NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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.

One thing we see is the kind of flexibility NetApp is giving, taking the Snapshot and other features; wherever we want to keep it, we can keep it. Those things, are really impressive. We don't have to look into that traditional backup model like a tape backup model or protecting your data.

Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it.

In the future, a few things.Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it. We want to see that in NetApp. It's very important from the operational perspective.

It's really good. We would say 99.99% up-time, we are seeing that with the NetApp product. It's really good.

On a scale from one to five, I would say four.

It's really good. We're getting the right response, so everything worked.

Right now, in current scenarios, we don't get many issues with the NetApp products. We mainly use them for the upgrade.

And so far we are getting good response in case the case of a disk failure or some cluster issues, then NetApp support is there, really.

We have a kind of recycle policy, and the end of warranty. We look at every purchase in the last three years, book value. We'll use that analysis as our first indicator.

The second one, the demand from our customers, our internal customers. What kind of application they are going to use, what kind of power they will need. We'll check with NetApp, our account team, whether there are any new solutions available from NetApp, or we can use the existing one. Mainly the NetApp account team will help us on this.

I'm only involved in upgrades. They're pretty simple, and their documentation is very clear, and it's all really nice.

Our primary use case for All Flash is just as an alternate solution of storage. We are just exploring how it fits us. We use it for file storage right now but we have a plan for block storage also.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage based on our experience with AFF. We are in the very initial stages of the AFF storage. It's very good. We are seeing good performance with it. But still, we need to see, with our mission-critical applications, with NetApp... Because right now we are just using the file storage, and we did not put any mission-critical applications.

Our company has certain policies a vendor has to meet; first they must meet our company basic criteria to be a vendor. For example, a vendor has to be in the market for more than this many years. Then, we look at other areas like how good they are in the market and how stable their products are.

Usability, in general. Currently, just basic functionality and consistency is all we really aim for.

Potentially. Hopefully just the consistency and integrity. That's our main goal as a small shop, compared to some.

Hopefully, you never have to actually use those backups but those backups are probably completing 90% faster. If we had roll back to a backup, then we're going to have more consistency. That's the main thing - that I hope I don't have to use - that would be there for its benefit.

Lower the price. I would say being forced as a small shop wanting to go to All-Flash and being forced to buy all of the licenses that we don't use and we don't need, that was a bummer, and that was a stretch as far as convincing management. That's probably the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.

I've been in charge of NetApp for three years.

I've never had a problem. We've never had an outage. All the upgrades have gone well. There have been a couple of hiccups getting to the point where you can upgrade, as far as configuration changes, but nothing that caused any outages, or data loss, or anything like that.

We'll see. We're only running about 27 terabytes in production right now. We're keeping everything else on our secondary FAS in our DR location. So we think it would scale well. But we'll see. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We haven't used it for a while, and then only a little bit. Just conversing about upgrades and making sure we're set to go to various versions.

They've been very knowledgeable. I haven't really had any problems with them. We haven't had anything critical where I needed an immediate response. So I also haven't worried that much about it.

We didn't need invest in a new solution but our support was up on our system. So we had to upgrade. We had a 15K SAS disk before that was sufficient but it was going end-of-support at the end of this year or the end of next year, so it was a good time to upgrade.

We chose NetApp because we put a lot of money into the training already. I'm very comfortable with it. I like it. It's pretty industry standard. It's very a valuable skill. So I'd rather not go to some smaller start-up vendor and then, if I ever do look for a new job, I can say, "Yeah, I'm very experienced with NetApp," not whatever other company. And HPE was horrible four or five years ago.

I'm coming from a HP MSA and they were just horrible. Very unfriendly. Disks failing every week. Every month.

We had a NetApp FAS8020 before and I thought it was great. We went from HPE to NetApp and there's no comparison. We looked at a couple of other vendors but they weren't as robust so we stayed with NetApp.

We looked at a company called Datrium. They were not robust enough to fit all of our needs. I looked at Nimble Storage. I don't remember what the other company was. I didn't actually talk to them, but I looked at their product. Everything's basically the same price and so why not just stick with NetApp.

We use it as our production stack, VMware, Oracle, and file shares for the most part, and use it for both block and file storage.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems, based on our experience, because we didn't have a disk fail in six years with our first FAS. That's hard to beat that. I hear different stories on that, but that's our experience. So I'm pretty happy.

Everything runs well. The main thing that we've noticed is Oracle including backups at night, and queries and the like. Other than that, the database guys were the only ones that complained anyway. So they're happy now and that's my only job, really.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Primary is data integrity (not losing my data).
• Secondary would be uptime. With NetApp we haven't had any down-time.

In terms of advice to someone who's looking for this kind of solution I would say do your research. You can't go wrong with NetApp. But make sure you're getting the right product for what you use or what you need it for. With the right use case.

The important features are space savings, deduplication, compression and compaction. By enabling the deduplication, we save a lot of space, because we use it for VDA. We also see some performance improvement compared to the SAS spinning disks.

This solution gives us better throughput, better performance and better space-saving efficiency. These are the benefits the user group has seen.

They should really prove the performance numbers they show you. They provide some general performance numbers, but performance varies for every different customer site and different workloads. What they say it will do doesn't necessarily match what it does. But we have seen some difference in workloads other than the VDA. So they should say, “For this kind of workload, here are the performance statistics and for other workloads, it varies.” They should not simply say that these numbers apply to every situation. That should not be the case.

We assumed that the performance statistics they provide are applicable for everything and we purchased it. Then, we found that this is not a scalable solution. We did not get the performance we expected. They could provide a clear indication that the numbers they show are only for a particular type of workload. They could also improve the performance to match the numbers.

Stability is good. We have been using NetApp products for a very long time. We are the first customer for NetApp and we have been involved in various other FAS deployments. Stability-wise, it's gotten better.

Three years back, we deployed many customer systems; we have a big 24-node cluster. So scalability is very good.

For this particular deployment, we have only one HA pair. Currently, there is no requirement to grow from a scalability point of view. Our requirement is very small.  In the future, we may think of adding additional HA pairs and we can grow that scalability; we can distribute it in the future.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just like any other FAS system. Just install and enable some features for the AFF systems. It was not like a regular FAS system, but other than that, configuration is exactly same; simple and easy.

Initially, we approached multiple vendors for this kind of solution.

We have a NetApp on-site PSE and a systems manager – a NetApp group – sitting in our company. They suggested, “Why don't you explore this All Flash FAS for the VDA?” Then we evaluated the E560, a NetApp product, as well as AFF. We also evaluated other vendors such as XtremIO from Dell EMC.

Finally, for the simplicity and the flexibility, we thought of going with the AFF system.
This is a newer deployment. We used to use just the FAS system with the spinning HDD. We have changed it to all-flash.

You definitely should consider it.

One important factor for working with vendors is flexibility. The ease to use many features like FlexClone, SnapMirror and disaster recovery features. Other than that, the support prospect is very important to us. So the storage unit itself was not the only thing we considered before deciding to go with this particular solution.

The most valuable features are the speed and the predictable performance. Compared to the spinning disk, I don't have to worry about IOPS anymore. I can rely on the IOPS being there. I can worry about CPU now. It's one less thing I have to worry about as far as performance.

The latency is very predictable and lower. It's very sustained, we know what it's going to be, and it doesn't get impacted by snapshots and so forth.

The AFF, which is what turns on the bit so that you can have an all-flash array compared to the hybrid array; I'm having troubles in my environment buying systems for smaller sites because I want the all flash array and I want the speed. I can go hybrid and still do SSD but it's making choices hard for me when I'm doing a lot of SnapMirrors and SnapVaults between sites.

I want the all-flash but I know I can't because I have to have SATA for the low-cost SnapMirror and SnapVault. It'd be nice if they would turn the switch on per aggregate, or maybe even per node, so that I could use it on some nodes. That way I wouldn't have to choose. Right now, I'm having a hard time choosing between hybrid or flash. I want the flash but I can't get it if I have to go hybrid.

I’m also looking forward to more CPU and power that's coming out in the AFF 700 and so on.

Other than that, so far, I'm pretty happy.

We had a stability issue. We got bit by a bug that was a compression problem, and we had to do a WAFL check. It was the first time we've ever had to do that only on the all-flash array.

The bug had already been identified, but nobody had hit it. We were the first one to hit it. The QA lab had found it. They should have notified all AFF customers before we hit it, because then we could have turned off compression and not hit it until the bug fix was released.

Technical support needs improvement. We need access to the backend people without having to go through two layers to get to them, because we're always above the two layers. It's a waste of our time to have to work through them.

We previously used a different solution, which was coming to the end of its lifecycle.

Initial setup was good. It's quicker, now that they've started sending out the pre-configured systems, or optimized systems.

There weren’t any other flash storage vendors on our shortlist. We were already in a four-year cycle with NetApp, so we just stuck with the same vendor.

In general, when I look at a vendor, the most important criteria is that they have our interests at heart and want to partner with us. Since we're a non-profit organization, we need them to understand what we're doing because we don't have a lot of money to throw around. They have to invest in our belief of what we're trying to do. Cost is part of it, but we still try to pick the technology over the cost, first.

At this point, performance is the most valuable feature. We're just putting it into production, on a pretty heavy performance-intensive workload. So far, its performed exactly how we wanted it to. Performance is the key on that particular device.

It's offloaded workload that was compromising other workloads because of performance degradation. It's enabled us to take that and isolate it; give it the performance it needs, saving other applications’ performance as well.

We don't have it running ONTAP 9 yet. Upgrading the OS to ONTAP 9 will definitely give us some advantages. From what I saw at a recent NetApp Insight conference, about how ONTAP 9 looks and feels, there are things to look at and learn how to use that, in performance monitoring tools as well. We still had some learning to do about what's available. We're using rudimentary performance monitoring. As far as that goes, the old tools are giving us what we want, but we're looking forward to upgrading to be able to take advantage of better tools.

We are especially looking for better performance monitoring. We want to be able to truly see what the load is doing at any given point in time, and especially if the user wants to know, “We're going to load this up. We want to see what effect it has on it.” We want to be able to give them real-time numbers.

Right now, that’s not easy to do. We can't get to the detailed level that we want to. We believe that that's available going forward.

We've only had it in production a short time. We've had it a total of about six months.

In the short time we’ve had it in production, six months, we haven’t had any stability issues.

We haven't had to scale it out.

We've had to call technical support only because the performance monitoring on it has given us some skewed numbers. Getting back to us on that was a little bit slow, to get us the answer that we really needed to see, but we got the answer that we needed. All is good now.

I wasn’t involved in the decision process to invest in this particular All Flash FAS, but I've been in many, many discussions about going to that technology. I'm part of our team to say, "This is what we think we're going to need based on what we've seen. This could be the right tool for the job." In general, with decisions like this, there’s no one person making the decision.

We were previously running on a different vendor platform. We had that device saturated, and there was nowhere to go with it. The scalability was non-existent. It was disk. This was a good opportunity for us to move into this flash environment with this particular workload because of the performance.

At this point, there really wasn't another player that was going to offer us familiarity with NetApp, for one thing, and what we needed.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are the ease of administration of an appliance; reliability of an appliance; and being able to adequately monitor what's going on with the appliance (which ties in with the administration of it). Support’s got to be on it, especially if it's in production. It's like, “We need help; we need it now.” The vendor has to be there.

Those are probably the three most important criteria. Price comes in there, but you pay a premium for those particular things. If the price point is right and those things are all right, then you've got a great thing going on.

Flash right now is just a hot ticket. If you've got performance-intensive workloads, and because the NetApp suite of tools that can come along with it, then, yes, I would recommend to colleagues that they take a look at it.

It's still pretty new to us, but what we expect it to do, it's doing. As we get more familiar with it, and if we see that we can scale it out and add more to it, I think I would be able to rate it higher pretty easily.

The most valuable feature is not having to worry about whether I assign the right platform to a workload. I can basically put it on there, knowing that I gave it all that it can get. If I gave it too much, I can move it off.

There are fewer customer call backs due to performance issues; fewer problems for myself and my staff. That kind of thing. Those are the biggies; just a sort of set-and-forget kind of platform.

Something I would like to see is coming out in ONTAP 9.1, which is volume encryption in place. When that gets released, we'll be taking advantage of that. That's something that we needed, and they're already going to be adding; it's on the road map.

Basically, what it allows you to do is compartmentalize data by volumes, which we do already, but then you can encrypt the data to protect this particular group’s data from this particular group’s data, and know that it's not going to be compromised; this is classified, and that's classified, and they don't need to know. I'm looking forward to that.

Stability’s been great. We're sort of early into our environment with it, but we really haven't had any stability issues or anything like that. It's been great.

Scalability is not determined at this point in time. We've installed what we bought; we're using it. We haven't tried scaling it beyond what it's done so far; haven't needed to.

We are a long-time NetApp customer. We knew that we had some workloads that were exceeding what our existing platforms could provide. We ended up saying, "Hey, the All Flash FAS is the next logical step for us".

We were using spinning disk. We actually also purchased a flash pool, which is a hybrid, this last go around; all NetApp. That'll be our first hybrid, but we knew that we also needed this all flash array to be able to step up to the plate with some of these other workloads.

Initial setup is complex, in that you have to make sure that you're setting it up in compliance with the best practices. The best practices are well documented. There's not a lot of, "Oh my gosh, I didn't see that coming", kind of thing. You just have to make sure you set it up right; otherwise, you didn't get what you paid for.

We're constantly looking at other vendors to see what they have, in terms of this purchasing cycle. We weren't seriously looking at other vendors. Unless NetApp had completely dropped the ball on the platform and/or given us a quote that was completely unreasonable, I don't think we would have necessarily gone with anyone else.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is customer support, in the States, and then also an account team that allows us access to the back-end engineers. For example, at a recent NetApp conference, our account manager set up a meeting with us and some of the security back-end people from NetApp. We're able to have a 45-minute deep dive into what we need as a customer. These are the guys and gals who are actually implementing the technology, and supporting us. We were able to have that conversation, which was great.

Really look at it from the standpoint of, what workloads you have today? What are the performance characteristics? Are you taking full advantage of what you have today? From a data mobility perspective, does that matter to you? It mattered to us, and that's something that NetApp brings to the table. Or, we can move it from the All Flash FAS to another platform, and then if it spikes up again, move it back, non-disruptively.

It's really, really good for everything that we've used it for. At somewhere in the range of a quarter of a million dollars, it's a lot of money; you get what you pay for.

Performance; that's the whole reason we use it. We have both FAS and AFF. Everything on our production site's running on AFF. That's the pure and simple reason: we need the flash, we need the IOPS. That's what it gives us.

I've had no issues with it. As a storage admin, it makes my job easy.

We get increased performance; a lot more stability. We don't have to worry; when Black Friday sales rolled around and our website goes down because we can't handle it. We were storage-bound in the past and AFF fixed it.

As far as my role's concerned, everything is handled pretty easily, especially with ONTAP; management's simple.

Compared to other systems I've used, the UI is much easier. I don't have too much of a problem with it, as long as you follow the documentation.

The GUI's pretty simple to me. I don't think it's that bad. I try and use command line whenever possible, but the GUI's not bad. I'm sure if I sat down, I could think of some things I would really like to have added to the GUI, or maybe make a little simpler to see in the command line. There's always – once in a while – some command that's formatted really stupidly in command line and it's hard to get an accurate view out of it.

As far as NetApp, we have not had any stability issues from it.

Scalability has been good so far. We have several data centers. We have no problems scaling it out.

I have had to use technical support a few times. They're always good. We even have a resident on-site with us and the resident's been great, helping us find new solutions, things like that.

We previously had a FAS and then we also had an IBM flash storage array. The IBM was not as reliable. We had several hardware issues with it. Then our NetApp sales rep came to us with the AFF. We had a pretty long-existing relationship with NetApp already, so we decided just to try and concentrate on NetApp solutions. It's worked out very well for us so far.

My role in the initial setup was only plugging it in, basically. It's pretty straightforward, especially with the fancy little map you get with the hardware. It was pretty easy.

We have an architect who looked at something from EMC, as well, but we're very well-ingrained with NetApp right now.

Follow best practices. Your best practices do a good job of laying out the very best way of doing it, usually, for most environments, at least.

When I’m choosing a vendor, I look at the amount of storage I’m getting for my money, the features I’m getting with that money, the support that we're getting with it, ease of use, management, and so on. What are we going to have the ability to do? What's controlled by the software/firmware? That kind of thing. We found all of those things in NetApp with AFF. As I’ve mentioned, management's been really easy for us; the ONTAP software's been great.