NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Performance; that's the whole reason we use it. We have both FAS and AFF. Everything on our production site's running on AFF. That's the pure and simple reason: we need the flash, we need the IOPS. That's what it gives us.

I've had no issues with it. As a storage admin, it makes my job easy.

We get increased performance; a lot more stability. We don't have to worry; when Black Friday sales rolled around and our website goes down because we can't handle it. We were storage-bound in the past and AFF fixed it.

As far as my role's concerned, everything is handled pretty easily, especially with ONTAP; management's simple.

Compared to other systems I've used, the UI is much easier. I don't have too much of a problem with it, as long as you follow the documentation.

The GUI's pretty simple to me. I don't think it's that bad. I try and use command line whenever possible, but the GUI's not bad. I'm sure if I sat down, I could think of some things I would really like to have added to the GUI, or maybe make a little simpler to see in the command line. There's always – once in a while – some command that's formatted really stupidly in command line and it's hard to get an accurate view out of it.

As far as NetApp, we have not had any stability issues from it.

Scalability has been good so far. We have several data centers. We have no problems scaling it out.

I have had to use technical support a few times. They're always good. We even have a resident on-site with us and the resident's been great, helping us find new solutions, things like that.

We previously had a FAS and then we also had an IBM flash storage array. The IBM was not as reliable. We had several hardware issues with it. Then our NetApp sales rep came to us with the AFF. We had a pretty long-existing relationship with NetApp already, so we decided just to try and concentrate on NetApp solutions. It's worked out very well for us so far.

My role in the initial setup was only plugging it in, basically. It's pretty straightforward, especially with the fancy little map you get with the hardware. It was pretty easy.

We have an architect who looked at something from EMC, as well, but we're very well-ingrained with NetApp right now.

Follow best practices. Your best practices do a good job of laying out the very best way of doing it, usually, for most environments, at least.

When I’m choosing a vendor, I look at the amount of storage I’m getting for my money, the features I’m getting with that money, the support that we're getting with it, ease of use, management, and so on. What are we going to have the ability to do? What's controlled by the software/firmware? That kind of thing. We found all of those things in NetApp with AFF. As I’ve mentioned, management's been really easy for us; the ONTAP software's been great.

Speed is obviously one of the most valuable features, with IOPS being the most important for certain applications: database applications and so on; performance with certain applications that has blown away the benchmarks set by the providers.

From an IT perspective, providing that as a platform for these specific databases has made us seem like gods, in short. There is a perception of IT in our organization that we're not capable or we can't provide the services that the other departments want. When they come to us and we give them space on AFF, they're blown away by the performance, as are the people that are telling them, "No, you guys can't provide it. Use these guys or go with a cloud provider." We're more than capable technically and now more than capable technologically.

I don't know if it's going to be possible in the short term to improve upon it because the drive technology is developing much faster than the processing technology, the CPU, that sort of thing. In the future, I'm sure they'll tackle that but right now, drive technology is accelerating.

We’ve had it for something like a year and a half.

We’ve purchased a second larger system and we've had no stability problems with it.

If one can afford the drives, then they're scalable. That's the caveat. Of course, there are some issues with scalability that come from the ability to crush your controller with so many drives behind it. If you have too many disk shelves, you can overwhelm a controller, one of the lower-end controllers. That’s a potential problem. It's not a problem we actually have, but it's something we have to be careful with because we have a mid-range AFF, and now we have an enterprise AFF as well. Now that we have the enterprise AFF, this isn’t an issue.

I have used technical support through a provider, C-Store. They were great.

I was consulted during the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS. It was an addition to FlexPod. We were told we needed to have flash storage to support an application when the truth was, we didn't actually need flash storage but there was an edict to do that. We went with the AFF in order to support the demands of a customer. We're happy enough with it to buy another.

In small ways. For the AFF, I was involved in the initial setup but not directly doing a whole lot of it. I consulted, and we set up the aggregates and all that based on specifications. It was straightforward and, again, we had good providers; good help makes things easy.

EMC was a possibility. I'm sure there were others. For me, it wasn't even a competition. I would have just said, "We're going with NetApp. We can talk about who's going to provide it but NetApp's the way to go." We were so heavily invested in NetApp already; also, most of our storage team had experience with NetApp and bringing in another storage vendor... learning curve and all that; we're already understaffed and over-utilized.

When selecting a vendor to work with, they have to be able to both support and anticipate our needs, communicate efficiently and clearly. Sometimes that means making changes in the way they do business in order to facilitate our needs because we have very little movement in the way we do business. We're a public school, a lot of stakeholders. We are beholden to explain ourselves to a lot of people. Those kinds of criteria are very important. Whatever we're buying has to be worth the money because we're not going to get it again very soon.

Make sure that an AFF is necessary before you buy one, because a FAS full of SSDs is very expensive and might not be necessary to meet your needs. You get plenty of IOPS out of a SAS and they are comparatively inexpensive so that you can increase your spindle count to make up for the IOPS of SSD; when you do that, you gain capacity too.

Don't let yourself be bullied by a vendor saying, "This software solution requires this level of hardware to back it up," because NetApp has already proven that's not the case.

Right now, it’s the ability to have full flash based solution with NFS that's most valuable for us. Because Pure Storage does not offer that, only block storage, we need NFS for our services to work.

It's improved the speed, obviously, compared to what we are used to, and the latency. It’s the same OS as the regular NetApp FAS, so you don’t need to learn anything again.

All the storage for the VMs are hosted on the platform of individual companies. When you host everything on NetApp, everything needs to grow and shrink for each customer. They don’t know what their customers are using it for, but NetApp allows us to be prepared for anything without knowing anything.

I'd like to see a one-click-and-start feature for the initial setup. That means software that just asks you a few questions and takes care of the rest.

We're in the process of starting a partnership, and we've been a client for five years.

So far quite good.

The 8080 is the biggest product at NetApp so you can scale very wide. With this kind of product we have no problems at all.

8/10, the two points missing is the same with every tech support, even if the customer knows very well what the issue is. Tech support still needs to go through the script to arrive at the same conclusion.

We started with NetApp five years ago and are still with them now. At the point we started, there were no competitors. At that time, it was a really great choice and it still is today.

Cluster mode setup was complex to do the first time, but everything else was straightforward.

We looked for support, stability, and that we don’t have a vendor who would disappear two years later. That is one reason we didn’t chose Pure Storage, because we don’t know where they will be in a few years. We needed a trusted partner.

It is still cluster mode, and is complex to set up the first time. You have to plan a long time ahead during the initial setup because you don’t know how you will want to scale.

We only looked at NFS because that’s what we need. If you need flash speed and NFS today you only have AFF. If you are looking at SAN, check out all the companies and features to compare them.

The primary use case of this solution is for its speed. We're using the AFF as a cache disk. We have terabytes of data that we have to move quickly off a system. The only way we could do that is with the 40 gig backbone that all-flash array provides and the speed of the disks.

Besides for the speed, one of the most valuable features that the AFF gives me is the robust hardware that it has. It's simplistic. It deploys very easily. It's already built from the factory to take advantage of the all-flash array.

I would describe the user experience of the solution as very simplistic. There's a very easy GUI to use, and then when you need to get very, very detailed, you have a robust command line that you could do anything you want with to enhance performance for your solutions. Really what we're using the AFF for is solely for speed. We really need the power of the backbone and the speed of the disks because we have to move so much data.

Setting up and provisioning enterprise applications take minutes. It's just not difficult. We only have to use the GUI, curate the spaces, and go. I've set up entire NetApp systems in a morning.

I don't need anything improved. This solution does what I need it to do. I would like to see a cleaner GUI and better help pages. The solution itself doesn't bother, a lot of times it's that after it's installed. I have more issues with the support after the setup. I want it to be more simplistic than it already is and I would love to see the GUI be more simplistic.

Still implementing.

So far the system has been excellent, no complaints. NetApp has always been built as a massively fault-tolerant system. If we have a problem, it just doesn't show it. 

Scalability is excellent. If we need more space it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself.

I go to tech support with difficulty because I installed NetApp for many years I know what to expect when I call. When I don't get the support tech that I'm expecting and I'm trying to get to the right one, it can get very frustrating for me to push my way to the right person. NetApp has the right people, it's just a matter of getting to them.

I installed NetApp for many, many years. The initial setup of NetApp is very simplistic. Even as an installer, for years upon years, there's a giant poster board that I still use to this day, because that tells me exactly where my cables are supposed to go. It just gets me off the ground quickly and then it's just a matter of following the GUI and knowing what you're doing.

I would rate the product at least an eight. I should give it a nine, if not a ten, but there's always room for improvement. 

I would tell someone considering this solution that it's expensive, but it's worth the money. You're going to get the speed and the backbones that you need to accomplish what you do. If you need that kind of speed and that kind of performance, you can get it out of the AFF.

• Data availability
• Speed

Being able to keep the system up - five nines are better - so I have that system online and have that data available to our customers. And the new flash stuff is really fast.

The ability to manage very easily, and the replication between sites for backups is also very easy to use. And it stays up.

I'm just keeping a really close eye on where NVMe goes and how that's going to affect the next lifecycle of disk and connectivity to the server. So that's what I'm watching for.

One thing they could improve right now is support. Other than that I've been pretty happy.

Stability for us has been good. We've had a few bumps, a few bugs, but it's based on the new hardware platform.

Scalability is great. In the cluster, being able to add nodes as needed, and to be able to move data around within the cluster to balance the workload on the nodes is just crazy easy.

We use technical support a lot. It's doing better. It's got some hurdles to overcome but they're certainly doing better. I can see them making progress towards what they need to be, but it's a little hard to get through level one.

When we get through level one and get to the back-end guys, we definitely have the right guys.

It was lifecycle for us. Equipment had aged out so it was time to replace.

Since we already had it running on a fast system, we just added them to the cluster and moved the data, without the customers even knowing. Just seamless.

We use it for Oracle databases and for our virtual environment, and use it for file storage, not block storage.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage before we purchased it was that we could use them for general purpose storage, didn't really think of them as high-performance, but they're definitely there now. We are likely to consider them for our mission critical storage because we've been running on them now for eight years and they've been running our critical applications, so they've proven it to us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they've got to have a pretty good track record. We don't do business with very small companies because we're a pretty big enterprise, fast customer; so they've got to be up in the reviews. We use reviews to tell us all of those quadrants and where they sit, and then we typically do an evaluation and an RFP among the big players in those fields, and then select a choice.

For a colleague who is considering a similar solution, I would tell them to definitely consider what NetApp is doing and how easy it is to use and migrate data.

We have been able to construct a business intelligence environment with nearly instant reporting for our parks, so they can determine where resources need to be put during the middle of a day. So, if there's a rainstorm, they can determine that we need to move people to front gates, we need to move pizzas here, etc. It enables realtime actions to events.

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

The performance is the most valuable feature.

The primary use cases for our All Flash storage system are primarily server virtualization and data storage for unstructured storage. We use it for both block storage and file storage.

The only complaints I ever had was with OnCommand Unified Manager and Performance Manager, and they fixed them in the last version.

It's pretty reliable. We do our upgrades in the middle of the day, with parks open. If I'm not up at 3:00 in the morning doing an upgrade because of a risk, that's a great thing.

We haven't had to scale yet. However, we built it so if we do, it's very simple to do. We could probably do it with an onsite staff and not need professional services.

We have frequently used tech support. They are one of the best departments at NetApp. Without them, we wouldn't be able to operate the way we do.

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

We had a different NetApp solution before. We actually started running the numbers, and due to the age of the systems, we were starting to lose multiple disks at a time. We were going to have a point where we lost data, so it was time to replace them. NetApp was the only vendor that really worked out during the quote process.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward. By the end of the process, we had it down to where we were converting an entire park within 48 hours.

Definitely go with NetApp. You're going to look at other vendors. They may come in at a cheaper price point, but you will pay in the end with management costs and downtime.

Before purchase All Flash, we had a very high impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance sound storage. It is still very high as it is the only vendor we would consider for mission critical systems based on our experience at this point.

We looked at some other vendors. They can't provide the single pane of glass management. We're a very thinly-staffed environment, and we need to be able to have a minimum number of people managing the maximum amount of resources. Other vendors don't do that.

For example, we looked at EMC. Their primary problem was the pane of glass problem. They offered three solutions to do what we're already doing with one. Nimble was the other solution which we looked at, and they were protocol limited. They could only do iSCSI, which would have required a significant architecture rebuilt for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• High availability
• Reliability
• Performance.

We have to be able to do the three P's. Get people in the front gate, sell them plush "Bugs Bunnies", and sell them pizzas. If we can't do that, we have a problem.

We have our ESB system which was actually running on an older NetApp that was having severe latency. Therefore, we just implemented an All-Flash system this year, which dropped the latency by at least four times, so now it runs without any hiccups or problems.

The company as a whole definitely is far more lenient towards NetApp now that we have the All-Flash array because the major ESB system is now running without any problems. Thus, it's made a big difference in the outlook of NetApp for our company.

• Lower latency
• Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9.
• Also it has the WAN acceleration between locations, which sped up our replication as well.

Higher communication: I love the professional services and I love everything that everyone's able to offer us, but I find sometimes we're not aware of all the things that NetApp can do.

With the new clustered system, because it has the switches in-between the cluster, it's far more redundant and far less likely to have any kind of outage, even if our network isn't as stable as we'd like it to be.

We haven't had to scale it yet.

I was the main engineer on the implementation. We had professional services that came out and helped us, install it and set it up, to make sure that everything was running properly, which was amazing. The set-up of the clustered system, while complex, was very necessary to ensure redundancy.

After it was set up, it was very straightforward getting moved over; pretty seamless for the most part.

Give NetApp a shot. There's a lot of other really good solutions out there as well. I'm pretty entrenched in NetApp personally because I think they do a great job.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Dependency and redundancy; just ensuring that we're able to stay up constantly. That's the biggest thing. It's because any downtime causes our stores not to be able to take transactions, that's not okay.

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.