NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

As far as our VDI environment goes, it's allowed us to exponentially expand it. We've gone from essentially a trial project to a full-out deployment, corporation-wide, for VDI. It's allowed us to facilitate that quite well.

For example, the bottleneck for speed was one. We’ve tried out some different solutions. We've got some Pure technology in there and we have a couple of other vendors. We've done a lot of business with NetApp over the years. We've kind of decided to stick with them for a while.

We're changing over all of our older models to the new FAS stuff, the AFF especially, because we want high performance, high availability for VDI environments. We're having some pretty severe bottlenecks on spinning disk with VDI, of course. We're changing over almost all of our sites to the AFF to get the performance that we need for the VDI environment.

I would give it a higher rating if they would work a bit on the interface and similar items, especially the metrics that it has displayed, improvement on those, maybe a little bit more historical, maybe have some additional metrics on the graphs and stuff on that.

Otherwise, it's a fantastic product. I'm quite happy with it now. It would have been nice if they would have jumped on the bandwagon a little earlier with flash but hindsight...

Actually, they've already improved it quite a bit; the 7-mode to cluster-mode migration, which they've worked significantly on. We actually have one coming up sometime in the next couple of months for one of our sites, 7-mode to cluster-mode. We were originally anticipating that it would involve a significant amount of downtime. Now, we're at the point where they're assuring us there's no downtime.

With some of the older technology, we have had stability issues; with the NetApp technology. With these new AFFs, they've been rock solid.

We frequently use technical support. They're great. Our SE's fantastic. He comes out all the time, helps us out. We've got a couple of other people that we have on speed dial that will come out and give us a hand when we require it; have issues setting up, making significant changes or anything like that.

Most of the time, investing in the AFF was a result of upgrading our current technology of stuff that we have in there, whether it be older NetApp stuff that we're replacing with a new AFF, or a need presents itself, such as a new project that we would have to look at. We don't have a policy of always having the newest technology in here, immediately; it's project-based or replacement based.

We've been with NetApp before I got to the company. They've been with NetApp for a while and I worked with NetApp in previous companies as well.

When I’m choosing a vendor like NetApp, I look at the support and how the company treats us as a customer. We don't want a company that's just going to sell us a nice, great big box, bow-wrapped, and then never speaks to us again. With NetApp, we've had a lot of continuity with, not only the SEs but, the sales staff and so on. They continually come in and make sure that we're good; checking to see if we have any projects that are coming up; checking to see if we have any problems that we need to solve with them; being very proactive and so on. Some of the other vendors that we've tried out have been, sort of, "Okay, it's in, thank you."

I don't get involved with the pricing, so I'm not familiar with that. I know it's a pretty penny, but I'm not familiar with that.

Depending on what the project is, I'd definitely tell someone looking asking me for advice to take a look at NetApp. Although NetApp is a great product, it doesn't fit every single solution, the different sizes. NetApp is a little more on the expensive side, so it'd just have to fit whatever that they're trying to do, whatever their company is. I'd probably tell them to take a look at what's out there, what would fit them, but I would give a good nod to NetApp. They've always done us quite well.

When I’m looking at a vendor to work with, I'll be blunt: I don't want to worry about it. I don't have to deal with it. I don't want to work with it a whole lot. I'd like it to be, "I have a use for it and I want it to do that". I don't want to have to do a lot of configuration, tweaking or perpetual updates and patches. NetApp, specifically, was very, very good about one-time patches, no-downtime patches. They work well from a it-just-works standpoint. I can't always say that about all my vendors.

There is room for improvement in the migration step. The no-copy copy has a lot of caveats. We felt like they weren't brought up early in the process. They were gotchas as we moved through the process. None of them were earth shattering or show stopping, but they often resulted in another night of work, another evening worth of work, or we had to shut down this over the weekend to make this happen, that we weren’t really planning on. That would be the change, but that's just at this point.

These setup hangups are why I’m not giving it a perfect rating. It’s close to being perfect, but I am going to have to round down in this situation.

For more detail:

We had a head fail – fortunately everything failed over as expected, but obviously having a system that’s less than 4 months old fail is hard.

Post hardware repair the new head needed a manual intervention to get all of its firmware where it needed to be, which did cause a downtime for CIFS users. We were able to schedule for after hours, but downtime is not something we ever really want in our storage systems.

So far, it is a stable solution. We haven’t had it that particularly long. We haven't had many issues with it.

It’s met our scaling needs.

Data is growing everywhere, so we’ll work with the data we’ve picked up and it will help us for the next calendar year. I fully expect we'll need to add more more shelves within a year.

Technical support is excellent. They are very responsive to our questions. As I’ve mentioned, we did a 7-mode cluster transition; there was a lot of learning on our side and they have been very patient with keeping us informed, getting us up to date on what we need to do on the storage side end.

We're still in the VMware environment but we moved from an old 7-mode cluster using old SAS drives to a new all-flash pool, mostly for performance purposes. We had some expectations and we're blown away. They all paid off, to the point the users actually saw big changes as well. We knew we'd see things on the back end, but we weren’t sure they would trickle down to the end user.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex. We used their tool that provides a no-file-copy copy. The goal was to switch all of our existing shelves to our totally new heads. It was sold as being fairly painless, no-change process. In practice, there were a fair number of changes, a fair number of tweaks, but that's from a purely time perspective. The amount of time it would have taken us to actually copy the data was nothing compared to the hour of downtime that we actually had to do the head shelf. From that perspective, from a user’s perspective, everything paid off quite well. From the admin side, there was a little bit more work than just turning off a switch and flipping a switch.

The speed and stability are the two most valuable features. I've definitely have seen a huge increase in speed and bandwidth from when we've put it in production; it's been great.

We use a lot of bandwidth in our company, so user experience is really improved because of that. The IOPS are high enough that there's no latency anymore.

I’d just like to see them continue down the road of increased storage capabilities, bigger SSDs, and bigger flash. That's a problem for us; we use a lot of storage, PBs of storage. We definitely need to keep leveraging, expanding and increasing.

I haven’t rated it higher because we haven't had it enough to vet it. So far, it's been great; haven't had any issues at all with it. Then again, we've only had it in production for a few months. We just need more experience with it.

We have been using it for 6-9 months.

Since we've had it in the last 6-9 months, we’ve not had a problem at all with it. It's been great.

We haven't really scaled it yet. From what I've seen, it looks like it won't be a problem if we need to go down that road.

We have not had to use technical support yet thankfully, other than original installation.

Before we implemented the All-Flash FAS, we had, and still have, a mixed environment of mostly Hitachi and Dot Hill. We also have LTO tape storage that we implement. I'm all over the board.

Even though I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS, we selected NetApp and the All-Flash FAS because of the speed of the flash, the reliability and the stability; it stays up.

Initial setup was just racking and stacking, basically; that was about it. Rack and stack is very straightforward; we had help from technical support to cable it. From that point on, it was pretty easy.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process, so I'm not sure who else we were looking at, at the time.

I would definitely recommend it. I think it's a great road to go down. Like I’ve mentioned, I haven't had any problems with it. The two things we were looking for, it does excellently.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are availability and knowledge: if something helps me go down the right path and pick it, if someone gives the pros and cons for everything we need, and be able to get a hold of them when I need to get a hold of them.

It uses multiple protocols and has all the implementation protocols that other products do not. We use CIFS.

We needed something faster than NFC, and we now have a 30 second latency, down from 60 seconds.

It’s too early to know the features exactly, as we get what we need. We do need, however, more training, which NetApp wasn't able to provide.

We have two devices, and have been using them for two weeks so far. We use it for VDI and Citrix. At the moment we are thinking of putting other workloads onto them.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable and we've had no stability issues.

It scales as we can just plug in more devices.

Customer service is great.

No matter the time of day or night, technical support will always try to help.

We ran VDI on EMC for five years, and it ran out of performance so we had to offload. We then decided to turn to NetApp AFF.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy, but we had a few problems implementing the devices due to a lack of training and the fact that it was a very urgent implementation.

We had great support from NetApp, but we did not do too much training. We have good knowledge of NetApp cDot. It took us a few days to install and configure.

We looked at XtremIO, Dell, Pure Storage, and Nutanix. We already have a NetApp environment, so it met our needs, and it was an urgent decision. There was no option, and we didn’t want to change back to block storage.

• Clustered Data ONTAP
• Snapshot implementation for SAP

It allows us to shrink the maintenance windows and downtime. It provides faster replications between systems because of the installed flash.

ONTAP has a lot of features that are really great, so I don’t think there is something missing that I'd like to have.

However, the best way to improve would be to have better management over the solutions globally (not a part of the software OnCommand, VFA, etc. installed). It would be great to combine all the software solutions together under a single GUI and people can just activate different features as they buy a license as apposed new installs each time.

We've been using it for four months in a multiple system environment with a lot of small writes. This was installed for an SAP HANA system as the persistency layer.

There has been no downtime yet -- perfect stability.

It scales to our needs.

10/10

We didn't have anything similar in use previously.

It's a straightforward and easy setup. It was guided and we had the documents to install it. It took around two days of racking, stacking, and installation.

I did the implementation myself.

We looked also looked at EF from NetApp and chose AFF because of the snapshot technology.

It's definitely worth it if you need the speed.

We are using it for storage.

Before, retrieving data or searching for something on the application would take some time. But since we migrated to NetApp, retrieving of the data happens quickly. It's fast.

In addition, we can easily manage the volumes on the NetApp application. We are getting very good, high performance and it has simplified our data management jobs, such as creating volumes. If our hard drive fails, we can reinitialize the process, and do many other things. It's very helpful.

NetApp has helped to reduce support issues due to performance or troubleshooting as we do not have such issues. We have not faced any performance issues since installing this device.

In addition, the ONTAP data management software has simplified our operations. We use it for high-availability of our file system. If any hard drive goes down, it will automatically be recovered.

We use NetApp AFF to support cloud integration and SAP Oracle. It has made the Oracle WebLogic site very fast and we can deploy the machines very easily. We can assign storage to the server visually, and use it to manage the storage.

The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive.

Also, NetApp AFF helps simplify data management with unified data services across SAN and NAS environments.

I have been using the NetApp AFF A400 system for the last three months.

We have had no issues with its stability. It has been up 100 percent of the time since we installed it.

We can increase the storage if needed.

Currently, 60 percent of our storage is in NetApp. Another 20 percent is in HPE, and we use Synology storage for the NAS.

Their support is very good. Whenever I have contacted them, whoever has dealt with me has been good.

But the cost of support is quite high.

Positive

Our HPE system was old so we switched to a new one.

The deployment was not complex, but it was done by our vendor team. Still, it was easy. It was not a big deal.

Our experience with our vendor team was good. They are quite a good technical team with good knowledge.

We only installed it three months ago so it's too soon to talk about ROI.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost. The cost is very high compared to other devices. The HPE storage we used before was less expensive. NetApp is also more expensive than Dell EMC.

We evaluated Dell EMC and HPE storage.

The NetApp interface was very easy, as was managing things. Our experience with HPE, which we used before, was that it was quite a complex system to manage when it comes to the storage and volumes.

We use NetApp AFF to support our VMware environment.

We have been happy with the performance and it has not given us any issues.

I like the simplicity of data protection and data management. We use snapshots for our FAS recovery, and we use SnapVault for our backups.

NetApp definitely simplifies our IT operations by unifying services. We only use this solution on-premises, but with NAS, we don't need Microsoft Windows to create a share. It's all on our NetApp platform. I like it because we do not have to switch.

I wouldn't say that we have reallocated resources that were previously dedicated to storage operations, although it does give us time to do other things.

We have used NetApp to move large amounts of data between data centers. It has made it easier for us, and RPOs are shorter because of it.

With respect to the response time for applications, I can definitely say that it has improved, although we have not done any benchmarking. I perceive the improvement through monitoring the applications.

This solution is pretty expensive, so I'm not sure whether it has reduced our data center costs.

NetApp has helped eliminate storage as a limiting factor in our business. My customers are happier because they have no issues with performance or accessing their data.

The most valuable feature is the ease of management. You just set it and you don't have to worry about it.

During a maintenance cycle, there are outages for NAS. There is a small timeout when there is a failover from one node to another, and some applications are sensitive to that.

We are in the process of swapping our main controller, and there is no easy way to migrate the data without doing a volume move. I would like a better way to swap hardware.

Technical support could use some improvement.

Stability is very good, although we do have some NAS outages during maintenance.

Overall, I like the scalability. It can do NAS, CIFS, and fiber channel all in one box and it's easy to manage.

I would say that the technical support is hit or miss. Sometimes you get somebody good, but other times, you have to just escalate a couple of times to get the right person.

Our previous solution was spinning disk, and our application demands more in terms of storage and performance. NetApp AFF just seemed like the natural route because we didn't want to get left behind.

One of the reasons we like this solution is that all of the features are included with the one license. For example, we can use NFS, CIFS, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, etc. It's all included in the package and we don't have to pick and choose.

We purchased the license for a five-year term.

We evaluated other options, including solutions by EMC, before choosing NetApp. The reason for our choice is that we already had NetApp in our environment, and the price-point is also a little better than the competing products.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to test and compare all of the products. Overall, I think that AFF is a solid store system and it's very easy to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.