we need to get started with is going to be smaller at the beginning than what the sales guys that sell our services tell us. We're about to bring in five terabytes of data. Due to the nature of our business operations that could happen over a series of months or even a year. We get that data from our clients. Thin provisioning allows us to use only the storage we need when we need it.

The solution allows the movement of large amounts of data from one data center to another, without interrupting the business. We're only doing that right now for disaster recovery purposes. With that said, it would be much more difficult to move our data at a file-level than at the block level with SnapMirror. We needed a dedicated connection to the DR location regardless, but it's probably saved our IT operations some bandwidth there.

I'm inclined to say the solution reduced our data center costs, but I don't have good modeling on that. The solution was brought in right when I started, so in regards to any cost modeling, I wasn't part of that conversation.

The solution freed us from worrying about storage as a limiting factor. In our line of business, we deal with some highly duplicative data. It has to do with what our customers send us to store and process through on their behalf. Redundant storage due to business workflows doesn't penalize us on the storage side when we get to block-level deduplication and compression. It can make a really big difference there. In some cases, some of the data we host for clients gets the same type of compression you would see in a VDI type environment. It's been really advantageous to us there.

The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options.

The solution's data protection and management are as simple as you can hope for. On the data protection side, we have a gigabit connection to our disaster recovery center and we replicate snapshots with SnapMirror hourly. This gives us a really good way to roll things back if we need to but have everything offsite at the same time.

I really don't have anything to ask for in this regard because we're not really pushing the envelope on any of our use cases. NetApp is really staying out ahead of all of our needs.

I believe that there were firmware issues. I think it was just a mismatch of things that were going on. It could have possibly been something in the deployment process that wasn't done exactly right.

It's reliable. I don't have to lose sleep over something being wrong with the system. The few incidents we've had here and there have been resolved quickly, either by our channel partner or by NetApp support.

As for scalability, we've added shelves in with very little effort. We're probably not what NetApp wants to see, but we've been purchasing some large six-terabyte SATA drives to expand out colder storage and just get those racked and plugged in. It's very easy to take it up and scale. We are looking very slowly at moving towards the cloud and the NetApp approach to cloud storage is way ahead of what we need, which is very reassuring.

The technical support team is always easy to deal with. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with them much, but when the need arises they're good to work with.

That decision to got with AFF was made before me. They switched from a NetApp FAS system, which is spinning disc storage. We came over to that from a Hitachi BlueArc system that was very old. The FAS system was doing well, but when it came time to add more storage, it was obvious that the choice for flash was the way to go, specifically for virtual machines and applications. It would have been chosen for virtual machine storage and application delivery.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward. When the stuff ships out, it comes with diagrams of how everything needs to be wired. The online resources are great to read through and the ONTAP system is consistent across platforms. Deploying AFF is less complicated than deploying older solutions.

We do a lot of work with our partner, which is informative. They know the products well and do a great job working with us to meet our schedules and technical needs.

I'd definitely encourage people to do a proof of concept and get trial gear in there because it's going to shine. It's something that when you actually get in there and use it, it just clicks.

I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten.

We are using it for VMware and Hyper-V data stores.

We have probably doubled the number of virtual machines that we've provisioned since getting an AFF.

It has done everything we have needed it to do.

• Space savings
• Performance
• Deduplication
• Compression

It's been very stable. We only had a few upgrade issues. Other than upgrading, it has been 100 percent completely stable.

It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it.

Support has been good. I've had a few cases where support wasn't able to answer the question or they took quite a while, but majority of issues have been answered fairly quickly.

We were at the edge of the performance on our previous system. We took a risk with the AFF because it was more expensive than going with the newer model of what we had, but it was definitely worth it.

The initial setup was straightforward. I'm very familiar with NetApp, so it's more of the same. I didn't have any problems.

I did the deployment myself.

The cost savings has been higher than I expected.

Our space savings through dedupe and compression is over 50 percent, so we are saving. I think our 8080s has 20TBs. We are saving at least 10TBs and that's over 50 percent of the capacity that we're using.

I would like the pricing to be cheaper.

Our shortlist would have been EMC, NetApp, and possibly Dell. This was before Dell bought EMC. 

NetApp was there because of the NFS support. That's why we chose NetApp, because of the NFS support plus their compression and deduplication. The cost savings on that alone was worth it.

It's worth the slight increase in cost for performance. In the end, you save money in the long-term (ROI).

• All flash
• SAN and NAS server virtualization
• Databases (OLTP and OLAP)
• File shares
• Test or development
  

After testing with early ONTAP 9 versions including storage efficiencies, we found that AFF systems can decrease the data footprint with MS SQL databases (real customer multi-TB DB) to 1:4, while aggregate dedupe wasn't available at the time of testing and post-compression and dedupe were disabled. Snapshots, provisioning, cloning were not included in the result of 1:4 data reduction. Alongside with AFF systems, we tested EF & IBM FlashSystem for comparably in price. AFF showed not only the best storage efficiency, but also the best storage performance (based on overall application performance, using MS SQL DB).

Therefore we found AFF systems very competitive in terms of performance, storage efficiency, feature richness, and scalability.

• SAN/NAS scale out
• Online data migration
• Data compaction
• Application integration
• Cloning
• Snapshots
  

• No RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols.
  
• No pNFS with VMware VVOLs.
  
• No direct storage attachment available. Most configurations require additional switches for data access.
  

Support's good. The product seems reliable. The uptime is good. We haven't had any major failures or anything like that. It runs all of our SAN VMware infrastructure with no problems, really.

The tools that it has, such as OnCommand Manager and so on, they're helpful if you're not a CLI type of person. I actually like the CLI as well. They're both pretty easy to navigate, especially with the cluster mode. You can do the tab completions and everything in CLI now. That helps you to navigate through otherwise long commands.

SnapMirror, all the Snap technology, is pretty cool. You can do SnapMirror, the vault and everything like that.

The migration from 7-mode to cluster mode probably could be improved. The migration tool that they use, the copy free transition tool, it's new and it seemed like, while I was trying to get everything prepared, few people really knew much about it at NetApp. I had to make a lot of calls, send out a lot of emails to find out if the current version was going to do what we needed it to do. I was told, no it won't; then I was told, yes it will. I'd say they need to keep working on that migration tool.

I have been using NetApp for about three years.

We have not really experienced any downtime to speak of. I did a migration recently from a 7-mode system to a cluster-mode system. While we were doing some of the migrations of some of the live VMs, our older ones started to max out on its processes. It didn't necessarily create downtime. It just kind of messed up our migration a little bit. We had to basically stop, regroup and then schedule it for another weekend. That'd be the closest thing to downtime, but I don't really consider it downtime, necessarily.

It's definitely scalable, especially with cluster mode. You can just hook in another set of controllers, add disk shelves. It's definitely scalable.

I feel like it's going to meet the organization's needs moving forward. As I've needed to add storage to it, I just grab another shelf and hook it up. It pulls in all the disks; you create your aggregates and everything. As far as if we ever need to add more controllers, you just connect them into the fabric, they come up and you can start sharing files, LUNs and all that stuff. It's definitely scalable.

Technical support is really good, knowledgeable, and responsive. Even with the migration I did, they sent out a professional services engineer at no charge to help us complete the migration of going from 7-mode to cluster mode between new hardware as well. We weren't just upgrading one system from 7-mode to cluster mode, we were actually upgrading and migrating to new hardware, so they sent somebody out and he assisted with the whole thing.

The auto support and everything like that is good. When we've had a disc fail, they're calling, they're emailing, they're sending disks out. I get a disk the next day. Support is definitely good.

Initial setup is not too bad. The cluster system I did not too long ago; you just console cable into it. It's got a guided setup on the CLI. After that's complete, you're on the network. You can use your web browser and access the OnCommand Manager application and start configuring SVMs and all that stuff. It's not super difficult. I know there are products out there that are probably easier. I've heard that Nimble Storage is supposed to be one that's really easy to use. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of complexity and everything, I'd say NetApp stuff is probably about 7 for me. I've only been in SAN storage and everything for, like I’ve mentioned, about three years. I'm still relatively new to the industry of SAN storage. I'd give it about a 7.

I recommend the product. I don't have a lot of experience with other solutions such as EMC Storage, Nimble, Fujitsu or Hitachi. I've never really messed with any of them so it's hard for me to compare.

I've been doing IT for a while. There some complexity to the NetApp stuff. I know that there are easier solutions out there such as the Nimble one. But overall, the NetApp AFF is a good product. You just need to know what you're doing a little bit or you're going to rely on support and other people. Take the classes. Make yourself familiar with it. That's what I've been doing.