NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We are it for CIFS, NFS, and NAS. We are also using it for the cloud environment.

They have come up with top of the line inline deduplication. They are delivering compression and aggregate compaction, as well. Everything is improving with their new features coming out on a day-to-day basis.

• Inline deduplication
• Compaction
  
• I've seen them compress it a lot, which provides efficiency.

These features are missing from other products in market.

The product should be more competitive and come up with additional features. They should keep the client always in mind and as the top priority. This would be the best way to compete with other solutions.

It is stable. In my three years working with the storage, I haven't seen any issues with our NetApp product.

We started with a cluster of two nodes, then we reached a six node cluster. We have scaled this up, as needed, whenever we saw a requirement coming up from the client. 

It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes.

From a technical perspective, the technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward; there is no complexity.

We used our vendor partner for the installation. We do have multiple vendors with whom we deal with for the procurement of NetApp devises. So, we call with them to come and do the deployment for us, as per our company standards. Our experience with these vendors is good.

I would recommend NetApp. It is a good product to use. 

We use it for our EHR. We have 4,000 users who need to have access to a very large EHR called Epic. We are sharing a cache database through AIX servers. 

It made everything faster. The user performance went from about eight seconds, for certain screens, down to three seconds per screen. That was the primary reason. Our users can multitask faster. The way Epic works is that you have multiple screens up at the same time. When you have multiple screens up at the same time and you have a patient sitting in front of you, speed is quality. Where before, the patient would have to wait for answers, now they get them almost instantaneously. Our users can run multiple things at the same time. For the users, the nurses and doctors, it is faster. All around faster.

As for IT's ability to support new business initiatives as a result of using this product, we are upgrading to Epic 2018 next year. The older system couldn't have supported it. That is another reason we went to a faster system. Epic has very high standards to make sure that, if you buy the upgrade, you will be able to support the upgrade. They advised me, top to bottom, make sure you can do it. Our new system passed everything. It's way faster.

We have VMs and we're were running VDI. We're running VMware Horizon View. We have about 900 VMs running on it and we have about another 400 Hyper-V servers running on it. Our footprint is very tiny now versus before. We now have some 30 servers running 1,000 machines where we used to have 1,000 machines running 1,000 machines. We have Exchange, SQL, and Oracle and huge databases running out of it with no problem at all, including Epic. It's full but it's very fast.

It takes us a minute or two minutes to set up and provision enterprise applications using the product. We can spin up a VM in about 30 seconds and have SQL up and running, for the DBAs to go in and do their work, in about two minutes.

It would primarily be speed. That's why we got it. Storage is costly but it's very, very fast. Very efficient, very fast.

Zero downtime so far. We've had it for two years.

We have not had to scale it. We bought it at about 128 terabytes and, right now, we are probably at about 80 or 90. Because of the upgrade, next year we are going to grow 30 percent. We will probably upgrade in 2020 or increase the space.

Zero downtime, so we've never really called. The engineer who supports it will call for firmware upgrades or for a yellow light: "Why is it on?" For the most part, we haven't had any issues with it at all.

We were on a standard NetApp but we upgraded to the FAS because of performance. We had it in for a test and it succeeded. That's why we bought it.

I have been with the company for 20 years and we have had NetApp for 20 years. We did switch over to IBM, about ten years ago, right before we went to Epic. But Epic said, "No IBM. NetApp." We were switching from NetApp to IBM, because IBM had a little bit of advantage, a long time ago. Then Epic came in and said, "No, switch back." So, we're back.

We have clusters but our guy doesn't know how to do the cluster side of things. That's what the reseller did, primarily.

We used a reseller, IAS. They have helped us. Our experience with them is good. We have had them for 20 years.

The benefit of getting the product, versus not getting the product, has allowed the clinic to do more. Since they are doing more, the return on investment is shrinking. We bought it two years ago and we have probably already paid for it.

The old NetApp we had was paid for. The new NetApp was about $3 million and we paid for that in about two years. It was well worth it because we can do more. For example, our advanced imaging is all pictures, videos; huge amounts of data get used up. Now they can triple and quadruple the amount they could do because of the speed. So instead of seeing ten patients a day, they're seeing 30 or 40 patients a day.

The total cost, the pricing of it, has gone up quite a bit.

Dell EMC. We looked at them briefly when they were EMC. We looked at IBM. But Epic pretty much says that NetApp sets the standard and we have to follow that.

If you have the money, you can't compare it to what we had at all, you just can't. In fact, the one that we had for production for the entire clinic is now sitting in our DR as cold storage. It went from state of the art to boat-anchor in about two years.

We have a range of customers, from manufacturing to oil & gas, in Malaysia. We have been using NetApp for quite some time, but now performance is a big issue for our customers, along with other challenges for them, so they are opting to go to All Flash.

NetApp is doing a good job of delivering to and satisfying customers. All Flash cloud technology has helped them a lot.

We try to provide a value-added proposition to customers, as a partner to NetApp. Most of them have been dealing with us for quite some time, five to ten years. They've been using a traditional base of NetApps and some other products. We have transitioned some of our customers from other companies' products to NetApp.

It provides our customers with a secure, fast, and always reliable solution. It also definitely affects the ability of our clients' IT departments to support new business initiatives because things become simplified for them, easier to deploy and to get off the ground faster. It gives them more flexibility to scale in the future.

In terms of it helping to improve performance of enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs, I have one customer that is running SAP on NetApp. The performance improved about 40 to 45 percent. That was a great improvement for the IT infrastructure services team.

The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance. Some of our customers are dealing with seismic data from the oil & gas industry, so they need data extracted and transported to the application faster. That's one reason we bring in All Flash.

We'd like to see improvement in the time to retrieve from the cloud, whether it's on-prem to cloud and whether it's public or private cloud. That's the most important thing we need.

We don't have many issues related to the appliance itself. In terms of the OS, we do have some hiccups here and there. Our support team and the technical support from NetApp are able to handle that.

At this point in time, a few customers are looking at scaling it. Since NetApp provides vast scalability, whether they scale up or scale out, it gives them better flexibility.

Technical support is good. We have not had to involve them much. Most of the first-level and second-level cases are handled by us because we have a range of certified engineers. Only if it's really a critical issue that urgently needs an expert to dive in, then we will engage them NetApp support.

We have customers who are not NetApp customers. We teach them what the capabilities and challenges are. Our main goal is to comply with and meet our customers' challenges. If NetApp really fits their needs, we move on from there. In a case where we need to transition the whole infrastructure from a different storage brand to NetApp, we'll do that.

If the customer is an existing user, it's easier for us to convince them. If they're a non-NetApp user, it takes time because we have to do proofs of concept to justify it to them. If they agree technically, then the commercial conversation starts. Normally, the commercial conversion does not take that long, because the technical team has agreed to the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is GUI-assisted. There are a lot of step-by-step guides, which are easy for certified engineers to follow. That makes things simple and we are able to make a good impression on our customers.

We are an integrator and a consultant for our clients.

For some of our customers, within one-and-a-half years, they get a return on investment. One year after the deployment, the customer will either scale up or scale out. That will give the customer's site a better footprint.

First thing first, I would advise you to gather the exact requirements and challenges. Try to blend those requirements with the NetApp solution, or part of the product, that suits you. Doing so will create a better engagement in the discussion. Otherwise, it could be very difficult to say that NetApp is the best product for the use case.

It takes less than half a day to set up and provision enterprise applications using the solution.

So far we have not connected any of our customers to public clouds. We have some challenges in Malaysia where some of the data, especially from the banks but also from the government and oil & gas, can't go out of the country. So we are not able to do that. In those cases, usually our customers will engage a managed services provider locally in Malaysia.

I give this solution a seven out of ten. There's still a long way to go and there are a lot of new start-up companies that also provide all-flash and hybrid. For some of our customers' applications, the new solutions are better.

It has to be the ONTAP System Manager. It is really easy to use and the interface is really clean. We are running 9.2 at the moment, and I have been able to configure it without a lot of assistance from the NetApp technical team.

We have been able to successfully use their high availability as well as run online upgrades without any disruption. It is the non-disruptive upgrade that has really impressed me.

We use it for our VMware environment. We store our virtual machines (VMs) and use it to run our work loads. It is used for file storage.

I have been looking at 9.3. It looks like they already have some really promising features, with the ability to import into CSV. So, this would definitely simplify the configuration without having to do point and click.

They have been very solid so far, in the five months that I have used the product. I have not seen any outages and their support is outstanding.

It has been very stable so far.

We have scaled so far to another unit and have a FAS2620 that we recently added. We were able to get that up and running without disrupting the environment.

Their tech support is very responsive. We have been able to put P1 cases in and we have gotten responses within the hour.

I was involved in the initial setup. We have an AFF and a FAS. We were able to set those up in a cluster.

There were other vendors on the list, primarily EMC and HPE, as they are the other players. NetApp came in at a better price.

I came from an EMC shop with block level storage and found that NetApp was a lot easier to manage and configure. From a learning curve, it was easy for me to set up and pick up.

Definitely give them a chance and see if the solution works for your environment. If you are doing block level storage, maybe try NFS.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: price.

It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment.

We're more nimble. We can move from block to file. The ability to have all of the efficiencies that come with it. The dedpulication, the compaction, the compression, give us those capabilities to get more bang for the buck.

The fact that we can move forward, increase capacity, update hardware, without having to take an outage.

There are a bunch of features that are available but aren't vetted for enterprise use yet, at least not in my environment.

Better stability, not releasing features until they are fully functional, or at least giving us a software train that doesn't add them until they are fully functional and proven. Right now, the long-term support model is nice but it still has features in it that are not ready. At least not for our environment.

NetApp's base solution is very solid. The latest, greatest features of course are not always that stable. We avoid those. If we stick with the tried and true, we have no problems. It's very stable.

It's extremely scalable. With the cDOT, you have the ability to add many, many nodes, and that gives you that capability of also being able to upgrade portions of it without taking the entire thing out.

Technical support, the first wave is a little bit rough sometimes to deal with. However, once you get to the right resources, it's quick in action.

It's actually kind of hard to deal with the first level because of the questions and we already have visibility into the triage sheets that they are asking us the questions from, and we've already gone through those. So we've moved beyond that dependence on the first level because of those triage sheets that are publicly available on the website.

It's been there as long as I've worked there. So, before that, CIFS, user shares, that kind of thing. It was never really an option for high performance storage.

We've been using Netapp for many years, long before I even came to the company.

It was very straightforward.

We're multi-vendor. We do EMC and NetApp. We will look at others but most don't have the track history that we are looking for.

We use AFF for both block storage and file storage. We are more likely to consider to NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF. With clustered data ONTAP, it's actually a true enterprise solution that has upgrade paths that don't require actual downtime.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor solution is the ability to deliver in the long-term.

The TCO makes it a very desirable solution. The efficiencies are more than worth the money. It means you can have a small footprint but support a lot of different solutions within the datacenter.

With All Flash, the benefit we have seen is the real estate in the data center has really shrunk by leaps and bounds. We went from having a huge rack full to provide about 10 TBs of storage to using just two shelves to provide 72 TBs of storage with solid state. It saves a lot of power and adds to the IOPS that can be serviced.

I would like to see end-to-end automation that would enable service providers to get the infrastructure with faster provisioning, decommissioning, or even performance analysis; end-to-end includes compute, network, storage and applications.

We are interested in seeing more compatibility with other virtualization platforms, especially with Oracle. That's a vast area. There seems to be two worlds: Oracle is on one side; VMware, NetApp, Cisco and all of them are on the other side. They need to come together to integrate and provide more compatible solutions. We are Oracle service providers for Oracle databases and applications. It’s a niche area and FAS still isn’t there.

The ONTAP OS is stable. We have the performance of the SSDs. We have the CPU processing speed, which helps us support 1 million IOPS.

I think we have a couple of options for the ONTAP versions: the 8.3 version and the new 9, which I think just reached general availability. We intend to use the 8.3, which is more stable in our environment for SATA, SAS and hybrid. We will continue to use the same stable ONTAP version for our All Flash.

As I mentioned, scalability with respect to the space is very nice. cDOT gives us the scalability to expand the cluster. So we have a two-node hybrid. We added two more, making it a four-node cluster. We can expand it to eight nodes in a pure SAN cluster.

Technical support is nice. It has been working well for us.

We have traditionally used SATA disks; then we migrated to SAS, and then to a hybrid which included a flash pool. Now we have embarked on all flash. This journey has been really exciting for us. We have used each of these storage systems to package storage services for our customers.

We were previously using HPE 3PAR. I was not involved in the switch between 3PAR to FAS, and I’m not sure why we switched. When I joined this company, we already started with NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no problems. We usually have a professional service engineer in the data center, and we have certified engineers within our organization to work together to design and implement.

It has usually been a unified computing platform with NetApp All Flash; so you get NAS and SAN protocols from the same box.

I would encourage my colleagues to evaluate multiple products, and find the right fit for their use cases.

All-flash performance and density are two important things for us. In terms of performance, we have a humongous database. Before this solution, we had a lot of performance issues. With this tool, we were able to nail them down to at least 20-30% performance gain. In terms of density, I don't have the numbers, but it is definitely better than the older disk-based solutions.

The business benefit is the rate. If you have better performance from your critical ERP applications and databases, that's a gain from the cost perspective. We are able to manage our data centers better from the space perspective. Those two pieces are the key benefits.

At a recent NetApp conference, I got a lot of good ideas from the sessions where they are trying to bring in a newer AFF. That should be good. I am looking forward to the SolidFire integration. That will give us more benefits.

I have not used technical support personally, but we do use technical support on our operational issues. The team is getting pretty good response from them.

This is where my organization's innovation comes into the picture. They keep their eye on the market and what's going on. We started that relationship around two years ago and we started ten years ago with NetApp.

We also keep an eye on how we can improve from a data center perspective. We are a big data center provider and we look at how we can make our data center more cost effective.

The ROI is good. AFF is definitely pricier than other solutions, but the price gets compensated by performance and the density.

When looking for a vendor, I definitely look the product they are offering. I look at what the change is and how it will make a change for us. I look at the costs and benefits, the ROI, and the operation.

I am not technical, so I cannot give technical advice. However, I am part of the decision-making process at my organization. We are the central hub of providing the whole infrastructure to the company. We do a lot of homework. If we decide that we want to go with this solution and we can prove the ROI to our senior leadership, then that's that. We are then on it.

The best feature is just for databases; the speed that we can use for all of our database, Oracle and SQL. For example, testing with our programmers, testing the systems; as far as the speed of getting to the database, getting their data back to their applications.

The speed itself means it takes less time trying to run queries.

NetApp for me has been great. We went from about 30 physical servers and some blades, and now we're over 70 virtual servers and everything's on NetApp. Basically, our utility is about 95% NetApp for storage. There's maybe 5% that are actually outside of that. NetApp has been great.

We're using it with VMware; being able to do some mirroring to our DR site. The biggest thing I'd like to see would be the ability to break the mirror and stand up the DR site as a production site; see if there's a way to do that almost seamlessly. That would be a big thing to be able to do: if you lose your main site, stand up your secondary site and the customer has no idea.

We've had zero stability issues. We've had a disk go bad and the customer doesn't even know it. That's the best part about it.

I don’t think we’ve had any scalability issues with it. I think it's great because every time they want more storage or a bigger size, it's easy enough to give them. Growing disk space is great with flash.

We haven’t needed to use technical support.

We were not using a different solution beforehand. We had been using physical servers for all of our SQL and Oracle.

Testing with some of our programmers, there were some issues with speed compared to physical servers, physical disks. When we did the testing, the older physical servers were actually faster than some of our virtual. We had to do some testing with that and we determined that by going to the flash, we’d get rid of that latency, that issue of slowness.

Initial setup is a little bit complex, but we use a guy who pretty much builds all of our NetApp for us.

Before choosing AFF, we looked around a little bit, thought about some Cisco gear, but decided we just wanted to go with NetApp from talking with a couple of other utilities that we know, that work with us. They were using NetApp, so we just gravitated towards it.

In general, when I choose a vendor, the criteria that are important to me are stability, for one; longevity in the business already; and then, of course, word of mouth from other customers. How they treat their customers, how good are they at getting back to you. There’s nothing like having a fire and wanting your vendor to be there on the spot to fix it. Other than that, that's probably the biggest thing.

Start with planning and whatever you think you need, double it. That's the word of mouth; that’s what most everybody says. We bought 20 TBs of flash to start, thinking that's all we would need, and in less than a year, we already reached 14 TBs.

Once you go to it, you don't go back. Once everybody gets their speed, they don't ever want to lose that. The nice thing about flash is that it protects the poorly written code. That's our favorite thing to tell the programmers.