NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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 primary use case for our Flash FAS is general storage for our hypervisor, software as a service provider. We primarily use it for storing our applications, web servers, file servers, and whatever other applications we have. We mainly utilize the AFF platform for the high performance and the deduplication capabilities. The management is a lot simpler on an AFF.

• Deduplication
• Compressions
• Simpler management
• The performance is great.

I'm not sure there are any additional features which I want to see, except for maybe more compatibility within the hardware universe and more compatibility for cables and other hardware. Some better integration with the E-Series to give us more options to scale. The other issue though is a completely different product called HCI, so this might not even be an AFF request.

It would be helpful if the compatibility matrix was a bit better. That's what we run into a lot. Our datacenters have a need for more flexible cabling and NetApp has very strict guidelines on what kind of cables you use. That's the only reason why I wouldn't rate it a 10 out of 10, but everything else is great.

Stability is very good.

Regarding scalability, on a scale of one to 10, I'd say about a five.

Tech support is great. I'd rate it as a nine out of 10.

The initial reason for going to NetApp was that our original solution, which was Dell Storage, just wasn't cutting it. We did our own in-house testing, performance-wise, resilience-wise, etc. The Dell Storage just wasn't cutting it. Dell's other solution at that time was Compellent, and NetApp was just better. The initial reason we didn't go with NetApp was because of cost, but they were able to meet us in the middle and we just went from there.

Not straightforward, there is a learning curve when it comes to AFFs, but once you understand the setup it's pretty easy.

Our initial perception of NetApp was it's extremely expensive and a little too inflexible. However, once we did get into the NetApp ecosystem, we realized that the cost effectiveness was greater than we originally thought.

The cost effectiveness is due to deduplication compression, the number of managed hours that we need to maintain the system, and the flexibility of NetApp which is geared toward keeping their systems more resilient.

I would check to see that you're okay with centralized storage because that's what NetApp's bread and butter is. If you want a centralized storage platform that is bulletproof, NetApp is great.

We use AFF for both block storage and NAS storage. We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF.

Two functions are valuable for us:

• Snapshot: We are able to replicate/clone production environments to test the SW version up (e.g. the Oracle Financials upgrades).
• MetroCluster: Our disaster recovery is based on two active-active sites. The MetroCluster feature allowed us to continue our operations (without business interruption) when we stopped one of the sites.

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

This solution is based on the scale-out concept. Some workload balancing activities across the nodes are not transparent (requires server downtime).

When moving volumes between controllers, you should always use the optimized path.

FCP is doing this automatically, but NFS unfortunately not.

So when moving NFS volumes between controllers, you will not move the load to the other controller.

To do this, you need to remount the volume to the correct LIF.

We did encounter stability issues but nothing that interrupted the solution; more background type of problems.

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

We did encounter scalability issues, the solution is not delivering the requested performance (I/O response time for the requested IOPS).

The technical support level is between poor to medium in our geography.

Previously, we were using the older generation of the NetApp MetroCluster (6240 unit). We switched as this unit was not performant enough, i.e., it had a high maintenance cost for the performance delivered.

Negotiate everything, i.e., including the price for the future capacity upgrades as part of the deal.

We looked at EMC, HPE, and Fujitsu.

You need to understand the limitations of the scale-out architecture.

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.

The input/output is the most valuable feature. When you have high-availability applications that need high IOPS, it's kind of a no-brainer to have an AFF. We're using it for some SQL databases now, and a VDI solution.

We did see some massive performance increases on all of the SQL databases when we moved over; that made the database administrators pretty happy.

It's worked very well. I know we'll see improvements in disk. You'll get better processors and things like that, which will make them faster, but overall, it's fantastic for our environment. Improvements in disk and better processors would be something I’d like to see in the future, but you're going to see that anyway.

I always get surprised when I see a new feature. Usually when something comes out, I'll see something and say "Wow, I would have never thought they would've went there." I'm not that good at future-casting.

I'm sure that people have issues. I haven't had anything, though. It's been great.
Maybe if it had some sort of game-changing technology. They're all very similar; that's the thing I learned through the POC process.

We have not had any stability or scalability issues at all, actually. It fit right into our current cluster, and everything works great. We haven't had any issues at all. It’s been absolutely stable.

We have not needed to use technical support for anything particular on the AFF. We do have a support contract and we do have support issues from time to time, but nothing's come up with the All Flash, so far.

In general, NetApp support is pretty good; overall, pretty good. I've had a couple of things that needed to be escalated but overall, the staff is pretty knowledgeable and they work pretty well.

We drove the decision to invest in AFF a little more than our database administrators had. They were fine with the performance, but we were seeing some things on our side that made us think it was time to go with a flash solution. They were driving too much IO over SAS and SATA, and we wanted to make sure we had the right solution for them going forward. We also wanted to futureproof it a little bit.

If you can set up any FAS, you can probably set up a AFF. Initial setup is pretty simple, if you know that technology.

The thing that I love the most about it is, being a NetApp customer for a while, they code their cabling; you know where the square plugs in, and you have a triangle and a circle. That makes it so much easier; they idiot-proofed it, very much. Then, of course, when you go through the setup and configuration, it alerts you if there's any cabling issue, so you can go back; that was kind of nice, too.

I don't handle pricing. I did a little bit of the negotiation. I thought it was fair for the value that we got, especially compared to certain competitors that we looked at as well.

We're a NetApp shop, and we've had a very good relationship with them over the years. Nonetheless, for certain purchases – obviously, for a big purchase such as moving into the flash arena – we wanted to be certain, so we did look at a few other options.

I felt like the AFF pricing was better. The fact that we had existing NetApp solutions and a great relationship with our NetApp partners was basically what won it there. I don't know that it necessarily does anything different than a competitor, but we've been very happy with it.

In general, when I’m considering vendors to work with, I like solid solutions. I like good support. You wind up trusting people after you get through a few solutions and through a few things with them. That's important to me.

If you have experience with NetApp, you shouldn't have any trouble with it. If you don't, I would suggest the training. It's pretty straightforward, but that'll always help.

The most valuable feature is the performance that we got out of it. With a previous solution, we had some latency issues and performance issues. When we got the FAS All Flash Array, that technology took care of those issues that we had, those bottlenecks.

It provides greater stability for our corporate database, which we host on the FAS. We have a much greater sense of confidence and reliability in our data solutions. It gives us more confidence that everything's going to keep working.

In terms of manpower or cost, because we are a public agency, it's more about value as far as the service that we receive and the stability of the solution. Those are the key factors.

I'm not sure about room for improvement, only because right now we've just completed a major upgrade. At this point, we're very happy. We don't see anything lacking in that regard.

Nonetheless, there used to be a product called Balance and it's been really replaced by something called Insight. From an operational perspective, the ease of use, we preferred Balance. Even though that product has come to end of life, we're unhappy about that.

OnCommand Balance and Insight are two separate NetApp products, that provide the performance capture and logging features. OnCommand Balance is an older product and NetApp has announced that it will not continue this product anymore, as its replacement is Insight. The staff here have used both of these products and they prefer OnCommand Balance. Sadly, we won’t be able to continue using OnCommand Balance, as long as we would have liked to.

So far, we've had no issues whatsoever with the stability. It's beating our expectations for an enterprise-wide solution, whereas other solutions that have presented themselves as enterprise solutions haven't performed to the same degree.

We've never had any issues with NetApp. In particular, the customer service I think has been far superior. Our business decision was basically based on NetApp's record with us for their customer service. We're making NetApp our single storage standard within our organization.

We previously used Oracle. There was a Pillar Axiom line for storage. We also previously had an EMC solution. I don't remember exactly what line that was.

We decided to invest in a new storage solution just because of the data growth that we needed. We're expanding our business content, meaning disaster recovery architecture. We needed to expand to an additional site.

As I’ve mentioned, we had Oracle’s Pillar Axiom line. We also looked at Compellent, which is Dell now, and Dell fired them. Then HP. We used to have an HP EVA as well. We used that before. We looked at HP's current solution. We weren't happy with that one.

We decided to go with NetApp over HP because of the experience we had with both of those organizations in customer service. NetApp, again, was far superior. Our requirements then to our reseller, or VAR, and NetApp was that we knew what our workload was and we needed to have a solution that would meet certain criteria, which was set on latency and bandwidth thresholds. The vendor, along with NetApp, was able to provide us with an evaluation unit that met those specs with flying colors.

Understand what your workload is first. What is it that you're trying to accomplish so you set the proper thresholds and criteria for performance. Understand what your support service needs are. Is that important? How important? It's not always about cost. We found that in all those areas, with our evaluation, NetApp was a clear choice for us, based upon past experience. We continue to have success with NetApp.

• SnapMirror
• Migration abilities
• Easy backup solution
• Snapshot ability

It's certainly better than our previous Pure Storage system. It’s a flash array that works seamlessly with other NetApp products. They have the ability of other FAS as well as of flash.

In a metro cluster, the bridges are fiber heavy, limiting the performance. This is its only disadvantage.

We've used it for two months.

So far so good. We've had no stability issues.

It's met our expectations, and we still have room to grow and scale out.

7/10 due to having unsolved tickets.

Over the last year, the quality of their technical support decreased, but it's getting better again.

We previously used Pure Storage.

It's very easy. We've been using NetApp products for five years so its just another NetApp system for us.

We did it in-house.

I would say if you need high availability across different sites, then think if the right product for you because of speed limitations.

For us in the health care sector, the most valuable feature is quality of service because we're able to stop the workloads from taking over other workloads that are more important.

We have storage virtual machines at work, so we're able to segregate and distinguish between different workloads. I think local HFL might as well form the natural process side of things, which is an improvement from 7-Mode.

We're able to treat more patients now because our workloads are performing faster.

I'd like to see online duplication, which I believe will be available with 8.3.2.

We've been using it for the past four months or five months with lots of clinical applications that deal with healthcare, and VMs with SQL.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no crashes. We have experienced a couple of problems based on configuration and books. I believe these issues are going to be addressed in an update, but for now I think they are just focused on the reiteration of what the best practices are.

It scales to our needs.

7/10, as there were a couple of issues which took technical support some time to handle.

We have used Fusion-io for flash but nothing in SAN. We were looking to address performance issues, and NetApp addressed them.

I think we took about two weeks to get up and running. We performed initial tests and diagnostic tests, all the results of which surpassed our expectations. We were able to get 400,000 IOPS from our system processor.

We used a mix of three days with NetApp, another three days with a partner, and everything else was done in-house.

We won't have a number until we've fully migrated, but so far it looks good.

We were looking at Pure Storage and a couple of other vendors who had all-in-one solutions.

I think it fits a lot of peoples requirements, but I'd recommend waiting until v8.3.2 just for the additional features and to resolve some books. Other than that, it's great.