NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We're using NetApp AFF primarily for file and block storage. We have deployments for remote sites and our data centers, and we also use it for NAS file storage, both NFS and CIFS. We're also using it as a cloud backup, so it is like our tertiary spot for cold data or snapshots. 

Our team is gaining experience with ONTAP, which works similarly in the cloud with Azure. As the business has more requests for spinning up new apps in Azure, we'll have the expertise to deploy that quickly in Azure natively with ONTAP stuff. 

Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us. 

AFF is simplifying our operational model. We get a lot of requests from our DBAs for routine operations like quick snapshots, backups, or something related to storage. Those requests happen all the time. You could do that with PowerMax, but the process on NetApp is more straightforward and less prone to error. We're a small team supporting a global organization, and every minute we can shave off our routine operations does make a difference for us. It enables us to focus on major projects instead of everyday work.

I'm not in the weeds in terms of costs. One of my other colleagues handled that a little more than I did, but time is money, and we can respond faster to requests. That saves everybody's time, improving efficiency and productivity. You get angry when you're on the other side, making requests and waiting. You're like, "Why have they not finished it yet?" Your morale, effectiveness, and productivity can go down. That can spiral out of control. It's a ripple effect of the little things adding up to make a big difference, so that's where I would frame it in terms of cost-effectiveness. 

We have quite a few active-active processes in our data center. We have primary and backup data centers and high-performing databases that require active-active workloads over a 10 gigabit WAN connection. And we are usually at about 1 millisecond latency at all times. So we're hitting it with lots of stuff, and it doesn't bat an eye. It's been very high-performing and easy to use.

I've only been using AFF for about a year now, so I don't have many criticisms. I wrote a lot of the automation for our initial migrations from PowerMax to NetApp and as well as automation related to refreshing our production systems. We clone a lot of our production systems to the testing or QA environments so our developers could use real production data in a safe environment.  

I worked with the APIs quite a bit, including the REST API. We're working to move out from RDMs to do more VMDK-based disks in VMware, which will allow us to use SnapCenter for more efficiency. SnapCenter makes things even simpler than they already are. Additionally, once we are on VMDKs, we’ll be using the SnapCenter API, which I like even better than ONTAP's REST API. 

The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different. 

That 5 percent mostly come from response data being returned slightly differently than the ones you've already worked with. It's easy enough to work around but blows up in your face the first time you try it, so you inspect the response to see what changed. I would like it if they worked a little harder to get that a little more perfectly standardized. Thankfully the documentation is top notch, so if you aren’t sure of something specific you can just look it up.

NetApp AFF has been rock-solid. We've had it in production. We did have a node blip recently, but it auto-recovered. Support was automatically alerted, and they told us to check it out. Support had already identified the bug, and there was already a patch for it.

We purchased NetApp AFF with scalability in mind. We ended up going with the A900, which is a switched design, so expanding nodes out will be trivial. For some of our smaller sites, we use the A150, and we don't expect that we will need more. If necessary, we can buy some more A150s and expand without much fuss.

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. NetApp AFF reduces support issues like performance tuning and troubleshooting. EMC didn't fail regularly, but EMC support has decreased in quality over the years, and getting satisfactory problem resolution has been challenging. That was one of the factors that started getting us to look at other alternatives. We certainly have had our fair share of implementation issues and little bugs here and there. We ran into a panic bug the weekend before flying over here [to NetApp Insight 2023]. But that was an auto-support case from NetApp and quickly resolved.

They were aware of the problem before we were. It automatically recovered. They found the bug for us and gave us a patch to use when we were ready. In most cases, it was pretty simple. NetApp support has been top-notch.  I've not had any issues working with NetApp. They've been some of the best and brightest people I've worked with in my career.

Positive

We previously used EMC PowerMax. The biggest reason for the switch is that we needed a cloud-ready, cloud-first solution. PowerMax is still a fine platform if you are committed to on-prem and have high-performance on-prem workloads and use cases. It could still be a perfect product for you. However, PowerMax may be limiting if you know your business requirements will take you to the cloud. That's where we were at. Our business was pushing us into the cloud, and we needed more of our workloads to be replicated in the cloud or cloud-native. PowerMax wasn't the right solution for that. 

PowerMax is an aging platform so it doesn't have the flexibility to easily migrate into the cloud. We need our hot-tier data readily accessible on-prem and to be able to access cold storage in the cloud through Azure or whichever provider you want. But we use Azure. That was a key factor for us. We currently use cloud tiering to Azure for automated cold storage processes (mainly for file level data) and we are still exploring additional use cases for future and expanded operations.

We did a six-month proof of concept and put it through its paces. We had a cluster in our primary and backup data centers. We tested out SnapMirror Business Continuity quite thoroughly. That was a new technology for us, and it's still fairly new in its own right. We even did some automation in the proof of concept where we built out a process that explored what our refresh process would look like on NetApp. We were able to bang that out in about three days. It was easy. I was involved with that from day one.

We partnered with CDW during implementation. They've been a fantastic value add for us. We also worked with a rep from NetApp, but we met a lot of NetApp people and CDW people. Both companies brought deep knowledge and expertise. We had a long list of questions that they answered to our satisfaction.

I wouldn't be able to quantify the ROI in dollars and cents, but we've seen improvements in terms of saving time and increasing our effectiveness. My background is in virtualization and networking. I was new to storage when I started working with NetApp only a year ago. It has been easy to figure out. As we grew our infrastructure team, it has been easy to onboard them and get them up to speed, so it's much easier to realize the value we're looking for.

When we bought NetApp, it was very reasonably priced. When you factor in the time savings, it's highly cost-effective. 

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10.  I would recommend AFF depending on your use case. PowerMax might be right for you if you're completely on-prem and have high-performance needs. You need to understand your business requirements and what your developers and DBAs need. It's crucial to figure out exactly what's driving the business. Plot out what the next year or five years will look like and ensure you're in a position to handle those needs. 

Once you know what those needs are, you'll be able to ask NetApp or whatever vendor the right questions. Those should be tough questions you ask your vendor and you should take them to task. If they don't give you good answers, they need to figure something out because you don't want something that doesn't solve your problems. That's pointless. 

If you have your list of requirements, and there's five things on the list, and storage solution A does two of the five. And you've got another one storage vendor B has five out of five. Are you really gonna buy two solutions if one has a specialty feature? Because maybe one does one better/is more performant? Or are you gonna buy the one that does five and handle everything. We had a very long list of complicated protocols and setups and NetApp checked every single box.

The replication of data from on-premises to the cloud is very easy when we are using the SnapMirror technology. 

Being able to use FlexCache is the best part of this solution. It is something that on-premises users are using for their production. There are some users who want to use the same volume from the cloud. FlexCache helps us in providing that.

We have a unified storage to access the file and NAS. We can do all the things in the same solution. We do not need any other product or storage mix.

CVO and AFF technologies have delivered the most value to our company. I would rate AFF a ten out of ten, and I would rate CVO a nine out of ten. We are still exploring the cloud. AFF is completely packed, and with CVO, we have a few challenges that we are trying to solve. Taking a snapshot and cloning are some of the best things that we are doing with these technologies. CVO also offers cost-effectiveness.

Their customer support can be better. When we have an outage, we need to wait until the issue is escalated to L3 which takes a lot of time. If that can be improved, it will help a lot. If there is any issue, we should be able to resolve it immediately instead of waiting for so long to get a qualified resource from NetApp.

We have a NetApp partner and we also have a point of contact from NetApp with whom we have regular calls every week. We can see what the new products are and we try to adopt the new ones. 

If there are any issues, we can get NetApp support to get them resolved. Their customer support can be better.

We considered another solution that is used only for SAN and is server block storage. With this solution, we get both SAN and NAS within the same storage device. We chose this solution due to its flexibility.

We have had a few outages on the CVO where the host needed more performance but the CVO that we selected in terms of disk type and other things was not able to support that workload. To support that workload, we moved the host to ANF instead of CVO. 

We are moving towards AI, but we are not fully involved as of now.

We have plans to increase its usage both on-prem and on the cloud. Data is constantly growing. We need more capacity. New business needs require new storage. New projects require more storage.

Cost saving on the cloud is the goal we have. We do not know how much exactly it will come out to be because it is on a usage basis. It can grow constantly, and then for one month, it can come down. We need to make sure that the cost is constant.

Our upcoming investments would be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. Data storage is the main thing that we cannot avoid. Cybersecurity is something that we need to make our environment secure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

As a pharmaceutical company, our data is very sensitive. It's critical to recover in the event of any incident. NetApp played a major role in our backup and recovery services.

The RPOs and RTOs are excellent. When we had a ransomware attack, NetApp helped us recover. NetApp has streamlined operations by providing faster operating responses and making data more accessible to users. The equipment they offer helped increase our performance.

I administer the solution, so I'm not involved with the design and decision-making, so I can't speak about our future planning. However, most of our files are on NetApp, which we have 50 sites using. I don't know about AI or other emerging technologies we may adopt. We haven't used AI, but the company is looking at that and security-related features, like AI-based ransomware technologies. ONTAP is on the roadmap. 

We plan to expand. All our storage is on-prem, but we plan to shift to the cloud, depending on the application requirements. Our roadmap includes migrating to the cloud and implementing AI. 

NetApp's backup and recovery are the primary features we use. We also appreciate data protection. NetApp's technology and hardware support all our requirements. Snapshot technology is hugely beneficial for backing up our data. 

Our environment is NAS-based. I don't have much exposure to NetApp on the block storage side. At the file level, the protocols they support are easy to use. This improves resiliency and helps us run the environment.

Our block storage is primarily Dell EMC, and we use NetApp for our AFF at the file level. We've heard many things about NetApp's block solutions, so it may be an excellent opportunity to look at NetApp from the block side of things and migrate. Dell EMC is relatively expensive, whereas NetApp is more cost-effective. I would like to explore all the new technologies and move our block storage to NetApp.

We did many POCs with companies like IBM, EMC, and NetApp and how they handled the file-sharing structures. NetApp came out on top for how it handled the files. It also beats the competitors in cost-effectiveness, which is the first thing a company looks at. 

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. 

It's a three-tier architecture and it's separated. It runs over the network instead of hyperconverged infrastructure. It sells itself since it's centralized management. Three-tier is completely separated away from it. With centralized management, you actually have pitfalls where speeds and read/write operations are all slower. Having it separate and having a dedicated storage area network or a dedicated network attached storage, for us, just worked better. It's been faster.  

In terms of improvements, they could have a couple more things that are usually done through the command line. 

I see that they're making more improvements by adding things like SnapMirror to ONTAP Systems Manager, so maybe some more features in that area would be helpful.

We do plan to expand. We're going to purchase a few 250s for some off-site backups in our secondary location, and that's kind of where we're at right now. With the next technology, we're actually getting Veeam. It integrates perfectly as a backup and replication system with NetApp. Being able to use an old NetApp as essentially a target for our backups is going to work perfectly. That's the next step for us.

We had Nutanix and VMware vSAN. We had sit downs and meet and greets with Pure Storage as well. A lot of them were very expensive, and we knew how Nutanix was operating. They give you everything upfront, and then you have to pay extra for the nodes. So the pricing models weren't as transparent. 

The scalability of this solution fit our needs and was better. Performance was the biggest factor in our decision-making.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Data storage and optimization are going to be our biggest focus next. We've had problems with it in the past, and we're able to fix those issues with the solutions that we're purchasing.

Our company is really into growth and innovation in general, and they're always looking for new ways to do something better. Previously, we have been doing things not to the best of our ability. Being able to purchase new hardware, new software, and have solutions architects come in and look at what we've got going on, it just makes sense to to go in that direction as well. 

NetApp allowed us to refresh our old systems with the new NetApp platforms. It allowed us to increase our capacity, our performance all over, and we are looking forward to utilizing more products in the future.

The ATL process, or the authorized-to-operate process, has been beneficial to the organization.

The ONTAP management software gave us the most beneficial bang for our buck. It allows our operation teams to manage the systems more easily than our previous tech solution.

The mirroring of two different sites is great. We're huge on that. We were not able to easily get that done with our previous solution. Using ONTAP and their SnapMirror technology allowed us to easily utilize their advantages in that space.

We want to consolidate under one solution. It'll be easier if we just had all of one product. That's what we're looking forward to.

They should just keep building on what they currently have. If they can continue to make it easier and more efficient and listen to customer feedback or do anything to automate the process will help a lot.

We're just getting into the solution and building on it. I can't say what needs to be improved.

Once we fully flesh out all of its capabilities, we will probably be able to provide some proper feedback.

Maybe more integration with other tech vendors and products, such as hypervisors. I know they're working well with Microsoft and VMware. However, they could integrate with more. If they can integrate more, it would be better.

We do have plans to expand in the future. We plan to continue to spread the solution across our sites where we need it the most. Hopefully, we'll have an all-in-one solution rather than having multiple storage solutions across our enterprise.

There's no competing option for us. We are a little bit on the budget side. This solution was able to deliver what we needed as far as requirements within our budget. Previously, we had Dell, and we're moving on to NetApp across the whole enterprise. 

In the future, we might look at something else depending on our use cases and requirements. As of right now, this solution is the one.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have been influencing our technology decisions a lot recently. We just recently made a commitment to AI in the space.

NetApp has enabled us to transition from legacy configurations and continue to do some of the same things we did before implementing NetApp storage. It helps us with simple things, like allowing us to grow a file system immediately. Customers can do their own self-restores. 

I've combined other NetApp systems into one of our newer platforms, taking other file-sharing solutions native to Windows or Mac and creating file shares, yielding a better return on our investment. At the same time, we are providing better resources and more efficient channels for files.

When we had another vendor, backups were not done efficiently, so we lost critical data. That's why we went with this solution. It has required us to think differently about how we will implement it. Anything we do needs some aspect of AI involved to help us because we don't have enough resources in terms of money or labor power. 

We have considered using WEKA.io or S3, but we have a solid history with NetApp. We have it in multiple layers, so we can't make those shifts without interrupting many business systems. Ease of use is one of those critical things. We're familiar with it. Making those changes is too much of a lift and would be costly. 

When you evaluate what it costs to bring in a new vendor or platform versus what you've already invested in that app, it makes that decision easy. Right now, I plan to start doing some more data tiering. We bought a storage grid we use for backup but want to use for data tiering. S3 will be a protocol we can use for clients needing to access things from various platforms. 

We want to add more. We want to build out our source grid infrastructure because that can allow us to do data tiering, backups, and another protocol to enable users to use data more efficiently. It's also secure, and all those things are part of our effort to be more efficient. You can't have one without the other. 

Our organization recently underwent a major upgrade, and we're expecting exponential data growth over the next few years. We must embrace what we currently have and the building blocks to grow and understand the demand. We have to do that seamlessly, but we can't do it with the same resources we have now. 

We could not consolidate resources between NFS and Sys services without the NetApp appliance or something like it. 

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10. 

NetApp is highly flexible. We can do things on the fly. Because the nodes are rock-solid, there is less downtime and maintenance. We don't have any downtime due to NetApp storage.

Our internal operations are rather static. We're a healthcare company, so we have the same product line. We don't have to fluctuate too much due to market pressure. The integration with VMware has streamlined the IT operations, where we can use vCenter to do half our BlueXP work.

One of the biggest challenges we had recently was SnapMirror. SnapMirror is rather old, but that shows how good it is. It hasn't been reinvented in so long. We're on-prem right now. I think hybrid integration with BlueXp to manage both storage types will greatly benefit us. We're not heavily involved in AI, but I am so happy that NetApp is with ARP and Cloud Insights. 

We plan to expand our NetApp usage to include more AI and ransomware protections. I want to strengthen our security posture with MFA and multi-admin approvals. We want to get off VMware and go right to Kubernetes. 

Our future investment will focus on cybersecurity. We've had partners who were attacked, infected, and went down. I won't give names. We weren't affected, but we were indirectly affected. We had to change how we communicated with them. It's coming from the top down that we all need to focus more on cybersecurity.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity throws a wrench into innovation. We only have so much money, tools, and people, but it's what you have to do. You can't just say that we're not going to do it, and we're going to develop a new product line.

We're not fully utilizing NetApp's Converge BlueXP, but it's a great help. It integrates on-prem and cold storage and provides disaster recovery. We'll see more benefits as it improves.

We implemented SnapCenter for SQL, which we provide to our customers for free. It provides hourly point-in-time recovery, which they weren't expecting, and we already had the license. They got it for free.

NetApp's price could be improved. All storage is expensive. NetApp is not cheap, but we can't return to anybody else now. We'd lose too much value. We'd be, reinventing ourselves.

We have used NetApp for 10 years.

We came from HPE and considered Dell EMC, but we're not in block storage anymore. We want the flexibility of NAS, and it wasn't hard to decide on NetApp.
It's come a long way, and we can train new employees that have never touched NetApp. They can get going in a week and start being administrators quickly using all the GUI tools. 

We've had instances before where we were on block storage with VMware. And if it fills up or anything happens, you have downtime. NetApp now gives us more alerts, so we expand it on the fly. It will auto-expand on the fly. So I think that's definitely a big outcome.

I only made the decision at the technology level about whether it would fit into our stack and provide for our needs. I never got involved in the cost, so I don't know if cost was a deciding factor. When we adopted it 10 years ago, NetApp was a different storage creature than everybody else. It was an easier decision. If we wanted to stay with block storage, we could go with anybody else, and they were almost identical at the time.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10. 

We're a hospital, and we do a lot of imaging tasks. Specifically with our cardiology imaging, we had a lot of issues with the data transfers to the FASM. Once I moved all of that over to the AFF, all of that went away.

NetApp AFF has helped reduce operational latency. From going from our old FAS systems to AFF, I already see massive performance improvements.

For years, my company used EMC, and EMC really wasn't doing what we needed it to do. 

Some of our sales reps invited my boss and a previous administrator to NetApp INSIGHT. From there, they got to see everything work. The administrator got the certification and they actually bought it right there. AFF just fits the bill for the company. 

AFF has helped us simplify our infrastructure. 

The simplifications have improved our operations. Our operations used to be one to two hours, just trying to set up simple shared drives and things. Now, I do it in a couple of minutes. It's taking a lot of weight off of me.

NetApp helped to reduce support issues like performance tuning. It's the auto-support features and everything that just fires off to NetApp and they're back to me within minutes of those auto-supports firing off. It's things that would normally take days to resolve, now take minutes using NetApp.

ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day.

NetApp AFF has absolutely helped to simplify our infrastructure. One hundred percent. It's still getting us very high performance for our business-critical applications.

There are features that are available but we haven't purchased them. We haven't delved into the cloud environment too much. BlueXP offers a lot of options that I would like to see, but it's not available with what we currently have. 

They should make these features a little more affordable.

I've been using it for less than a year. We've had it at our company for years, but I've been working with it since March. 

I've never had any major issues out of it other than the drive or node failure. The way it's configured is not an issue. We never saw any dip in performance or anything. 

Scalability is fantastic because we work with new clinics all the time. Usually, I have to spin up some new volumes for those, and it's no problem at all. We're looking at Keystone right now, and that's going to help it quite a bit more.  

The customer service and support are fantastic. A couple of weeks ago, I had a drive go down, and they had one out to me the next morning.  

I had a control board go down on one of my nodes a few months ago, and they sent a guy out to me the next day.

Positive

We previously used different solutions. We opted for AFF because of its flash capacity. The all-flash capacity is fantastic.

I enjoy understanding how the setup works. I never have any issues with it. 

The previous guy set it up before me, and I've picked it up and run with it. I haven't really had any issues since then.

We saw an ROI in terms of turnaround times on our data. It provides patient care at a much faster speed than what we normally would be able to.

In future releases, I would like to see some nonprofit licensure tiers because it's a nonprofit hospital, so it's competing with more commercial licensing. It gets a little more expensive for the nonprofit.

My company evaluated different options, but AFF was definitely one of the front runners.

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