NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup. 

NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications. 

I have been working with the solution for more than five years. 

NetApp AFF is scalable. 

NetApp AFF has good technical support. 

Positive

We chose NetApp AFF because it is flexible and reliable. It offers a unified storage system. 

NetApp AFF's deployment is straightforward. You can deploy it within half a day. 

NetApp AFF's pricing is competitive. It is not expensive or cheap. The tool's pricing is based on configurations and can cost around 150-160 dollars for 70 TB of storage. 

We recommend the solution to small, mid, and enterprise companies. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for in-house data.

The simplicity around data protection and data management is good with the snapshots and then being able to lock them up. We can conserve the data for our space and then set the layers that we set with the administration. It's very feasible.

Our data staff is smaller than it was because it's easier to manage in one portal. We have moved several employees into different departments.

The IT operations have been simplified through the unification of data services because we have just one window where we can manage it all.

With regard to application response time, I can say that the speed increase is substantially noticeable, but I do not have any numbers. It is probably twice as fast as it was.

I know that the data center costs have been reduced because we have fewer people managing the data, but I do not know by how much.

This solution has lessened our concern about storage as a limiting factor. It comes down to the easy manageability, the deduplication, and the compaction. Our volumes aren't growing as fast as they were.

The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability.

The deduplicate process is performed in the cache before it goes to storage, which means that we don't use as much storage.

The versatility of NetApp is what makes it really nice.

The certification classes are good, but they don't cover enough of the material, and the exams only test on what is covered in class. When I leave those classes, I only feel half-full. I have to do so much research and I'm trying to get the data for my tasks, and it's a little complicated at times.

The NetApp AFF is very stable and we haven't had any issues.

From what I can't tell, this solution is very scalable.

The NetApp technical support is very good. They have the website and they have the forums where you can get questions answered. You can get a lot of things answered without even talking to anybody.

Prior to NetApp AFF, we were using an HPE Storage solution. It was a little more difficult to swap out the drives on the XP series. You have to shut down the drive and then wait for a prompt to remove it. It's a long process and if somebody pulls it out hot and puts another one in then you're going to have to do a complete rebuild. It is not as robust or stable when you are swapping parts.

NetApp is very easy to set up.

All of the solutions by different vendors have setup wizards but with NetApp, it walks you through the steps and it is easy. It has NAS, CIFS, NFS, and block, all at once. Building the lines and going through is done step-by-step. With other vendors like EMC, you have to get a separate filer. There are a lot more questions that have to be asked on the front end.

NetApp also talks seamlessly with VMware, and most people are on VMware.  

We performed the implementation.

Our shortlist of vendors included EMC, NetApp, and HPE, because we have relationships with all of them. Ultimately, NetApp gives us more versatility.

This is my favorite storage platform.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 use it in the healthcare industry.

It's helped with latency. It has improved our job flows.

It's fast and reliable.

I would like to see more functionality with the external software, SnapCenter. There should also be more integration with the flash side of things. But overall, it's been pretty good.

My impression of the stability is that it's good. 

It's pretty scalable. When you add more to the environment it helps things, overall.

Technical support has been really good. NetApp support has been really helpful. We have a SAM that we use as well, and he helps us with issues that come up, bugs, etc.

We were pushing what we had too far on performance. It wasn't so good, so that's when we looked at All Flash.

It was really straightforward, for the most part. We were used to working with FAS already and this is just adding All Flash and SSD to the mix. It's a lot of the same standards we had already.

For the installation and configuration, we've done the recent ones directly through NetApp. Our experience with them has been positive.

We'll have the solid-state drives around longer so we won't be turning over controllers or disk as fast.

Our shortlist was really just NetApp, in our situation. We're pretty much all NetApp. We didn't evaluate anything else for this particular project.

I would recommend NetApp.

I rate it at nine out of ten, and close to a ten. We've been pretty happy with the All Flash.

We are mostly using it for NAS, CIFS, and NFS protocols.

Logical data might be very high, but the physical data, because of efficiency features (such as, dedupe, compression, etc.), has been greatly reduce data. Therefore, we are getting 10 to 20 times the efficiency on this product.

Data efficiency is the most valuable feature of NetApp.

I would like to see aggregate level encryption in the next release. This is critical.

Disk level encryption is already in the solution, but it is very costly. Its pricing should come down.

It is stable.

It is scalable. On the NFS side, we have around 24 nodes, so that is pretty scalable. Also, the scale up is very high.

Technical support is always great from NetApp. It is the best.

We were not previously using another solution.

The initial setup is very easy.

We have seen ROI from the product.

We were looking at NetApp and Dell EMC. However, NetApp is know for their NFS solution.

This is the best solution in the market.

NetApp is a good company. I use to work there.

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.

Our use case is really just our Exchange environment right now. In terms of block or file storage, we present it to VMware and then present it off as RDM's to the virtual servers. Our AFF is not currently part of a cluster together with other NetApp FAS systems.

Because of all the inline deduplication and the integration with SnapManager, it allows us to set the storage and forget it with the Exchange team. They do all the restores through the Snap Single Mailbox Restore.

And it's quick, it's fast, even though IO is not huge for the Exchange environment, it's still nice to have that speed for when they do have that need.

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Its integration with SnapManager products, really, is the main reason that we've stuck with it. Without having that integration it wouldn't allow our Exchange team to operate without us.

For us, probably the best feature would be an ONTAP-as-a-whole feature, the fabric pulling directly to cloud with unaccessed blocks over time. For us that would be the feature to revolutionize where NetApp stands, and bridge their connection with the cloud. It's actually a feature that they're introducing now, it's just not mature.

Right now you're only aging snapshots up to the cloud, and only if the aggregate is at 50% or more. It would be cool if the feature was that the fabric pulled just aged/unaged blocks. Who cares if a block is still there or not after it hasn't been accessed in three years? Just age it up to the cloud, if suddenly I need it just pull it back.

That should be automatic without extra things. You could use FPolicy to do it one way or you could do it a different way. But if that was just in the array and part of the normal hybrid flash pull array with the fabric pull on the end, to get rid of that extra old data.

It's really stable, in our experiences, this stuff has been pretty rock solid.

We haven't had to deal with scaling yet.

I use NetApp's tech support all the time. I actually think they've done a great thing - the introduction of chat support has been really great.

Increasing hours for that would probably be good because it's easier to be on a chat call and be troubleshooting with something. Sometimes a lot can be lost on a phone call.

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

We've been a NetApp customer for a while so we've used disk-based and hybrid storage from them.

We use Nimble for our primary VMware storage right now. We haven't switched that back to NetApp yet. We're going to see how the next few years go and then we'll figure out from there.

We were using Exchange, we were using NetApp storage before, and we knew the SnapManager products were a huge part of that. And when you couldn't get the same functionality out of trying different things with different vendors, you don't want to beat your head against the wall reinventing the wheel with what you're doing. It was a natural progression for us.

It was pretty straightforward. Our need and setup for it wasn't crazy.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage before and after we purchased AFF was good. For our primary VMware storage, before, we went with a different vendor for a little while. Then we pulled back to NetApp for this, because of the ease of functionality and ease of use relationship with ONTAP.

Based on our experiences with AFF we are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future because of its reliability. We've tried out other vendors, and we might end up going back to NetApp for those solutions, given our different experiences.

When selecting a vendor to work the most important criteria for me would have to be:

• Support - To me, that's the most important. Being an engineer, you have to rely on the support people to know what they're doing.
• Ease of use, what you're familiar with, obviously - NetApp has a big community out there so it's easy to look up other stuff, and to find other opinions, and work with the information that's available, in the information age that we are in. In some cases you might find other solutions compared to when you call support. Support is down to looking through the same thing you are.

As for advice I would give to a colleague in a different company who's looking at AFF and other similar solutions, it depends on how they support their Exchange environment. But if they were willing to pay for the SnapManager and the Single Mailbox Restore suite, it's really hard to beat what NetApp has done with it. If you set up everything properly, and restores are pretty much a non-storage event, you can mostly push that off on your Exchange team, and just worry about when they need large data increases.