NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It has resulted in more customer revenue. We've got a very diverse crowd as far our customers go. Different customers are asking for faster, more performance, more service, and AFF pretty much delivered that.

The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast.

I don't know if it's really specific to AFF, but metrics as far as performance. I would like to see a lot more of that.

Also, ZAPI is kind of difficult to use. You know, it's SOAP-like, it's not really SOAP. I would like to see it more of a REST-based JSON, instead of XML.

One of the biggest things that would really help is if it were driven like AMQP on the EMS would be really nice, so I can actually see when things are being created instead assuming things are created based on API calls.

It's very stable. I don't think I've noticed any problems with it at all. It's one of those things you don't really think about until you run into a problem. I haven't run into a problem, so it's actually very stable.

It's scalable. As far as NetApp products go, in general, they're very scalable.

I haven't used it directly. We have residents so usually, if I need support, I go to the resident or one of the Professional Service guests that works with us. But the support they provide is excellent.

I'm generally not involved in initial setup. Usually where I get involved is after it's gone through RDS, and I do the automation orchestration as far as our customers' provisioning and billing, etc.

For the most part our use case is databases. We use AFF for both block storage and file storage. We've got arrays for both. We've got a very mixed NetApp setup. We've got some that are just AFF, some that are AFF FAS systems - flash pulls and the like.

I've always been a fan of NetApp. I've dealt with other vendors but I like NetApp because when we need support, they're usually there, they show up, whereas other vendors don't quite do that. As far as AFF specifically, it's just another good product that NetApp put out. We're definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future, based on our experiences with AFF due to the support that NetApp provides. Very good support

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are

• support
• generally performance - if it's a performing product
• scalable is always good.

I would pretty much tell colleagues to go with NetApp because of the support. When something goes wrong, that's usually the most important thing to me: how do I get support? NetApp's always delivered on the support side.

• Easy to manage.
• It's quick. It's very fast.
• We've been getting something like 27-to-1 compression, so it's been really good.

Because of the speed and storage efficiency, we have no complaints from the customer and we don't have to buy as much space, because we can compress it.

I know we're looking at cloud solutions, so maybe if they have something cloud-based, that might be something. It could be important soon. Right not it's not but it could change soon for us.

Two years.

We haven't had any down-time yet. So far the disks are really reliable, so I'm happy about that.

We haven't had to buy any new flash for a while because of the compression. So far, being able to compress the data has been able to help us save money on buying more disks.

I haven't had to use it yet. I've been able to do it myself so far.

NetApp's been responsive on other issues. So far, on the flash side, I haven't had any issues to have to call them.

We needed something quick for our SQL DBAs, so that was the recommended path that we take, and it's been great so far.

We were using the 600 Gig drives, regular SCSI drives, and they weren't fast enough. We switched because of the complaints of how slow the disk worked prior to us moving over to the flash.

We had a vendor help us, but it seemed like it was pretty straightforward.

Our primary use case is for SQL databases. We use it for block storage.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for a mission-critical storage system, based on our experience, because of the speed. We have a cluster, so the high availability. Those are the two.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Dependability, like at 3:00 in the morning, if I need help, they're there. That's really number one for me.
• The willingness to be able to train me so I can do it and I don't have to constantly call them.

Those are the two, my major factors.

To a colleague in another company who's researching a similar product I would say, "Go for it." If they don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night saying their backups are slow, they've got to go with the fast disks.

• Data availability
• Speed

Being able to keep the system up - five nines are better - so I have that system online and have that data available to our customers. And the new flash stuff is really fast.

The ability to manage very easily, and the replication between sites for backups is also very easy to use. And it stays up.

I'm just keeping a really close eye on where NVMe goes and how that's going to affect the next lifecycle of disk and connectivity to the server. So that's what I'm watching for.

One thing they could improve right now is support. Other than that I've been pretty happy.

Stability for us has been good. We've had a few bumps, a few bugs, but it's based on the new hardware platform.

Scalability is great. In the cluster, being able to add nodes as needed, and to be able to move data around within the cluster to balance the workload on the nodes is just crazy easy.

We use technical support a lot. It's doing better. It's got some hurdles to overcome but they're certainly doing better. I can see them making progress towards what they need to be, but it's a little hard to get through level one.

When we get through level one and get to the back-end guys, we definitely have the right guys.

It was lifecycle for us. Equipment had aged out so it was time to replace.

Since we already had it running on a fast system, we just added them to the cluster and moved the data, without the customers even knowing. Just seamless.

We use it for Oracle databases and for our virtual environment, and use it for file storage, not block storage.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage before we purchased it was that we could use them for general purpose storage, didn't really think of them as high-performance, but they're definitely there now. We are likely to consider them for our mission critical storage because we've been running on them now for eight years and they've been running our critical applications, so they've proven it to us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they've got to have a pretty good track record. We don't do business with very small companies because we're a pretty big enterprise, fast customer; so they've got to be up in the reviews. We use reviews to tell us all of those quadrants and where they sit, and then we typically do an evaluation and an RFP among the big players in those fields, and then select a choice.

For a colleague who is considering a similar solution, I would tell them to definitely consider what NetApp is doing and how easy it is to use and migrate data.

The most valuable features are the deduplication and compression, along with NetApp's Snapshot technology.

I'm looking forward to the compaction feature after the code upgrade in a few months.

We have been looking for a flash solution that scales horizontally along with a proven application integration stack. NetApp has been helpful and stable, and enabled us to buy capacity as needed, as well as help in quickly refreshing UAT/DEV environments as needed.

The product still uses the concept of decoupling hardware with multiple HA pairs where system resources like CPU/memory is bound to a single controller. This approach definitely helps keep the system more resilient and stable, but it makes the environment a little complex for the end user to decide where to place their application for best performance. This is being mitigated by a few of the performance and automation tools they provide, but it may not be the most efficient approach in real time.

I have used it for one year.

There were no issues with stability.

Scalability in regards to capacity hasn't been an issue. The product really scales well.

With regard to performance, storage pools/aggregates are tied to a single node, so a storage device/LUN can only use CPU/memory of that particular node.

NetApp technical support has been excellent for years and they are also improving with their deep software engineering skills/customer reports.

We used to deploy other large storage vendor products that didn't integrate well with the application stack. Automation and efficiency has been a driver in the company, which made us switch to NetApp.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Snapshot/FlexClone are the core licenses that I would recommend to others. Opt for a converged infrastructure like FlexPod, where the Cisco UCS server platform is involved.

We evaluated other large flash vendors including EMC and Pure. Every vendor has their own niche in the flash industry.

Decide your current and future requirements in terms of performance, capacity scaling, application (SQL/Oracle/SharePoint/Exchange/SAP) integration, storage efficiency (dedupe/compression), operational overhead, etc., and decide on a vendor based on it.

No vendor is perfect in every aspect, so chose the vendor based on your requirements and test them!!!

It is cost-effective flash for us. It's a platform that we've used for quite a few years. We've been NetApp customers for probably about eight years right now. You don't have to go in and re-learn any kind of new interface; it's using basically the same interface. Provisioning is ultra-fast and it just works.

We had a few databases that were using SQL databases that we were having some performance issues with. We moved them over to FAS and, no more performance issues. Basically, you throw a ton of hardware at a problem and that fixes it.

A lot of the applications that we use are canned applications. We don't actually have the ability to go in and modify them. We’re kind of handed a bad deal in some aspects. We go in, we put that stuff on flash to see whether we can make this thing perform the way it's supposed to. We really don't have the option of going in and changing the code.

I recently attended a conference and one of the sessions was about performance data with ONTAP 9. They've addressed some of the issues that I'd like to see in that, such as being able to see where your latency is, and how much performance you have left in the array before you need to start looking at what we need to start moving workloads around.

It would be a little bit nice if the monitoring was a little bit better and smoother, but we've not had any issues from that perspective. In the future, I don't want to have any of those issues.

We've had no stability issues so far with it; in fact, I've not lost a disk out of it.

Scalability is not something that we're going to be concerned with right now, as far as adding; we can always add a tray. It's non-disruptive. That's great.

For flash, we did use professional services to come in and help us get it set up but other than that, we've not had to make any phone calls about it. It's pretty straightforward.

At the time, we had been NetApp customers for quite some time. We had been using a FAS3220 and we were starting to see performance issues. Our sales engineer said, “Why don't you guys try take a look at this?” We did some research on it. We actually POC'd it with a few others, that will probably remain nameless at this point in time, and obviously, NetApp outperformed the others; oh, we loved that.

Well we were a 7-mode shop and we were switching to CDOT. There's a little bit of a transition there. I won't say it's overly complicated; it's just some new things to get used to.

The setup complexity is why I have not given it a perfect rating; not that it's a big deal. We had professional services come and help us do that but going from 7-mode to CDOT was quite a jump.

I have a feeling that’s pretty common. We were going through the conversion on all of our arrays. We currently have three. It's getting easier as we go through the process more and I understand it. It would be a lot better if the transition was a lot more smoother.

A lot of companies will tell you that they're the best at what they do. As a company, I think it's very important that you look at POCs to see if you can get them. Everybody can tell you they have the best product, but until you can actually prove it on your workload, you really don't know 100% for sure.

When selecting a vendor to work with, as a company, we have had a tendency to just go and buy the "best of breed," which sometimes included arrays from multiple vendors. As a company, we have five different brands of arrays. You can't become an expert in something if you have five different arrays to work with. What we're trying to do as a company is to align to say, best of breed being, this is fantastic as a NAS appliance so we're going to look at that and say, maybe we should look towards getting that. I think we're taking our shotgun approach and we're kind of moving it down to where you can be more specialized in what you do. As I’ve mentioned, NetApp is fantastic; it does block, it does NAS. It's a one-stop shop.

• 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.

The speed, we have multiple apps with high IO requirements (Hadoop, Mongo, and some monitoring tools), we’re using our monitoring tools to spin up and spin down our environment.

Flexibility, being able to network multiple 880 series together to increase speed. We’re building a four head environment with goal of 500,000 IOPS/second. With the amount of data from monitoring tools and data storage, we need incredible speeds.

We've been using NetApp products for 15 years.

No issues encountered, and none are anticipated.

As we continue forward, we can add additional heads with same IOPS.

From what we’ve seen so far, we’re very happy with potential.

I think NetApps improved our organization in customer experience and system management. It gives the customer options when they move their system to the cloud. I think the cloud solution from NetApp is very good for customers when they have a plan to use cloud services.

I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product.

It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system.

I have been using NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) for more than three years.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very stable.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very scalable. I think the scalability of NetApp is the best because they have a custom solution, and it can scale well.

NetApp technical support is very professional and good.

The initial setup isn't really completed. It's easy.

NetApp is a good choice because it's not only for a normal application, but it can also integrate with Nvidia for AI solutions.

I would tell potential users that NetApp is one of the best primary storage systems with many good features. I think it's a good choice for storage services.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) a nine.