NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

For sure, the most valuable features are the compression and dedupe on there. We gain so much more back than we thought we were going to get; that was one of the biggest things. I don't have to worry about any kind of disk utilization problems because of the spindles or anything; that's what we've always experienced.

We shrunk our footprint and get a lot more power for the same thing; makes it simple.

I would like to see compaction, the new feature in ONTAP 9. We haven't gotten that yet. We just got everything to CDOT.

Stability’s great. I have zero worries, unlike the 6080s; that thing was unstable as heck. This thing's great.

I like the scalability, too, because the footprint is small. You just add shelves, add to it, swap it out.

We've called technical support many times. It's good. We're very hands-on in our organization, so the first level usually isn't that helpful. We usually give them about five or 10 minutes to work on it, then we say, “OK, let's escalate this; let's not spend an hour here”, but they're always helpful. It's just a matter of the first level being the first level; they don't have the insight to do any more.

We knew we needed to invest in the All Flash FAS because we were on 6200 series with 300 GB drives. We were very obsolete and we didn't want to go to a large platform, so we went to that. The price point was easy because they priced it so cheap.

I was involved with the initial setup; did the whole thing. We build it, from the time they ship it. Once they get it to us, I take care of everything; networks, the whole nine yards. It’s straightforward. It's very easy, but of course we've been doing this for years, so it could be complex and we wouldn't care.

The price keeps coming down and it's going to keep coming down.

I did not evaluate other options; that was it.

It depends on their feature set. If they just need a niche product, they may want to go to a different platform; not that they need to, but they could consider that. If they're looking for something that covers everything, then the All Flash FAS will be enough.

All of it's pretty simple. All the feature sets are very straightforward to me, coming from the FAS environment.

I have given it a perfect rating because it's easy. Nothing's wrong with it. I don't have any problems. It's easy to set up. I'm good to go. I don't have any issues with it. It's very easy to use.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that they consider our needs instead of trying to shove something down our throat.

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.

I primarily use the solution for asically all my main data for all my ESXi hosts.

The product suffices and works.

The product is scalable.

The stability has been very good over the years. 

Technical support has been okay.

This particular solution is coming up at its end of life.

During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing. There's a learning curve. There are simpler options available. 

I have been using the solution for seven years, although I am in the process of switching off of it right now.

The stability and performance over the years have been good. In the seven years I've had it, it has totally crashed twice on me. The stability is pretty damn good. You have to admit that.

The scalability is okay. You can scale it if you need to. 

Currently, we have 70 users on it. 

Their tech support is okay.  When I have issues like what I had, I usually just reach right out to my sales rep and they direct me in the right direction.

I just switched over to Pure, so my flash storage is more than adequate now.

However, previous to this solution, we did not use a different product.

In terms of the initial setup, you need to know what you're doing with it. That's another reason why I'm going over to Pure. It's much simpler.

I'm not impressed with their pricing.

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I've got kind of a unique situation happening right now. I've got a NetApp DS2250 that's starting to fail - or started to fail about four months ago. I ordered the Pure Storage, and I got it in, cutting all the in-between stuff out. I was waiting for some 10 Gig switches to come in from Cisco, however, with a chip shortage, everything has been delayed. I'm still not getting those in until September. Pure Storage is not actually up and running. I'm limping along with my NetApp right now.

My advice to those considering the solution is to know what you are doing before you get started. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. I don't like the pricing and you do need to know what you are doing to use the product effectively, however, the stability is excellent. 

We use it for different machines, Oracle Database, super server database, and a few BDI projects.

The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments.

The admin tools and the integration with other products and clouds can be improved. 

It should also be easier to identify and troubleshoot problems in this solution. It takes a long time, and it should be improved.

I have been using this solution since 2012.

Its stability is very good.

It is scalable. There is scalability for processing. We have small and large organizations as clients.

Their technical support is very good, and the documentation is also complete and useful for us.

Our clients were using other solutions, such as Hitachi, and they switched because of its scalability, functionality, and support.

The cloud setup is easier to implement. The on-premises setup is a little more complex.

We deployed it a few weeks ago. It took one to two weeks for planning and two weeks for final implementation, but it can take longer if there is any kind of migration or change of product.

We deployed it ourselves. We worked for NetApp from 2012 to 2015. We did a lot of implementations in Chile, Argentina, Columbia, and Peru. It is very familiar to us.

All features are included in the license, whereas with an EMC solution, you have to pay separately for extra terabytes. 

We evaluated HP and EMC. The main differences were the support, functionality, and cost of NetApp. 

Last year, NetApp started to move away from Chile and the Latin American region. They are not selling the solutions directly. They have an agreement with Lenovo to sell NetApp products worldwide with the Lenovo brand.

I would advise others to take the help of a good implementor and get proper certifications. It is also very important to understand what do you want from the solution.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. It is a great product with great support.

Our primary use case for NetApp AFF is unstructured data. We set up it up for high availability and minimum downtime.

This solution simplifies our IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments. We are using it on the fiber channel side, as well as the iSCSI side, for both CIFS and NFS, so it across the entire infrastructure.

We have used NetApp AFF to large move amounts of data. We just recently did a migration using SnapMirror and SVM DR. We did have some scheduled downtime, but there was no unplanned disruption in service.

Even with this solution implemented, I still have to manage the storage side and the availability of it, so we still have to worry about it being a limiting factor.

The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support.

This is a very reliable solution in terms of keeping the system online.

This solution should be made easier to deploy. A lot of systems nowadays just come with a box where everything is included. With AFF, you have to manage it, you have to install ONTAP, and you have to configure the networking.

The stability is good. This is a very reliable solution.

It can be set up as a cluster, HA, and when one node goes down the others hold the data, so the customer barely notices that there is a failover.

I would rate the scalability an eight or nine out of ten.

We can grow this solution very easily, just by adding storage. All we need to do is buy a shelf and expand the storage side of it.

I would rate the customer support an eight out of ten. They are really good in terms of responding to the customer.

We have a large amount of unstructured data, so we felt that AFF was the right solution for us.

In terms of complexity, the initial setup is somewhere in the middle. It is not straightforward where you can run it out of the box. You have to set it up and configure the network. 

We had a jumpstart, but I can handle the installation on my own.

We have not seen ROI so far.

We did consider using other vendors, but NetApp AFF was the best in terms of reliability.

In order to automatically tier cold data to the cloud, you would have to use third-party software.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have deployed NetApp AFF with four nodes; two of these are in our primary data center, and the remaining two are in the second data center. We are using Cluster Mode configurations.

Our organization has improved because this solution provides a Highly Available storage system with DR configurations, deployed across two data centers.

The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy. The High Availability and Cluster-mode Setup are also very useful.

I would like to see an improvement in the High Availability of the NFS and CIFS sharing during upgrade and patching; this would help to avoid downtime.

It's, mainly it's for storage, we have various databases with different applications and we are using it just for storage, mainly as just a storage for our systems.

A while ago, they performed slowly, but now they are quite fast. 

I think the major thing to improve is in terms of the implementation, especially where that technology is implemented for the first time. Be sure the partners are well aware in terms of what needs to be done from the moment the sale is initiated, or a purchase order is provided, to the point of being implemented.

I think it is a very stable product.

Implementation was not easy.

When evaluating a possible solution, I look for:

• Technical Capabilities
• Scalability
• Cost
  

Always consider whether you can afford the solution.

We also looked at IBM and EMC, but eventually we chose NetApp AFF because we already had people experienced with NetApp AFF. We did not want to invest in new technology completely.

Make sure that you are very clear in terms of what you want to buy. Your specifications have to be very clear, so there are no gray areas. From there, it`s up to which vendor provides you with the right proposal, and if its cost-effective go for it.

Scalability, really, for us. We have a lot of customers who purchase other companies and they need scalability; the NetApp solutions really lend themselves to that. 

I think for us the pricing point was pretty important too. In Australia, we find that selling solutions now, the features and functions are one thing, but the price point is pretty important as well, and NetApp provides a good price point.

There is a variety of features and benefits to customers using this solution. A lot of our customers are coming over from EMC, and the integration with cloud is pretty important to them. NetApp has a lot of roadmaps on cloud inspiration. That's important to them. That's one of the reasons I'm here, to understand more about the cloud inspiration, and having those on-site/off-site features. A lot of people are now looking at cloud. There are a lot of hardware solutions that are coming up, and NetApp really lends itself to them.

I don't really know. After this conference, maybe I'll have an idea of other features that I'd like to see, but at the moment the features provided are adequate for the customers' needs.

I don't give a 10, or a nine out of 10, straight off the bat. I'd like to work more with it before I can give it a better rating.

Probably about two or three months.

So far, no issues at all.

Most of the companies we do solutions for acquire other companies, so it's important to them at the beginning to know that, even though they don't know what their sizing is going to be like for the next three to four years, if they do purchase companies and a lot of data comes on board, the solution is easily scalable.

I think I did one call with tech support and it was pretty quick. They got me the right answer immediately and I think the call was closed within one day.

I've actually shadowed a NetApp consultant and it looked to be straightforward. I can't wait to do my own in the future.

EMC, we do a lot of Celerra and VNX implementations; HPE EDS, and Hitachi.

My experience so far, compared to other solutions, All Flash FAS has been pretty good. I think the documentation in NetApp is pretty good. I think the interface and your working tools are pretty good, compared to some of the other vendors where, with them, it gets complicated. I think other vendors have add-on components to their solutions. NetApp's seems to be native. Those are great benefits to us.

The way my company integrates with customers is our sales force checks with the customers, they decide on a solution and then it gets passed over to technical, which I'm part of. We inherit the solution and then we try to make the best of it. We do give our sales boys a lot of pros and cons for each type of vendor.

I suppose that's where the sales guy, when he has his initial discussions, works out a technical solution for the customer at a high level and then also works out a price point.

I'd say the price point's an important factor. I think a lot of solutions provide similar functionality and I think that the edge would really be the price point, for us. 

Sometimes the customer has had a relationship with another vendor and they get to a point where they'd like to move over to something new, because of support issues, or there might be some kind of issue with their sales rep. Lots of factors sometimes influence them. That's why it's important for our sales force to exactly understand what the issues are.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor start with, "Is it going to work for the customer?" We'd like to do best-of-breed for customers and we don't like to just push a solution down because of any relationship with the vendor. It must work for the customer. 

So far, NetApp solutions that we have put together have worked for the customer. It is sometimes hard to get NetApp into a customer when they have another vendor, like EMC. It's hard to push the other vendor out, because not only the storage but there are also other parts that the customer sometimes aligns to a certain vendor, so it is hard to push it.

Do good research. Make sure that the customer doesn't have any pre-existing relationships that might deter them from going to another vendor; that's really important. Sit down with the customer and go through the pros and cons of it. Sometimes it's good to point out the cons as well, so that they understand those and not realize those six months or a year down the track.

I've had a really good experience. It's pretty straightforward. It meets the customers' requirements. The price point is really good. But I'm going to reserve the 10 out of 10 until I get a bit deeper into it.