NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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 that we have for NetApp's All Flash FAS is for on-premise storage that we've used for presenting LANs, NFS, and SIF shares for servers for analytics and ESX data storage.

NetApp AFF has improved our organization through the use of clusters. Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome. 

AFF has given us the ability to explore different technology initiatives because of the flexibility that it has, being able to fit it in like a puzzle piece to different products. For example, any other solutions that we've looked at, a lot of times those vendors have integration directly into NetApp, which we haven't found with other storage providers and so it's extremely helpful to have that tie-in.

This solution has also helped us to improve performance. We have hybrid arrays as well so that we can have things that are on slower storage. For the times that we need extremely fast storage, we can put it on AFF and we can use V-vaults if we need to to have different tiers and automatically put things where they need to be. It's really helped us to nail down performance problems when we need it to put them in places to fix them by just having the extreme performance.

Total cost to ownership has definitely dropped because with deduplication compression and compaction always on, we're able to fit a whole lot more in a smaller amount of space and still provide more performance than we had before. Our total cost per gigabyte ends up being less by going to All Flash.

Some of the most valuable features of All Flash are the speed, integration with vCenter, being able to clone VMs instantly, and the ability to move data around quickly.

The user experience with AFF is much like others of NetApp's products: fantastic. It's extremely familiar. It's very intuitive. We can find all of the features that we're looking for through the GUI. The CLI is tap complete so that if we aren't exactly sure what the syntax is for a command, we can just tap-complete it which makes it a lot easier than having to look up every single thing that we're trying to do and the way to do it.

Our use case for AFF with the public cloud is that it allows us burst ability so that when we need additional capacity and speed instantly, especially if we need more and we haven't bought new nodes yet, it allows us to burst into the cloud quickly. 

The setup and provisioning of enterprise apps depend a lot on the automation, which has had really fantastic integration, just for being able to use things like WFA for provisioning. It has sped things up with the extra software that NetApp provides to be able to speed things along.

NetApp's always got their eye on new features and new use cases for things before we even get to them. It's been pretty amazing that they'll come out with new features, and we haven't even been thinking that this is a way that we might be able to use this in the future. I've been really excited about some of their other products, like SnapCenter, which is fantastic. We are also interested in the single pane of glass to be able to do snapshots and backups for anything in our environment, as long as it involves NetApp.

As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited to see. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic.

Stability's fantastic. In the past, I've seen problems with ONTAP where we'd hit bugs and things. Since NetApp has changed their development schedule to every six months with a lot more scrutiny on their code, and a lot more checking of their code before they include it, we've hit far fewer bugs. We've also had extremely stable systems with solid performance.

The scalability's fantastic. Many times we have had to add capacity which included the compute power and the storage. We've just added HA pairs to the cluster and it's extremely easy to migrate over to those. You can just do vault moves to get over to the new nodes and then evict the old nodes from the cluster. The fact that you can scale up to 24 nodes gives you a great deal of scalability possibility.

Their tech support is fantastic. NetApp is amazing with getting you through difficult problems. When you call into global support there's somebody that answers the phone quickly and they're extremely helpful. We have other NetApp resources like our sales SEs and people that help us out. There's always somebody there to point you in the right direction and help you to get the solutions to the problems you need.

There has been an amazing improvement on ROI due to racks base and power usage going to AFFs, like A700S's being so small and so efficient, take up way less space per terabyte which is a great improvement there. 

I give AFF a ten out of ten because there are amazing features on it. It's extremely fast, it's extremely usable, and the support's fantastic. 

I would advise someone considering AFF as a possibility for storage, I would tell them to look at all the features, positives and negatives of all the other storage vendors. In the past year, I've done an evaluation of a lot of different storage vendors and their features. The cost-effectiveness of their products and NetApp have come far ahead of all the others and so don't just buy into somebody from NetApp telling you these are all the great things about it. If you research all of the other companies and all of their offerings, I have no doubt that you'll decide that NetApp is the top provider. From the speed of their product to their flexibility to move into the cloud to their awesome support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are not yet connected to any public clouds.

We use it for electronic medical record storage.

Because we use the production environment and copy down to test environments, we've taken it from days to hours.

• Speed
• Reliability

The next solution needs to simplify the day-to-day operations.

The stability is excellent. It's highly stable. We've just never really had a failure since we put it in. It's been two years.

There have been no issues of scalability, for our use.

Technical support has been very good. We use scripting called WFA, and we've had a little bit of an issue with that, going from the first generation to the second generation. But the actual hardware, product, and support itself have been excellent.

We were moving to a new data center, so we needed it.

The initial setup was complex. The fact that it has to interact with both IBMs - AIX - and with the Epic application, means there are three vendors in the mix.

We used an integrator, Sirius. Our experience with them was excellent. Sirius already knew the environment it was coming from, the reseller was an IBM flash storage environment. They brought it over to a NetApp flash environment.

There were really only two on the shortlist: IBM and NetApp. We chose NetApp because we had an opportunity to make all of our environment NetApp.

I definitely recommend it. It's very complex to set up. Everything is. Even though it's complex, NetApp, out of the other two options, would probably be the least complex.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had any failures in the production environment. The only issue, as I said, is that we've had some trouble with the scripting. Otherwise, we'd give it a ten.

Our primary use case is escalating a more global performance, which wasn't achievable with the regular spinning drives. We wanted to have higher breakthrough performance with a flash-based solution using all SSD drives. 

1. I am able to store two times more data than what I'm purchasing, which affects the way funds are being utilized. 
2. The time for applications to give a response is much faster.

1. The OS running on top of it is ONTAP. The user experience is a breeze at the fingertips with ONTAP.
   
2. The efficiency ratio.
3. The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses.
4. The initial deployment is completely GUI-based.

I am looking forward to the enhanced features coming out: The upgraded version of ONTAP and more support on the protocols.

I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace.

There needs to be compatibility with upgraded applications. We don't want the system to be upgraded, but not have backwards compatible to existing applications.

It needs to be able to integrate with Intel and other NetApp family products, besides ONTAP.

It's a combination of the hardware along with the operating system which produces the stability. Based on the data protection factor and on its sustainability in case of a component failure, it is well-designed on the hardware and software fronts. 

I am satisfied with the stability.

The scalability is amazing. It is like an entry level box which scales up to almost a 144 drives. It is more than what an entry customer usually needs. It is suitable for expandability needs and can grow with the customer.

Customers were already using the application. We took their feedback. It was the best product based on our requirements.

I work on the phase when the solution when it is being designed. My involvement would be more on solution designing. Once the solution is finalized and has gone through, the implementation is not that difficult of a task.

The initial setup is very simple. System Manager 3.0 is built into it, which makes it easier to set up the system. It probably takes about 15 to 30 minutes.

We used a reseller for the deployment. We had an amazing experience with them.

This solution helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs. It is why we provisioned it. Analytics require huge amounts of processing power. With this solution, the processing happens in a tick of a second, which would not happen with regular spinning drives. With SSDs, All Flash FAS, and the help of ONTAP, it nails the performance.

Our total cost of ownership (TCO) has decreased by 40 percent.

Dell EMC was an option, but we liked the operating system of NetApp.

With an increasing amount of data cranking out every day and a lot of analytics running on processing applications, more performance is required from storage devices. This is a database solution which is All Flash FAS is suited.

I have not connected AFF to public clouds yet, but possibly in the future.

It takes half an hour max to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF.

It is a diversified solution.

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 have some specific workloads that are pretty demanding that struggle on spinning media. We're looking to leverage All Flash FAS to meet the workload demands of some of our real high IO clients. That's primarily why we're looking at it.

The benefits are yet to be seen. We're currently putting it in right now. It's not in production yet. It's still being installed. We tested it. We're expecting a significant workload increase from our previous-generation platforms, but we'll find out soon enough.

We just have experience with it in our testing. We tested it. It was a lot faster. We haven't put a full production workload on it yet. We expect it to be much faster.

I think it is on the product roadmap already, but I would like to see more of the cloud pools and tiering. Obviously, some workloads need the speed of flash, but some workloads also have pieces of it that don't. They'd be able to leverage the speed, but then age data moving off to object, spinning media or whatever would definitely be good for the future. It’s currently lacking that right now, but it's on the roadmap that I've seen, so I think they're heading that direction.

I’ve been probably using it for a good nine months. We had some thorough testing and looking at what workloads we can fit on it. Then, we've been through a six-month install process. That's an internal thing for us.

We haven't used it much in production yet, but as far as we can tell, it is stable.

We haven't really scaled it yet. We expect it to be scalable.

We have not used technical support specifically for this product, but in general, it's hit or miss. Sometimes, when we first call in, we get some medium-level resources that don't really solve our problems right away. Once we get to the escalation or higher-level guys, they're usually really, really good.

Our production environments are currently normal, non-flash FAS appliances. They are stressing the hardware significantly, so that's why we looked at All Flash. They run thousands of compute nodes. They want to run more but they can't right now, because the system is already maxed out. We're hoping they can scale that and run a lot more on the all-flash array.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward. Especially hardware-wise, it's not much different than what we currently have; we're pretty used to installing.

We considered quite a few vendors before deciding on NetApp. We considered EMC Isilon and a couple other smaller vendors. We eventually chose the FAS, primarily because we already have the equipment and the environment. It doesn't really change our support structure. We don't have to learn anything new. Obviously, cost is a factor, too.

When selecting a vendor to work with, they have to have a good product, number one. They have to be a good partner. Cost is obviously a factor for everybody, but it's got to be something we need that solves our needs and meets our requirements. They have to be a good partner; it's not just, “Here, you figure it out.” They work with us to make it work, which NetApp does a pretty good job of, and then make it affordable for us.

Look at TCO. Most people look at flash and just look at it as being expensive: “Can we avoid it and use something cheaper?” There are other savings besides just the straight-out, raw cost.

I think it does what we need pretty well. I can't give it a perfect rating because we haven't thrown a giant production workload on it to see how it scales and works. So far, it's doing what we need it to do.

We use it for our high-performance requirement, low-latency requirement databases. That's at the core of the retail application; what we've connected are non-virtualized AIX databases running Oracle and DB2.

The valuable features are the high performance and low latency that the retail application requires.

We have a six-node NetApp cluster for our regular 8080 FAS systems, and we have two cluster nodes with All Flash FAS, so it enables us to manage this high performance, low latency, application workload in the same fashion as we treat all of our other data; the SnapMirrors, the SnapVaults, the snapshots, the user control. We can use the same toolkits for everything.

It provides ease of management and the ability to manage it as one unit.

One of the limitations we found with the All Flash FAS, using ONTAP version 8.3.1, is that we could not do foreign LUN import directly to the 8040. We had to stage that through the other cluster node before they ended up in the regular place. There were some limitations and some gotchas on the initial migration path.

It was installed about a year ago, and the full workload was deployed around March of 2016.

Stability has been good. We have had no stability issues at all whatsoever.

There have not been any latency issues.

So far, we have about 40 TB of raw space. On top of that, comes all of the inline compression, the dedupe and all of those features and functionalities. It's not a huge system but it's IO intensive. It's on the order between 40,000 and 80,000 IOPS.

Technical support is pretty good. We don't call on support all that often. We're well handled in house. For the AFFs, we haven't really had too many support issues at all.

We replaced 2 E-series, and the decision was made to get a larger cluster mode system with two nodes of All Flash FAS, specifically so it would be one cluster, and could be managed as one cluster.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was fairly easy; a little bit different from a traditional FAS but very well managed by NetApp as the install engineers.

I don't see the price of it, but my company must think that it provides plenty of value at whatever price we are paying for it.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We went with NetApp because we were already using NetApp. The strategic direction at the higher management level was to go with NetApp.

The mix we currently have with 8080 for traditional spinning disk workloads for VMware and file sharing – those kinds of things – mixed in a cluster with the All Flash FAS system, does everything we could possibly ever ask of the system. One set of management tools, one set of skills to manage all the capability, I think it’s an excellent solution.