NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

• The compression
• Dedupe
• The speed

With the ONTAP, the flexibility is also a nice feature.

We've had quite a positive response since we've moved to the AFF for our VCD and our VDI environments. The feedback from the end users and the virtualization team that manages it has been very positive.

We have a fairly large vCloud, vCloud Director (VCD) environment, which we use for our AFF systems, that and VDI. We use it all for file storage.

It is solid.

It scales out very well. We have not had any issues trying to move anything around or when it comes to expansion. We haven't had to expand the AFF yet, but other ONTAP systems are very easy to expand.

They're very professional. They usually find the issues, within the first couple of calls. The software support for all the SNAPManager products, sometimes the support is a little iffy on that, but the hardware support and the ONTAP support have always been pretty solid.

We had some issues with SNAPManager for Exchange around Snapshots not getting deleted, and it's been an ongoing problem for us. We haven't really come up with a solution yet. That's still been a problem. It's gone around the block a few times in support. In support you get a new guy, they start over with a case, that's been the frustration.

It was all disk space, it was on a FAS system, it wasn't AFF. We switched because of growth. The amount of IO that we needed from our existing system just couldn't handle it.

I felt that NetApp was a little late to the game, but I guess that made them a little bit more mature when they got there. However, I've always been a fan of NetApp, an advocate.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.

We looked at Pure. We looked at some of the Nutanix stuff, but it just wasn't what we needed.

I have been an advocate of NetApp for a long time. It's a good company, has good equipment, and good support. I am more like to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experiences with AFF.

Our current AFF is not part of a cluster of NetApp FAS systems, we have other systems that are multi-node clusters.

Definitely, heavily look at NetApp and its AFF solution. It's a rock solid platform. That's my recommendation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability and longevity. That's why I'm looking at some of the other Flash providers out there. They haven't been around long enough really for us to know that they're going to be there when we need them. NetApp has been a pretty solid vendor for us.

We're a hospital and we store all of our patient records on it. Everything that we do in the hospital is done on there. It does it for VMware as well as databases and Oracle, we do everything on it. It allows us to do our job.

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

The capabilities of ONTAP is what drives me towards NetApp.

Their ability to put more storage on smaller spaces through their deduplication compaction. Routines and thin storage are very valuable to us. 

An additional feature that I would like to see better support for is block level storage, where they understand what's inside the LUNs as well as the LUNs themselves.

Though with 9.2 coming out, there is very little else that I want. I think anything they add at this point is going to be just icing, because it's already meeting my needs.

It's very stable.

I like the scalability, the clusters, being able to add new nodes and such. It also makes for easy upgrades; you just add new nodes, move stuff off, and take the old nodes off.

They are very good, knowledgeable, and responsive. Though every once in awhile, you get a knucklehead.

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?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

We were using an EMC solution before this one. We switched when we ran out of performance on what we had.

I was involved in the setup.

They preconfigured it at the factory and that is a pain in the neck. This should stop.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi and NetApp.

When choosing a storage, it's a matter of management. Once you've bought the storage, all your time is spent in management. So, look at the software as well as the hardware.

We use it for block storage almost exclusively.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems because they have been excellent to work with and their product has been stable.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support and performance.

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.

It promises to deliver lower-latency throughput to our database servers. We're pretty confident that we can take advantage because we've built out a new, lower-latency network. To date, we've migrated one SQL server workload, a fairly large one, on to it. We haven't really put it through its paces yet, but we like what we see so far.

We expect more capacity so that we could move more of our workload on without having to make some of the tougher choices about what gets moved and what doesn't; what gets moved off of spinning disk.

We're actually delving in to it, moving our large Oracle workloads on there. However, we don't want to necessarily move all of those components on. There are some that clearly might not benefit from All-Flash FAS. Being that there's a premium cost, a premium right now, and we only have one array, we need to be judicious in what we cut over. The smaller database environments are a given. Also, we'll be moving some of our VMware, more performance-sensitive workloads, onto that.

I’m not even educated enough. That's why I went to a NetApp Insight conference: to learn some of the details of flash. We're not so concerned about the value proposition of deduplication, compression. I know there are a lot of benefits of capacity. That's not our primary concern. However, as time goes on, that's going to be more and more of an issue.

Stability-wise, it's fine.

Scalability has not come up yet. Obviously, we haven't been able to scale anywhere.

We have not yet needed to use technical support.

We were previously using SAS and SATA. That said, with our Oracle environment, no one's been complaining. We've been getting quite satisfactory throughput. We just migrated from 7-mode, all on spinning disk, to Clustered ONTAP on newer hardware, smarter back-end aggregate design. We've really implemented more of the NetApp best practices. Actually, we're getting great performance out of our traditional arrays. For us, it's really a matter of education about how to deploy the All-Flash FAS units.

Given the advanced disk partitioning and ONTAP 8.3, that was a small learning curve, but that's not unique to flash. Actually, it was pretty simple to set up. The fact that we have a heterogeneous disk type in the array made it simple. Our choice of aggregate type was very simple. Basically, we split the unit, an 8060. We split the capacity across both heads. It was pretty much a vanilla roll out.

We were able to get good pricing; it was part of a larger acquisition. Other than that, if this were a standalone purchase, pricing would definitely be an issue. When we were pricing the AFF separately and comparing that to the other big company, a year ago, it really looked like the NetApp offering was very costly.

The last purchasing cycle, two years ago, it came down to a bake-off between EMC and NetApp. We've been a NetApp customer for quite a while, so our skill set is heavily invested there. Also, we're about a 50% file-based shop as opposed to block, so NetApp is a pretty good fit. I like their file solutions more so than EMC, that it's all integrated. It's not a bolt-on appliance.

In general, when I choose a vendor, I look for stability, supportability, and that the product has actually been adequately tested; that it's not beta.

Give more attention to your VDI solution. We have already implemented a VDI solution that's not using flash. That's a perfect workload candidate to put on flash. For my organization, it might have made more sense to put the back end on our NetApp All-Flash FAS, because we have the skill set to administer the storage, as opposed to bringing in another topology that might have some issues.

To be able to give it a higher rating, I would need to actually go and take that car out on some highways, where I could really open it up. I haven't given it a chance yet. That said, I would need to see it perform orders of magnitude better than the spinning disk, and that's what's advertised.

We decided to use the All-Flash because of speed. Most of the time, when we looked at the SAP database, what we found was, by using the All-Flash, we got almost 100% improvement on our jobs.

The best part about it is the density; otherwise, earlier, we used to use a lot of 300- or 600-GB disks. It saves space, saves power and makes us more efficient. The main thing is performance. If you can get the report done in half the time, it's good.

I would like to see the All-Flash FAS support virtualization better. I find that lacking in some areas; application and for disaster recovery. I know we have to do a lot of setup and we need to know exactly what needs to be done, but I would expect NetApp to make those best practices available automatically. Why do they say, “Do this, do this,” when they could say instead, “For DR, click this button”, which would automatically implement the best procedure, rather than having to figure it out yourself? That should be automated.

There are several other improvements that can be done, especially with the clustering. I don't know why we had to make back-end decisions. With software-defined networking, most of the decisions can be made at the front end. Right now, how NetApp works is, you get the data to the head, take it to the back end to make a decision and then pump it back. I just want to eliminate the switch in the back to the cluster. Why not make those decisions? Maybe they need to do something on the software-defined networking; maybe have some module in the switch to make the decision at the front-end, distribute the workload for the clusters in the back. I really don't like having another switch in the back. You know your data comes from this network.

So far, we have not had any major stability issues because I look for stability, then performance; the product has to be stable first, then comes the performance.

My uptime is 99.99%. Other people say “All five nines,” but I say, “Hey, when the CFO or the CEO wants access and it's down, it doesn't matter what you're doing.”

Stability is very, very important. The first thing is stability, then performance. Performance is important because performance is everyday work. Stability is like, you say nowadays, “IT infrastructure has to be like air. You don't look for air, right?” You can automatically breathe it like that. Storage has to exist all the time. That's the main criteria on stability.

So far, I don't know the exact size that we have. I know we can add more storage. We just procured some more disk shelves to add. I don't know the limits. I probably need to go check out how large we can be.

Also, we're trying to keep our environment separated. That way, there's no contamination. There are also regulations and other things we have to worry about. If we're putting everything in one box, putting all the eggs in one basket, we need to be really careful about stability, performance, and making changes.

If we want to scale out in the future, I think the system is capable. We should not have problems; I hope that will happen.

We might have used technical support a little bit but most of the time, it is working, so I don't think we made any calls. I don't think we are using it. We're paying for it but we're not using it much.

Our vendor was good, they did the initial setup; they helped through the setup. If you set it up right the first time, you probably don't have to mess with it a lot. If it is stable, there isn’t much else to do.

We were previously using NetApp with spinning drives, and we were also using some of the EMC DMX.

Now, we are using NetApp exclusively.

Initial setup was pretty easy. I think it only took maybe half a day to do everything; put it in, power it, connect all the cables, configure it. I think we put it in production within like half a day; not difficult.

We did run the eval and our PoC through other vendors, other storage suppliers.

There were two other flash players, and we finally ended up going with NetApp All-Flash. The reason being the migration would be much easier. We added our existing cluster to the same cluster, so that we could do the migration whenever we are able to do it. We didn’t need a big downtime to migrate it.

Also, when we buy other technology, we have to have people to manage it. We need to decide whether, “OK, do I need to use the current talent pool to migrate to All-Flash, or bring in a new player where we have to support both?” It adds to the cost.

When we are selecting a vendor to work with, we look at whether they want to work according to our interest or according to the vendor’s interest, because we need to make sure they can support us in the long run; that they are reliable; and that they have good people who know the product and have a good attitude working with customers. Most of the technical knowledge and other things, you can acquire, but attitude is important.

If you are a NetApp customer and considering a new technology, you need to look at the additional cost of doing things or administrating another thing. If you are completely moving from NetApp to a new vendor altogether, can they do everything? Transitioning from one storage to another takes a long time. At the end of the day, your servers and other things, they don't have anything there, like transient, that you can replace any time. But when it comes to storage, your storage is important.

If you give me the storage, I can do pretty much everything. If your data is available, you can figure out how to reroute it or do things with that, but if your data is not there, you have servers, everything is useless; network. Everything is useless. I still see people invest a lot of money on networking. I say, “Look, if the storage is not available, you don't need network; you don't need servers.” You need to look at your storage; it’s very critical. It has to be stable, perform well and you need to be able to protect it. If those things are there, you can take the storage anywhere and make it work. If you don't have compute, Amazon EC2 can give you compute, Azure can give you compute, but you need to protect your storage.

The most valuable feature is the performance; the latency with our high-IO database systems.

It's made a huge difference. We've cut hours off our job times, simply by moving the storage and nothing else. We can finally meet our production deadlines for job times. We can shorten our work windows down because we can complete the jobs faster.

There are two area’s that I think NetApp needs to improve upon, pricing structure and support.

From a pricing perspective it’s just too complicated. With many other vendors it’s very easy to understand what you are paying for. A shelf of disk should just be 1 line item and the support for that shelf should be another. Recently we purchased an all flash FAS with 2 controllers and 1 shelf of disk (3 physical items); that invoice was 18 line items long. This makes it very difficult to create charge back/show back models.

The other area for improvement is support. When it comes to simple things like replacing failed drives, support is usually responsive. For everything else getting good support can be difficult. A particular pain point is responsiveness and regular communication. If the ticket isn’t opened as a p1, it can take several days before someone calls you back; and when they do we have to continually follow up with support on ticket’s status. If we open a ticket we obviously need help, so we expect at least a daily update on our ticket, even if that update is “no update.”

We have been using it for six months.

I haven't had a problem with stability. It's only been six months, but it's been pretty solid.

We haven't had to scale it yet, because we just put it in six months ago. Nonetheless, we did add it to an existing cluster and we’re able to move data over to it pretty seamlessly.

We haven’t had to use technical support yet.

We previously used the FAS8040s, with a mix of SAS and SATA flash pools.

We knew we needed to invest in the All Flash FAS or a similar solution by looking at our performance metrics and realizing that we were really struggling from an IO perspective. We just had more IO than our existing system could handle, and it was the next best option.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We went to a boot camp prior to doing the install. We had a pretty good understanding of how it all worked, so the implementation was pretty easy.

We only looked at NetApp for the all flash because we were already a NetApp customer. We weren't going to change vendors yet.

It was really easy to install, it was seamless to move the data over to it, and it's performing as we expected it to perform.

The vendor relationship is really important to us when selecting a vendor to work with. We're a good people company so for us being able to relate to our salesman and getting a good understanding of what our needs actually are was really important to us. From a technical level it all comes down to it's need to be reliable and we needed a solution that we didn't want to hire people just to manage it. It needs to be able to just setup and we need to be able to run and grow with it.

We switched over from an EMC array that didn't have dedupe. Now with the AFF model, we were able to do compression and deduplication across the board. I think it's like a 4-to-1 compression rate.

For example, we did probably about 20 TB of space and in the EMC side, it was about, I would say 70 TB but we're not even finished yet.

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

One of the things that we like is the sub-millisecond latency that we find, especially with SQL and Exchange. Everything's working faster than it did on our previous unit.

I would like to see them improve the GUI. It's not really AFF; it's across the board. The GUI is a little antiquated in my opinion. Looking at the other GUIs like the HP, which we've used, and also the Unisphere for EMC, they look a little bit snappier. The NetApp GUI looks a little old.

Also, the way you create storage, where you have to create a volume and then a LUN underneath it is kind of, in my opinion, a waste of time. If it could just do it in one shot, that would be easier.

We haven't had any stability issues, but we've only had the product for about two or three months. It's stable; so far, so good.

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

We recently moved from EMC to NetApp. We were pretty much running out of space on our current infrastructure for storage and we knew that we needed something else.

Initial setup was straightforward, but it was because we used professional services, to have somebody come in and let us drive as they guided us. The console is pretty basic, but the professional services answered all of our questions, which made it easier for us.

We did a bake-off with HP, NetApp and EMC, and picked the NetApp solution.

Pricing was a pretty big reason we chose NetApp, but it wasn't up-front pricing; it was pricing across the four or five years that we were going to keep the unit. We also chose them because of the amount of IOPS sent and the sub-millisecond latency requirement we had given them for performance metrics. Also, we were able to just add discs rather than add controllers, which we had to do with the HP and the EMC.

Generally, when we choose a vendor, we pretty much always go with Gartner because if we have the service, why not use it? NetApp is always up there, along with the other ones that I mentioned. That helped out a lot, along with the sales reps, of course. The technical team for both sides and the things that other customers say about it.

Definitely use professional services, because there are a lot of moving parts and they can guide you through the best practices. If you are going to do it, give your current performance metrics to NetApp or whoever else, so that they can see how much storage you're using, how much it would be if it went through the dedupe scenarios and also what your response time should be at the end of everything.

Snapshot, SnapMirror, FlexClone, and deduplication are features we use a lot of and which are valuable to us. We're also using light compression, which is a new thing on the AFF.

For us, it's brilliant to have all the functionality that NetApp gives you out the box. We've been a NetApp customer for 14 years and it's great now that we can get that on all-flash and have the performance to go alongside the functionality. We've always wanted that performance. The really good thing for us is we're already cluster-mode so we can just slide the AFF into the existing cluster and migrate all our data across relatively seamlessly.

For us it's about getting stuff on the website faster and more reliably. Currently our existing filers are struggling on the load. So it's all about performance really; it could have better performance.

We've been looking at it and talking about it for probably about three months. We've ordered it, and it's in the data center now. We've got the kit, it's just not in production. We'll hopefully deploy and put it into production this year.

We didn't have issues with deployment.

We expect it to be stable.

I think our experience has been a bit hit-and-miss. From a technical point of view, we were early adopters of clustered Data ONTAP and cDOT. We found that the support was limited on cDOT. We were using cDOT for the better part of three years and it's only now that it feels like the support team at NetApp has caught up. That was a challenge, and again there's been a lot of changes at NetApp around the sales side of the business and I think we've suffered a bit at the hands of that.

It should be straightforward because we know it; it should be straightforward.

To be honest, we spoke to a lot of people. We spoke to Tegile, XtremIO, Pure Storage, SolidFire, and Nutanix just to understand the market because it felt like the storage market had moved on quite a lot over the last three years. Clearly, with us being an NFS house, it's all we've used. It came down really to Tegile or NetApp.

We chose NetApp because it was an easier deployment for us because we already know it. We've got the skills. We know that it works and, I guess, NetApp has just got a bit more experience in the market. Their ability to execute is kind of a known for us.

It's interesting as in it's come down at a price-point now to where it's much more feasible than it was even two or three years ago, to go down the old-fashioned road. It doesn't mean necessarily it's the right thing to do, I don't think. I think it's important that as a customer you understand what your requirements are.