NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

ONTAP A3 was huge for me because it introduced non-disruptive upgrades, which is imperative in the retail business.

We have a lot of applications that utilize it, and it has ties for e-commerce. Anytime there's the slightest blip in availability, it’s noticeable across the entire enterprise. Upgrade and upware swaps are seamless.

The process for initial setup could be streamlined. I had a couple of instances that weren’t clear in terms of which direction I should go.

We’ve used it for one year now.

It's rock solid, we've only run into one small bug in the code. NetApp were very responsive in getting us to identify it, and providing us with a workaround. I have very little to do in management of FAS because it’s so stable.

We haven’t yet needed to scale. We only have two nodes, but I have plans to present to management for growth. I know it will be seamless in adding nodes in clusters. I’m not afraid to take it on because I know it’ll be easy.

They’re incredibly responsive. We found a bug in the virus scanner that was causing issue in our environment. They identified it and gave us workaround shortly which allowed us to stay online and productive until they provided fix with 8.3. We haven’t had a problem since.

It was mildly complex. At the time, I had very little experience with seven-mode, and we had some falste starts with getting cdot configured. But we used the seven-mode migration tool for 20 terrabytes of data in two days.

I’m in love with FAS series and am chomping at the bit to get my hands on all-flash

What are you waiting for? They’re easy and rock solid. cDot is a gamechanger. The ability to abstract everything into the virtual layer makes management easier and gives you tremendous flexibility. Makes my life much simpler.

We use it for data storage, applications, and CIFS shares.

Through its Cluster-Mode, it's quicker. It also improves Exchange and SQL Databases.

• Compaction
• Single-instance storage
• Its compression features

I am still trying to wrap my head around all its features.

The stability is solid. It doesn't fail on us, which is exactly what we want. We are in a critical business that we can't have any percentage of downtime. Therefore, if it stays up, that is what we want. We have been dependent on NetApp for almost a decade now.

For capacity of storage, we manage about three petabytes of data. It is exactly what we need in terms of scalability.

Technical support is first rate. We are very satisfied with it.

Our last solution was at end of life and warranty. We went from NetApp to NetApp, so we stayed with NetApp, but we move to the latest, greatest solution.

It's always a little bit complex when you're trying to integrate a new piece of hardware, with cluster mode as well. There's always a learning curve, but with that curve, there is knowledge which stays with me for the life of that technology. So, that learning curve is essential.

We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations. Fortunately now, we are on Cluster-Mode and don't have to do that again.

We used a combination of a reseller/consultant. They did a great job handholding us all the way for any type of issues that we had with mission critical data. E.g., multimillion dollar uptime everyday ensuring we had virtually no issues.

We have seen ROI, especially in terms of data points and availability.

We did not evaluate other solutions. Our history with Net App is that it is a stable platform and does what we want it to do. It's not extremely complicated, and it's something which is tangible that we have used and want to continue using.

Figuring out the basics as to what NetApp offers. It is not something that you can just dive into as you will need to have a bit of background knowledge of it. However, there is plenty of help out to to learn the technology, and it's very tangible. 

Give it a go. I would recommend it. We are very satisfied with it and the whole deployment of it. We have almost seamlessly transitioned our production environment into a completely new hardware environment on the back-end.

We use it for electronic medical record storage.

Because we use the production environment and copy down to test environments, we've taken it from days to hours.

• Speed
• Reliability

The next solution needs to simplify the day-to-day operations.

The stability is excellent. It's highly stable. We've just never really had a failure since we put it in. It's been two years.

There have been no issues of scalability, for our use.

Technical support has been very good. We use scripting called WFA, and we've had a little bit of an issue with that, going from the first generation to the second generation. But the actual hardware, product, and support itself have been excellent.

We were moving to a new data center, so we needed it.

The initial setup was complex. The fact that it has to interact with both IBMs - AIX - and with the Epic application, means there are three vendors in the mix.

We used an integrator, Sirius. Our experience with them was excellent. Sirius already knew the environment it was coming from, the reseller was an IBM flash storage environment. They brought it over to a NetApp flash environment.

There were really only two on the shortlist: IBM and NetApp. We chose NetApp because we had an opportunity to make all of our environment NetApp.

I definitely recommend it. It's very complex to set up. Everything is. Even though it's complex, NetApp, out of the other two options, would probably be the least complex.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had any failures in the production environment. The only issue, as I said, is that we've had some trouble with the scripting. Otherwise, we'd give it a ten.

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.

The most valuable features are that it's all flash and it's super fast. The only problem is, it's a little too fast in some situations. It's actually causing problems with our applications because it's too fast.

Other than that, it's great because it gives us enough IOPS to manage our whole system. Except for that one, it works great.

We're able to bring in a bunch of SANs together, into one solution, instead of having a bunch of separate ones. We had about two or three other ones we were using, and now we just use one.

It's as fast as it's going to be. The problem is the whole application somehow manages to eat up 450,000 IOPS, which is insane. It just has bursts of speed because it's programmed badly. We've been trying to fight with the vendor about that because that was originally why we went with the solution.

Other than that, I can't see any areas with room for improvement right now. I haven't used it for too long. It's only been a couple of months, because it's relatively new.

Stability hasn't been an issue at all. It's just been that one program, pretty much, lately.

Scalability hasn't come up yet. It's pretty nice because we're planning to expand on to an offsite location, as well, to have redundancy. Scalability seems pretty good.

We haven't yet needed to use NetApp technical support. We have gone with the vendor that sold us the NetApp. They've been helping us with it, when we have any questions. We haven't had to directly contact NetApp.

We were having performance issues with that specific application and we were trying to fix that. Then, once we moved, we came to the conclusion it wasn't the speed problems; it was the application itself. So now, we're trying to get them to fix it. It was actually more proof of that for them.

In general, when I choose a vendor, the important criteria that I look for in a vendor are cost and performance. That's what it comes down to: Who has the best prices? The most bang for your buck.

Initial setup seemed pretty straightforward. The vendor pretty much took care of most of it, but it was more of the implementation of the VMware. That's what we were working on, or what I was working on, anyway. It was fairly simple.

I think we looked at EMC a little bit, but I think they were too expensive. They were out of our price range, and we wanted to go all flash. That's pretty much why we chose NetApp.

Make sure all your applications aren't the problem with what you're trying to fix. There really weren't that many problems with it. It just worked. It works like any other SAN really; it's just really fast.

There’s probably more VMware-type issues that you might have to run into. I’d look into how to set up a lot of iSCSIs if you have a lot of databases. Other than that, it wasn't so bad.

What we like is the performance of the equipment. It's really much better than hybrid aggregate or machines with flash cache. We have been using the FAS series for a long time and it's still performing well. First we started with 7-Mode. Then we moved our databases to clustered data ONTAP. Today we have more than 24 nodes; we have a lot of machines working in cluster mode with all activities on site. It works perfectly.

We use an ONTAP cluster for the core Oracle DBs. The benefits are performance and the features we use, such as FlexClone to clone and restore the DBs everyday and to check if backups are properly done. These are great benefits.

In future releases, I would like to see improvements in performance. That's something that we always need. But the performance that we have right now is really good.

Also, I'd like more features related to All Flash FAS with OpenStack or All Flash FAS with Manila.

In terms of stability, it is much better than 7-Mode. In terms of stability and performance, it is a very good machine with very good improvements. The cache layers are warm and everything is solid state; the kickbacks are really fast; better than other solutions. It is really good.

We scale one or two controllers every year by adding an extra part to each cluster if we need it. Last year, we just bought a shelf, but in the previous years, we were increasing by one or two HA pairs per cluster; that's a lot for us. But, it's easy to scale. The most interesting thing we did is we moved volumes across the cluster without downtime and with a minimal performance impact. That's something that we couldn't do in the past with 7-Mode. So that's really good for the company. For a commerce company like ours, we can't support these functions with downtime; it must be while online.

Technical support is good, but it depends on the tool that you're using. In the past, we had troubles with DFM and we eliminated DFM from our infrastructure. Support for OpenStack, Cluster-Mode, and 7-Mode is really good. Because they have been doing it for many years. But in general, support from NetApp is really good.

We decided to switch to all flash because we needed better performance and lower latencies that are stable with higher IO. That's something that traditional arrays can’t do.

We normally set up our clusters ourselves. We request professional services from NetApp when we want to add new machines into the cluster. But for other tasks, such as to configure, generate reports, create the aggregates and move databases across the cluster, we don't need technical support. It’s relatively simple.

We tried SolidFire also and we liked it. But we don’t use it for Oracle, we use it for OpenStack. We also looked at other companies. For example, EMC, which is a good solution, but it's really expensive. If you compare it with NetApp, the performance is the same. When using NFS, the best is NetApp. For Oracle, we are using NFS. NetApp does not have a competitor for NFS.

It's an all-flash array and it integrates with the NAS solutions we use; that's a key part. We were looking at the different arrays. For example, SolidFire doesn't integrate with the NAS. Our solution mainly focuses on the NAS part of it, so we we're looking for a high-performance array. AFF basically is geared to those needs, apart from the base services which come with the NetApp product.

It has improved, in terms of latency and performance issues we were having on the spinning media; those will be gone. We can sell the customer what they need; all customers.

I haven't thought much about additional features or improvements. We’ve only been using the product for a short period of time; the main part is that it integrates with the NAS solutions and all the backups, SMVI, we would like to do. We're happy as of now.

Maybe thinking from my current problems or customers is why I can’t really think of anything. Maybe our environment is not as challenging as others. That could be a reason that we're not looking for extra things.

An example of something that is lacking, not necessarily for the AFF, as such, and that we might not have faced, is that in the FAS series, we were told about the faster 3200, if we get into an issue wherein it’s looking at a cluster interconnect, we need to basically replace some motherboard. Sometimes even doing a failover and give back wasn't even possible. We had to do a forced takeover and give back, and we basically corrupted couple of databases; it went to that extent. Hopefully, those are not issues in AFF. We haven't faced that yet but you never know until you actually use the product for a while.

Basically, they could do better in terms of software integration. There are a lot of features that, when we try to do it or, when NetApp tries to do it, they come across a lot of bugs which could affect us as customers.

Bugs need to be addressed at a much earlier level. There could be more QA done at NetApp itself before they get it out as a product.

We have been using it for three months.

We have not been using AFF for a long time, but the FAS series has been stable. We had issues with the 3200 series, wherein motherboards needed to be replaced under certain conditions, which we didn't like. We had to take some hits on that. Otherwise, if we go to the higher-end arrays, they're very stable.

There haven’t been that many issues. We do not have a lot of performance issues or demands, so we haven’t had many issues, in terms of scalability or performance.

We have used technical support. Whether it's a hardware or software issue, we do use it. We use it through a partner, if not directly with NetApp. They're helpful. It’s generally been a good experience with technical support.

We were previously using the FAS series with spinning media.

One of the key factors in our decision to move to a new solution was that NetApp was marketing it very well. We were running five-year-old hardware and we were about to do a tech refresh on them. We looked at spinning media, FAS and the AFF solution. AFF was making some sense cost-wise and performance-wise, so that's why we went to AFF.

We used professional services from another vendor for the initial setup, so we didn't feel it was that difficult.

The training for AFF was not difficult; it wasn't complicated.

We looked at Tintri for the VM piece of it. Finally, we went to the AFF.

In general, when I’m choosing a vendor, I look at what kind of products or aspects of the product we are looking for, whether they satisfy that or not, as well as performance. Third but not least is the cost, as well as how much difference it is from our current NetApp solution because our staff needs to be trained on that.

It does integrate; if you know the FAS series platform, it's not much different if you know CDOT. It's not much different doing implementation.

Determine which volumes need to go where; do that preparation from the customer’s perspective: how they want to use the product rather than how to deploy a product.