NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The features most valuable to us are--

• A-SIS deduplication
• vServer DR, which is a new feature in v8.3.1

The peak loads on a software install for VDI desktops now have lower latency. Previously, we had a 3240 with HDDs. For normal operation the HDDs with flash cache were fine, but for virus scans and software installations/patching, we would start at midnight and end at three or four am. However, sometimes at four deduplication operations would start and that runs concurrently with the installation that isn’t complete. So as a consequence, we had terrible latency until 11 or 12 so our users were unhappy with that situation. With the AFF, we have absolutely no problem at all.

It’s still new so the only thing I can think of is if the price for SSDs comes down and we can switch everything to flash, that would be an improvement.

I've used it for three years. We're currently running VDI on it with ONTAP.

We had an easy deployment because we have a VMware environment where we use vMotion from the old FAS to the new AFF.

Very stable, 100% uptime.

It scales to our needs.

8/10.

8/10.

We used FAS and we switched because of the above reasons.

It was straightforward.

We used a vendor team who were 10/10.

Straightforward.

The situation before was terrible; we had things to do and couldn’t. It was a high pressure situation. 3,000 people couldn’t work for four hours. Now they can start working on time.

No other options were evaluated.

It’s a good product, performs well and is easy to get up and running. If you need the speed, go for it.

Our primary use case is that we have two areas with AFF storage

We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great.

It has a really useful, friendly console.

The dedupe gives us more IOPS for more reliance equipment and better performance.

Two years.

It is really stable and trustworthy. The equipment is reliable. It doesn't break, so I can sleep at night. We don't have to worry that there is a problem with our equipment every week.

We haven't had any problems with the equipment. In two years, we have needed support twice.

We don't like the cost. We would like to buy more.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10. It is reliable and has good performance. Working with the product is a great experience.

We primarily utilize AFFs for engineering VDIs. We are utilizing it to host VDI and performance is the primary expectation from AFFs. We are satisfied with the product.

It's helping to leverage data. The storage is being utilized to implement larger, complex file sizes. That is how we are utilizing this product.

Speed is the most valuable feature. It is all-flash, so it is fast.

It simplifies since it is integrated with the other platforms as well. It's maintainable; it does not take too much to maintain the stuff. Creating users and sessions is easy on it.

It is a fast product, but NetApp could focus even more on the configuration.

Since the failure rate has been reduced, we haven't had any outages so far, or even P2s, on this solution. It has been impressive.

It's a fast product. It is exactly the same as other fast products; it is scalable.

We have more than 100 users utilizing the product concurrently. Concurrence is one parameter that we looked for, and AFF is satisfying that problem.

We have a premium support globally. NetApp has been promising on every front.

There was not much complexity involved. Since this was a new setup, migrations were not in order. So, it was pretty straightforward.

We tested it out against another solution and it worked out very well. Based on that, we took the decision to expand it further. 

It is working out well from a latency point of view, which is why we have opted for AFF. We are getting results.

Traditionally, we are limiting the number of our vendors. We still haven't ventured out to any other vendors. We have consistently been with NetApp.

Going forward, I would like to compare AFF vs Pure Storage based on all the parameters.

I would rate it a nine (with 10 being perfect). It is pretty impressive. I am holding back one for improvement in its scope.

This is the first time that we have implemented all-flash in one of our regions.

We are not utilizing it as a tiering solution.

We primarily use NetApp AFF for file storage and VMware.

Coming from a financial background, we are very dependent on performance. Using an all-flash solution, we have a performance guarantee that our applications are going to run fine, no matter how many IOPS we do.

We use NetApp for both SAN and NAS, and this solution has simplified our operations. Specifically, we use it for SAN on VMware, and all of our NFS storage is on NAS. They are unified in that it is the same physical box for both.

This solution has not helped us to leverage data in new ways.

Thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. This is one of the reasons that we purchased NetApp AFF. We almost always run it at seventy percent utilized, and we only purchase new physical storage when we reach the eighty or eighty-five percent mark.

I find that we do have better application response time, although it is not something that I can benchmark.

As a storage team, we are not worried about storage as a limiting factor. When other teams point out that storage might be an issue, we tell them that we've got the right tools to say that it is not.

I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror. They are one of the market leaders in this regard. It is a very solid platform that has been in the market for a while.

Technical support can be a little slow when it comes to escalating through levels of support.

We have had trouble with restoring applications, and if there is more support for application-aware backups then that would be great.

We have rarely had an issue where there was an outage. Whenever we have an issue, we can rely on NetApp support.

We are running in cluster mode, which is known for its scalability. I would say that it is good.

The technical support has been all right, but it takes a while to get a hold of the right person because you've got to go through the level one, level two support. But, after a while, you get the support that you need.

We do have experts within the company, so we only go to NetApp's support when we have a very serious issue that we need to work on.

Overall, it has been all right.

We have used NetApp for a very long time. Our reason for implementing AFF was that we wanted to go for an all-flash solution. We didn't want to keep using hard disks, but we still wanted to continue using SnapMirror and Snapshots. This was the way to do it.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward, at least for me. I've deployed NetApp before in my previous jobs, and it was easy with my experience. That said, it is not very complex.

We used Professional Services from one of NetApp's partners, Diversus, to assist with our deployment. Our experience with them as been good. They are one of the top NetApp partners in Sydney, Australia. 

We did not evaluate other options.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for customers who need absolute low latency and have low latency in their workloads. They need maximum performance in their virtualization and file storage environments.

We had some customers who were running virtualization workloads on classical spinning disks. We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower. Actually, most customers benefit from the improved latency and performance from the AFF systems.

Another important aspect of it is because we have customers who use SAN and NAS, they want only one system. This simplifies things by handling both the same way. You set up data protection, and it doesn't matter if it is SAN or NAS, you know the data is protected to a secondary system or to the cloud, wherever you want it to be.

A few customers are tiering out to their own S3 data center, not the cloud. For them, it has reduced their costs because they had an existing S3 solution. They just tier through that, then they need less space in the SSD tier.

The most valuable features are that it runs Data ONTAP, which is compatible with the whole Data Fabric, and its absolute performance.

Simplicity is a very key aspect of the system because you can configure everything with the System Manager. It does most of the complicated things behind your back, so you don't have to handle them. Since it integrates with the Data Fabric, it's very simple to set up a data protection scheme.

We have had customers asking about S3 support for a while now. I heard that is coming in one of the next versions. So, I would like to see S3 targeted support on the FAS system.

The stability of the AFF system is very high because it's running on ONTAP, and ONTAP is a proven operating system for about 20 years. So, it's very stable. We have thousands of systems with our customers and the AFF system inherits stability from the FAS system. We know it is stable. 

The scalability is great. The cluster scalability can be scaled out. The cluster can be scale out to up to 24 nodes. You can also scale them up if you add disks. So, scalability is not a problem. You can even scale it down if you need to, and we've also done this with a few customers. We can scale down the clusters later if the workload or requirements change. That is definitely one of the big plus points.

The technical support works well for us. We do the first level support for all our customers, so the customers call us. If we are ever in trouble and don't know how to respond to the support call, we can open the second level case with NetApp. That works very nicely. So, the customer is in good hands with us, and we are in good hands with NetApp.

We do the initial setup ourselves. We use the CLI, so we don't use the simplified methods because we have some special requirements most of the time. 

It definitely reduces costs because it simply takes less power to run these systems. While the SSDs don't take power, they are in general very big right now. So, the running cost has decreased for a lot of our customers.

The product is at least a nine (out of 10). I have been working with FAS systems for around 15 years. I've come to know how easy and reliable they are. They do what they are supposed to do, and they do it very well. Now, the AFF system is just the flash version, which does the same things, but faster. So, it's almost perfect.

VMware datastores over NFS for DL585 G7 hosts on a 10G switch.

NetApp FAS was unable to keep up with the I/O. A200 has performed without a problem.

Having separate storage virtual machines with completely different setups for NFS and Windows solves problems the FAS has when the domain controllers are unreachable.

The system commander web management is good, but it is easy to make bad configurations, and it takes a lot of jumping around to work a single issue.

Flexibility in some of our big things. We're constantly doing new projects or new directions in IT, because it obviously changes all the time. NetApp has been great working with us, being flexible on having to do migrations, if we want new solutions without taking any of our applications in our current systems down. That has been a good benefit. And they've grown over the years to get better at that.

For us, it's probably along the lines of keeping everything up and running, critical, 24/7. DR's been a big push for us over the past couple of years with the environment. Different things happen and you need to keep all of your critical systems up and running. All the new technologies that NetApp has come up with, helping us do that, has probably been of the biggest benefit for us. The flexibility and being able to change on the move.

Some of the applications have changed over the years. Their complexity was there before, but moving forward we've seen a few features being taken away in some of those applications, that we had grown to love. But that happens in any type of software. You get stagnant, you like a feature, change comes along. It can be a little bit difficult to do.

Very good. I don't know if I could say anything bad about it for stability. I've never had any issues.

Very good.

Personally, I have not used tech support, but guys on my team have used them. They've always been great. We have a special account manager who has helped us elevate critical cases if need be, and our sales team and all the people we work with there have always been available for us all the time.

We use it for our high demand applications. Mainly email, our critical systems, that is what we're using our all-flash array for, tiered storage. We have some non-flash, where we store archival data and things of that nature, but the flash is performant for our tier-one applications. We use it for book storage and file storage.

We've been an NetApp customer for nine years now, so as they've grown, we've grown with them and implemented any of their new solutions, software or hardware based. We've been a great customer.

If you want an all-around company that can meet your needs, whether it be scalability, performance, the software application availability to interact with your applications, NetApp is a great place. We've looked at other storage vendors over time. They didn't seem to have all of the pieces that NetApp can bring. Some storage vendors might have something you like a little bit better, but NetApp can bring it all together much better than others, and that's why we have stuck with them.

Reduced latencies, and the cluster data ONTAP, less down time, able to do upgrades, things like that, without much disruption.

I would say the consistency with the ONTAP versions and the speed and performance from the flash.

A shorter list of bug fixes would make it a 10 out of 10 for me. It looks like they're doing monthly releases now, so there are a lot more upgrades. It feels like a little too much, but we get to choose whether or not we need to pick that version or if we're going to wait. It's good not to have to wait four months for a patch.

With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade. The upgrades are very minimal. They've got the waiting period in between them, kills about 15 minutes of time. It'd be nice if that was streamlined a bit. I'm sure the engineers have that pause in there for a reason.

Normally good.

I think we've got an eight-node cluster right now, so it's meeting our needs.

It's been easy to tag nodes and scale out.

It's always been a good experience. I've never had any issues getting the right level of support.

Pretty straightforward.

I would say the primary use case for AFF is a combination of database and virtual servers. We have both block storage and file storage.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage, both before and after we purchased AFF, was top-notch. We are definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future based on our experience with AFF, due to its reliability, ease of administration, cost.

For us, reliability, cost, and just a good relationship are the most important criteria when selecting a vendor.

It's reliable, fast, low latency, and we haven't had any issues with it. It's been quality.