NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It's simplified operations because our storage team is so used to managing all of our stores using a single platform and by just adding flash to that same platform – the existing platforms – simplifies our day-to-day operations.

Their technical support needs improvement.

Stability is 100%. We haven't had any issues with NetApp over all of the years we've been using them; it's a great, stable platform.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give it a 10 for scalability.

With technical support, they need a little more help in there. I would give them an 8 out of 10.

Initial setup it was straightforward. Because we're so used to the FAS systems already, it was easy to add the All Flash FAS system; it was so much easier to deploy.

We did a PoC against other vendors. The decision came down to the simplicity of the platform.

We tested an EMC, an ExtremeIO, and we also did a Violin as well. As far as performance metrics, Violin actually beat all the other vendors but because of the stability and the financial turmoil with Violin, we felt a little skeptic about investing in a company that we didn't know what they were going to be tomorrow. Again, because we're a NetApp shop, to us, that made it so much easier to make the decision based on that.

Look at the simplicity of the operations and the scalability of the products. Being a small company, we're big in storage but we have a small operations group, so I think simplicity just makes our team more efficient. Adding different tools or different storage vendors is just going to add a lot of complexity into our environment.

I liked the performance; it's fast. We use it for Citrix XenApp profiles and we would always have issues in the past from spinning disk with lagging profiles. They'd be slow to log in, which impacted end users. Since we've been using the FAS solution, it's been zero down time, very good response, no issues whatsoever.

We live on the US east coast and when we have snow storms, a lot of users work remotely and that's when it impacts, as profiles get used very heavily. When you have three or four thousand users all logging in at nine o'clock in the morning, trying to pull down profiles because nobody's coming into the office and our company never closes, on spinning disk, the impact is very high. On flash, you don't see it, it doesn't even blink; cannot even tell.

Where I see room for improvement is their technical support.

Stability is the same as the spinning disk solutions. NetApp solutions, in general, I think are very stable. I don't have any issues with them.

I haven't had to scale the AFF, in particular, so I would assume it would be the same as the spinning disk solutions, where we've been able to scale to multi-node clusters.

With NetApp's technical support, when you get the right person, you have a good response. Sometimes, it's a little hard to get to the right person. We have a support account manager, so he helps negotiate that a little bit, or facilitate that. I think NetApp support still has some work to do. Once you get the right person, you usually get the answers you need, but sometimes it's hard to get to the right person.

Installation was fairly simple.

Before choosing this product, I didn't evaluate other solutions, actually. We already had this use case, in particular, running on a NetApp filer. It kind of was a natural progression to move it to a flash filer.

I think that you need to evaluate your use case and do a proof of concept, testing on multiple platforms, and see what works best for you.

VMware multi-tenant and SnapMirror destination, multi customers' filesystem too, no problem with multi AD and domain

• IOPS
• Reliability
• Multi-tenancy
• Network segmentation
• easy to maintain and configure starting from a correct initial setup. focus on network conf in particular

Reliability. flexibility and multi tenant. we host 20 client virtual dc on our a200.

I scaled out our previous 2 node cdot cluster on the fly by adding cluster's switches and then the 2 node a200, after that data migration between fas 2554 and a200 was made non disruptively and on business time.

The full bundle is too expensive. It's needed to implement native replicas (i.e. snapmirror) and backup (i.e. snapvault) features

our system is very stable and reliable, of course it needs to be maintained and monitored, even in case of network switch failure a200 keeps to serve data, very important is the initial setup, so you have to focus on the final architecture.

very good

tech support is very responsive and effective to find solution to some issues, most of the issues can be resolved reading KBs

fas 2554, need to scle out with space and performances

initial setup maust be done by cli, storage space privisioning made by gui, good interaction with vmware with vsc 

I'm the vendor team and storage administrator

I need to ask for it to my ceo

full bundle too expensive I.e. full licenses to implement native replicas and backups

starting from a fas 2554 it was the best solution

good deduplication and compression ratio

We use it for typical data center workloads: Exchange, file shares, and SQL.

We have a big problem in our organization where I can't get the application engineers to give me performance requirements. Now, with the SSDs, I don't need to worry about that anymore. All of our applications are high. Our test applications perform at a higher level now.

It has improved performance of our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs because we have a higher IO from the disk now. We run a lot of write-intensive VMs. For sure the solution helps out.

Our total cost of ownership has decreased because of the nature of the SSDs, their mean time to failure is much higher. They don't fail as often and that's going to reduce it. And because we upgraded to the All Flash and the bigger SSD, we reduced our footprint. I increased my capacity 500 percent and reduced my footprint in the data center by 95 percent.

The most valuable features are

• the IO performance that we get
• the cluster part 
• the increased workload and performance with the SSDs.

And the CLI portion of ONTAP, in general, is much easier to use.

It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products. In my area, we are really big on security, using smart-card authentication. Multi-factor authentication is a big thing for us, being on the federal government side of things. We need all the products to have the ability to do smart-card authentication. That's the biggest one. That's the drawback of this solution. But otherwise, it's getting there. It's starting to catch up.

It has been very stable so far. It's about a year old, we haven't been using it for long, but so far it has stood up very well.

We haven't needed to scale it yet. We probably won't. But obviously, because we are in a multi-node cluster environment, with the switches we can scale out very easily if we need to.

I mostly interact with my sales engineer who is very sharp. The few times that I've had to interact with technical support, it has been very good.

The gear we were on was about ten years old. We always buy behind the technology curve. I noticed that spinning disk was going away and that the industry moving towards SSDs, so I wanted us to try to get ahead of the curve a little bit, to give us some more horsepower to do some more initiatives that we want to get done in the future.

It was very straightforward. There are setup tools so if you're not very familiar with NetApp, they walk you through the process step by step: How to configure all the interfaces and the SVMs, etc. I'm more experienced with the command lines, so I deployed it that way. But it's very receptive to PowerShell scripting, so it's easy to use.

We used an integrator, reseller, and consultant for the deployment. Resellers are resellers. I don't have a good or bad opinion of them. As for the integrators we had, I'd rather do it myself quite honestly. But it was okay.

Because we're federal government, we really can't choose. We've had NetApp for years. I did evaluate a lot of other products. Honestly, at the end of the day, storage is storage and disks are disks; it's all the bells and whistles on the front. Other solutions could probably have accomplished the same task. Ultimately, it comes down to dollars and cents, but I'm not really involved in that side of it. I'm sure they chose NetApp because of the cost.

Know your workload, know your customer. Know what your requirements are, know what your future requirements are. Determine what's important to you. Think about the administrators, if you're not the administrator; I'm not, I just engineer it. Think about them and how they will use it. Think about the future, where you think your business will grow.

When it comes to setting up and provisioning applications using the product, it depends on what you're doing. But I I can have an Exchange server up and running in about 30 minutes.

At the moment the solution is not having any effect on IT's ability to support new business initiatives. I got it to support things like ADI and solutions like that. So hopefully, going forward, it will play a role in that. We have not connected the solution to public clouds. We do plan to in the future.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten because there's room to improve. There's always room to grow. The security side of it: They have a large government customer base but it seems like they really don't pay attention to that side of things. There are a lot of security things, a lot of customers can't send their stuff offsite, and I'm one of them. So coming up with better ways to satisfy that part would be great.

• Performance
• Density per rack unit from the capacity perspective with some of the other drives.

It solves the performance issues of the past. 

The primary use case for my customers is enterprise vSphere workloads or Oracle workloads. We have customers using it for both block and file storage.

This is not a directly specific to AFF, but I like the idea in the cluster that the data from ONTAP would allow having a mix of All Flash HA pairs with hybrid arrays. This allows for a somewhat tiered approach for storage. So, that is cool.

I am excited to see how the data fabric story plays out from the entire NetApp portfolio that connectivity of all the different devices. I know in the beginning when it was first spoken about, SnapMirror was something talked about. I liked that idea of just having the ability to transfer data between different NetApp platforms, and that would obviously include the All Flash line.

Cluster data ONTAP as an operating system is very stable and very mature. We seemed to like with 9.2 that there is inline deduplication at the aggregate level. That is a welcomed addition.

Since we are talking 24 nodes for NAS, that is really good. I forgot what the scale number is for block on clustered data ONTAP, but I have not run into any opportunities where we had to go beyond what we had.

When you are looking at NetApp as a scale-out NAS player, they have been in the SMB in the FAS space for long time. They have done it well. They have done the multi-protocol access, NFS to NTFS access and reverse really well. They have the ability to have a cluster of disks contained of different kinds of disks, which has been useful. Also, as a unified box, it is like the Swiss army-knife of the unified boxes.

NetApp has been excellent. Performance has improved significantly.

Because it has been used to deploy the virtualization solution, the consolidation helped optimize its center space, in terms of power, cooling, and so on and so forth. Therefore, we have had significant optimizations across the board. Also, there are SVUs to deploy virtualization solutions for our customers.

We are more like to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF, which is currently being deployed for core banking applications as well.

• The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities.
• It is very easy to manage.

It is very stable. We've had no problems. Drives last for a very long time with very minimal failure, if any at all. Support is also excellent.

It's extremely scalable with minimum downtime when one has to do the scalable solution.

They are very efficient. Once you open a case, you have an engineer who is assigned and stay with you until the problems are resolved. We are reaching the right person quickly and easily.

Previously, we were using external drives for backup solutions before we came across NetApp. We switched because of the features NetApp comes with, then the ease of use.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was all straightforward.

Price is always good, as long as price is coming down, especially for flash systems. The entry point for potential customers, who are looking at coming onboard for flash systems, it may be a bit expensive. It would be good if the price comes down.

There was EMC and IBM.

NetApp has always had a good name in the industry for providing excellent solutions, especially with the added protection functionalities, Snapshot, SnapRestore, and SnapMirror features. It makes it easy to have One-Box that provides all the solutions a customer would need to protect their data.

We decided on NetApp because of ease of use.

We use both block and file storage.

With the current release of the ONTAP also, it's going to be easy to migrate the data to the cloud, which is very good because of the trend of doing hybrid solutions now.

NetApp is doing a perfect job. Just go NetApp. You won't go wrong.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• A solution which is fast.
• It is reliable.
• Support is excellent.
• Ease of use.
• User-friendliness.

It gave us a lot more peace of mind, because before we had a SAN solution that worked - it gave us the ability to have Microsoft SQL clusters for our treatment. This adds an extra layer of protection with the high availability, the multiple layers of redundancy, having SnapMirrors so we can replicate and do snapshotting. It's just given us a lot of peace of mind.

When you've got patient-data, you've got to make sure it's there.

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Probably the biggest single thing would be the high availability options, because it's medical treatment, so it's got to be pretty much up - because we do treatment with it.

Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much.

I don't know if I could come up with another feature. Of all the new hardware we bought for the new building, it's the only thing that we've yet to have any troubles with.

Maybe the reporting tools, the performance reporting tools. Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much. I know they're getting better on that but I suppose that's one thing I'd improve.

It's been perfect. We haven't had anything wrong with it.

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I think it's excellent. We haven't scaled it up yet because it was a new system, so we haven't added to it. Actually, we did add a shelf to it, but it's awesome. You just plug things in and they go.

Technical support has been excellent. Excellent. We've had our resident engineer who comes out all the time and assists us on things. We went to add that shelf in, he came up. We wanted to make sure we were doing things right, as in adding the disk in, and where to put it, and how to balance the system. He came right up there and helped us the better part of an afternoon, and just showed us things, and what to do.

It was great. Never a complaint.

We were using Hewlett-Packard P2000s, and they were fine, but it was basically just a rack of disks that allowed us to do SAN solutions. They were actually pretty good, too. They didn't have the high availability features, and they couldn't do replication. They could do some snapshotting, but it was nothing like what we have now.

What happened is, it was kind of an end-of-life, they were getting real old, long in the tooth, and we needed more room. When the entire enterprise looked at vendors, they had brought on NetApp. When we looked at it, we thought, "This is great," and here we are. That's why we bought it. It just filled in. It did everything we needed it to do.

We've been extremely impressed with NetApp. I like the interface. I like all the tools they give us. The support is incredible. Our rep is awesome.

Hewlett-Packard, again, was one. EMC, because we do actually have some EMC stuff. And NetApp. That was basically our list. I think IBM was in there for a little while, but I think they kind of fell off. I remember hearing about it, but I didn't know anything about it. That was our short list.

Our primary use case for the All Flash FAS is medical data storage. We use it for both block storage and file storage at the moment.

We're more than "likely" to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems. It's already mission critical. This is cancer treatment. That's what it's doing.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support, features, and support. Can I say one twice? Because I know in healthcare, if something goes wrong, and we can't get it back up and running, patients are affected. If cancer treatments stop, it's really bad. Or somebody's mistreated? The feds come out, and it's a criminal kind of thing, so we've got to make sure that nothing goes wrong. So, I'd say support twice.

My advice to someone researching a similar product would probably be pay attention to growth, scalability. That was probably the other big thing with our P2000s. There was no way to scale. If we wanted to do something, we had to buy a whole other product. Once we ran out of room on that one thing, we had to basically look for something else. You have to do a data transfer. With the NetApps, we can just add on these racks of disks, and scale out with more controllers. I'd say that's it. Just make sure you pay attention to growth, and things like that.

The most valuable features are cost, performance and usability. NetApp’s really good with usability; to get it up and running quickly and usable.

We've been using for our internal cloud environments, for internal cloud storage. Response time's very fast. Capacity's very good. Performance is very good; it's quick.

We've only had it in production for about three months, so we don't have a lot of time with it. For what we're using it for, it's been fine. I don't know of any issues or anything that we need to do, that I would request additional features right now, aside from the scalability improvements I’ve mentioned.

I know we use external monitoring. There's some level of monitoring on the systems themselves, but we do use a lot of external monitoring, whether it's NetApp versus third party. I know with ONTAP 9, they're working on more monitoring capabilities and more features within the unit, but they don't have that yet. I would like to see more monitoring onboard, on the system, instead of having to throw another third-party system at it.

I've been a NetApp customer for quite a while, at least 12 to 13 years. Stability's never been an issue for any of our systems that I've been associated with; it's been very good. We haven't had any issues with those units, knock on wood, so far; it's been good.

Scalability has been OK. We've been scaling them vertically instead of more horizontally because you can only scale the FAS horizontally so far, so we've scaled out vertically.

I would like to see them improve its ability to scale vertically. With flash, you can only drive so many IOPS, the controllers can only handle so many IOPS. There's a limit; there's physics, a mathematical limit that they can do.

It's been a long time since I've actually called technical support with a case. I try not to call tech support. At my level, I usually need something like a third-level support. You call in, you have to say what your issue is, they can't help you and then they have to pass it to the next person and then usually it's third level. Usually, it's a third-level, advanced person that I would need to speak to.

They've been fine. Once you get to that level, someone that's knowledgeable, support's fine.

In this environment, we were using spinning disks. When we needed to expand capacity, that's when we decided to go with all flash, and NetApp made it very price competitive. They were trying to push those units, so it was worthwhile to get flash instead of more spinning disks.

NetApp's initial setup is very straightforward. It's very easy to get up and running within a day, as long as you have the cabling in place and the power, but that's outside of NetApp's control. Once you have that infrastructure in place and they come on site, it's very easy to get up and running within a day.

Before choosing the All Flash FAS, I also considered Hitachi. We chose NetApp because NetApp is in our internal cloud, and that's what we were expanding. We didn't see the need to switch vendors at that point. NetApp's easier than Hitachi HNAS to get up and running.

For my manager, price is the most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with. NetApp's been very competitive with pricing over the last 2-3 years.

NetApp's features are easier, and the capabilities are a lot more advanced than Hitachi and other vendors that we look at. The software's much more mature than the other vendors. That's why I like NetApp. It's easy to use. It's easy to get down to what you want to do with it; the features and capabilities are there.

Everybody pretty much can do the same. The issue is how complicated it is to get to what you're really trying to do. That's the one thing that I've seen. NetApp does a good job. They're much more mature, as I’ve mentioned. It's easy to drill down to get to the data, get it set up and get it configured, and it works.

We've only been using it three months. We haven't hit any issues with it yet; I can't say that we won't, but I'm not expecting to.