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CTO at Pronet Security
Real User
High availability and improved performance are key features
Pros and Cons
  • "High availability"
  • "Stability could be improved."

How has it helped my organization?

  • Improves performance
  • reduces CPU usage
  • Efficient use of RAM

What is most valuable?

  • Price/performance
  • High availability

What needs improvement?

Stability could be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three to five years.
Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues with scalability.

How are customer service and support?

In the first years it was great, after that it has become worse.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

NetApp is getting too expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

HPE 3PAR.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
PeerSpot user
it_user527397 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at University of Iowa
Vendor
The systems actually started acting like real computers, not like a virtual system.

What is most valuable?

The valuable feature for us was, we started our VMware solution on a mid-tier NetApp solution. When we went to All Flash FAS our changes went form about a 5 or 10 millisecond response time to 1 millisecond. The systems actually started acting like real computers, not like a virtual system.

How has it helped my organization?

The benefits for our organization are that our customers actually noticed, and that's pretty hard to do sometimes. It was really good because they actually noticed the response times changing and that our virtualization system actually became more responsive for them.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Our stability has been very good. We haven't seen any down-time for five or six years probably.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability on NetApp is unforeseen. I'm sure we're going to buy more. I'm sure the fact that we are using clustered NetApp, we can take that stuff and move the next heads into the next cluster and then just migrate things, and nobody notices in the background. That's probably the best thing about the scalability.

How is customer service and technical support?

The technical support is really good. We don't use it that much because I have a few guys on my team that are really good with the product. But the technical support, whenever we need them, is great. We actually work with Sirius Computer Solutions, our partner. They help us figure out where we should upgrade to. They'll come in and they'll do technology things to make sure that we are going for the next solution that will help our product.

How was the initial setup?

We did the initial setup. I would say it was an eight out of 10. There were some issues but it was okay. They helped us fix it, and we figured it out. That's mostly because we just like to do it ourselves, because we want to see what we're doing and what's in our datacenter.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, we evaluated other solutions but the NetApp solution seemed to be the best one for what we were doing, and for simplicity of moving from the current solution to the next solution.

What other advice do I have?

If a colleague was evaluating storage solutions I would tell them to buy NetApp. The decompression, the dedup, all those things that happen, are just better then everybody else's platform.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF
April 2025
Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user522096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at LDS church
Vendor
Raw speed has reduced our latencies significantly and management tools make admin easy
Pros and Cons
  • "Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
  • "Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."

How has it helped my organization?

Our biggest use cases for the AFF are virtualization and data bases. We use it for file storage.

For any of the performance intents of applications, it's just been night and day from when we put them on. We had them on spinning disk, then converted them to the AFF. The latencies have become really low and my customers are all happier for it.

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

What is most valuable?

Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed.

I like what they're doing with their management tools. It makes it really easy to manage them. They're always improving and going with those. It's been really great, especially with the APIs. We can use them to make our calls and to manage it. It's been good for us.

What needs improvement?

Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those. If we could find some way of not getting so many, so that the alerts that do come in are real and valid, and not so many false positives, that would make a big difference.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We've been really happy with their stability. We did run into a bug that nobody else knew about and they came up with a patch for us to help fix it, and it's been rock solid ever since. So we're happy.

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

With their clustered ONTAP we can scale as big as we need to.

How is customer service and technical support?

I've been happy with them. They've gotten me the answers every time I've called in. I haven't had any problems with getting the escalation I need. I just ask for it and they're able to kick it up and get the response that we need.

How was the initial setup?

It was a little complex. There were a few changes that we were not privy to. For instance, they had the 40 gig converged NIC that we didn't even know was available until we got it. Learning how to adjust that and manage that was a little bit different, it was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not horrible at all.

What other advice do I have?

We've been a customer of NetApp for a long time and they're a good, strong company and we have a close partnership with them. We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF because they're a great company to work with. They put out some good products.

The most important criteria for us when selecting a vendor would be

  • somebody who is stable
  • somebody whose industry standing is a big deal
  • and then price point.

They're a good strong system. I don't think that anything is perfect, but it's pretty close. It takes care of everything that we need. It's a fantastic solution. We haven't regretted getting it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user750720 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Inline deduplication and integration with SnapManager allow us to set the storage with the Exchange team and forget it

How has it helped my organization?

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.

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't had to deal with scaling yet.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user527199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mission Command Systems at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
I can quickly and efficiently bring the system up and shut it down, when necessary.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is how user friendly it is. For somebody in my position, I have to be able to bring the system up quickly, efficiently, and also shut it down, if there's a power outage, quickly and efficiently, without having troubles. It also supports VMware. That's what we use, but we use the NetApp as our filer; it’s our only filer.

How has it helped my organization?

I attended a recent NetApp Insight conference to find out more about how we can benefit from it, to understand it more so, that way, I can employ it better during high-tension situations.

I never see the financial side, so I don’t know if we have seen any financial benefits. In terms of the manpower to run it, it’s me; I can do it myself. As a former grunt, I've been able to manage the system easily, ever since we got it four years ago. As far as administration, it only takes one person.

What needs improvement?

The graceful shut down feature is no longer there, in the version that I have. I believe I'm using ONTAP 7.0.x. on the FAS2040 and we’re also using the FAS2020.
I don't know where it needs improvement because I'm not that well-versed in it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is excellent. I've had no issues in the last six years that I've had NetApp flash storage. Just recently, on one system that's been out and had a lot of controversy in it, we had a filer fail on us. We were able to get a filer the following day. It was excellent.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability was another reason why I attended a recent NetApp Insight conference. That's what I wanted to find out: where we're moving ahead, from here.

We have enough capacity for what we do. I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems. Everything works; no problem.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I didn't evaluate anybody; higher levels than me did that. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right. My organization’s not going to give a contract to nobody, for a bad product.

Right now, I'm concentrating our collapse-down strategy, where we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I went to the NetApp conference. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer; if the filer's going to need to expand. If we're going to be migrating to a new filer, etc.

How was the initial setup?

To get my certification to build it, I found it a little bit grueling. Everything is tailored to our specific organization, following the documentation. It's different documentation than what NetApp uses. I’m not familiar with the NetApp filer documentation.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user527337 - PeerSpot reviewer
Datacenter, NOC & IT Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
It definitely has some advantages for running database transactions. SnapMirrors will give us the opportunity to virtualize the database.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the speed. Quite frankly, we got a smoking deal on it. We like the integration with UCS. With the number of transactions we use, using NFS mounts has not proved successful in the past. AFF definitely has some advantages for running database transactions.

SnapMirroring is also valuable. Previously, we’ve just had localized storage in the servers with RAID 5 and we’d just run backups. Having SnapMirrors is going to be awesome. It also gives us the opportunity to virtualize the database. We can just snapshot the things. When one dies, rather than try to do a restore, we can just pull out the latest snapshot and let replication catch up from there.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've had it for about a year; possibly a little more. We've pretty much just done a proof of concept on it until right now. Right now, we are rolling our databases onto it.

We're using UCS for front end, and because we need the speed, we're spinning up databases with all the data on AFF.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I believe it will be a stable solution. I realize we're going to lose disks over time. That's the nature of SSDs. They’re are getting better, and I presume they are going to get better in the future. With our support for spinning disks in the past – we have very little monitoring – basically, the filer tells us, “Hey, you’ve got a bad disk,” and the next day the disk shows up. We have spares, so we just pop a new one in. We’ve had excellent support.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

As far as I know, it will scale with us. With our databases, we're not going to need that large of a footprint. However, we have some other projects that we're testing out at this time. I believe scalability will be an issue. As far as I know, we’ll just pop more shelves in and we’ll get the scalability.

How is customer service and technical support?

Technical support is outstanding, period. They're fast. We know people there. As a matter of fact, our previous engineer is now an SC again. He came from NetApp, worked for us for about seven years and now he's back at NetApp. Our former CTO was at NetApp. I think my manager was at NetApp. If not, he was at a partner of ours. So, we have a very good relationship. When we call for support, they answer. You cannot say that about everybody.

How was the initial setup?

A lot of what we've been doing is migrating from 7-mode. We have run into some pain points. I don't know that it's necessarily NetApp's fault. A lot of it is just our inexperience. Some things we hadn't really thought of; moving the LIFs, that sort of thing. We've had some major network storms that we weren't expecting. Had we read deep enough into the documents, I think we would've found that before we tried it.

What other advice do I have?

Depending on what you're looking for, I recommend looking at FlexPod as well as AFF. Price it out with some of the other solutions that are out there. I am not that familiar with what EMC and some of the others have to say. Compare and contrast, and figure out what is it you're trying to do. I used to be in the sales role in a very large company that's not around anymore. Customers always appreciated it if when I told them, “Hey, you're overbuilding this. You're going to spend way more than you need to.” That’s my advice.

When I select a vendor to work with, I look at a little bit of everything. With reputation, obviously, NetApp has the leg up there. We have a deep and longstanding relationship with them. When new vendors come along, we like transparency. We’ve had people come in and say, “Oh, we have this solution. It’ll butter your toast and fix all your problems, all at the same time,” and clearly that's not the case.

We had a vendor come in one time that was going to do quite a bit with our databases until they saw the size of our database. They very politely said, “Well, we can’t scale to that.” We thanked them, and I appreciate that kind of honesty. Obviously, we didn't do business with them, but later on down the road, if they came in and said, “We have a solution now,” I am more inclined to listen to that.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user550299 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees
Video Review
Vendor
Predictable performance has stayed below a millisecond. Low latency has been good.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable thing I have seen since we've got it is that predictable performance has stayed below a millisecond, which was not the experience we've had with spinning disk. So, I was looking forward to that coming in and giving my customers predictable performance, and it’s proven to be doing that for us.

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

What needs improvement?

We're having a hard time deciding what goes on flash and what doesn't now. When we're doing replication, where you have an all-flash array and we're replicating between sites, we want this flash but we want to have SATA for replication, as well, for a target. So, we're having a hard time deciding, should we go FAS or should we go all flash?

While at the recent Insight conference, I talked to some of the more senior technical guys. They were able to give me the difference in impact on performance from a FAS running SSD and an all flash running SSD. There's not that big of a gap. And so, that gave me more confidence that we could go hybrid if we need to on our smaller sites, and then still get the replication done on low cost and not lose the big performance that we got out of flash.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been very stable, just like the other products that we've had from them in the past.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We bought small and hoped that the efficiencies would bring in what we need, and it did. But with everything going on in our environment, we actually increased it so that we can have a little more capacity. Right now, it's probably 2% utilized, which is completely different than a spinning disk, which is 70% utilized. So, the scalability's just easy to do; it's incredible.

How is customer service and technical support?

Support, I think could use a little bit of help. We can't seem to get to the backend guys fast enough. We've had conversations with them about that. So, we would love to see some of that going on and get better support quicker, to the right guy.

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

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was very straightforward, with the new optimized arrays that you can purchase and they come in with a 10-minute setup. That did take away a lot of the steps that we used to do before. So, it did come in, we were able to just plug it in and in 10 minutes have it up and running.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We were already a NetApp shop, so for us this was just adding it to the cluster. And it was time for us to do that with a hardware refresh, so we really didn't compare to others.

What other advice do I have?

The most important criteria when I’m looking for a vendor are stability and availability. Cost is always thrown in there, but it's not the first one. And then support is becoming more and more important to us; being able to get to the right person at the right time.

From the All Flash, from being a NetApp customer for quite a while, having all protocols in one box is very powerful. And so, I would say, that would be a great thing to consider when you're considering the all flash array is, most of the all flash arrays out in the market today are block. They do have the file protocol, they're leading in the industry with it. And we've switched over to the file protocols quite some time ago. And we're seeing much more savings in operational costs because of the file. We take out the zoning and all of the block stuff that comes with it, and we're being very successful with file and we've reduced our operational costs significantly because of it.

I'm very happy with it and the low latency has been good. It's met the mark.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees
Vendor
NetApp vs. XtremIO

Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS?

I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive Operations.

As a benchmark let’s compare FAS to EMC’s solutions – I fully appreciate that EMC has taken a best of breed approach, but my feeling is that for most non-enterprise customers this is not a sustainable strategy – customers want simplicity and ease of use, and you are not going to get that by deploying four different storage platforms to meet your needs.

I have chosen EMC because they are the overall market share leader and they have the broadest set of storage products available – so let’s compare FAS with VNX, VPLEX, XtremIO, Isilon and Data Domain:

NetApp FAS supports All-Disk, Hybrid Flash and All-Flash data stores - that meet the needs of any kind of application workload

The VNX is a very good All-Disk and Hybrid Flash array and XtremIO is a very good All-Flash array, but you need two completely different products to provide the functionality.

NetApp FAS eliminates silos and provides seamless scalability - to address Server Virtualisation, Virtual Desktop, Database and File storage needs in one scale-up and scale-out solution, that can start small and grow large

VNX is optimal for general Server Virtualisation and Databases and XtremIO excels when it comes to large scale Virtual Desktop and ultra-high performance database requirements. The VNX scales-up, but not out, and XtremIO scales-out, but not up.

NetApp FAS has fully unified SAN and NAS storage - to enable consistent management across all protocols and therefore flexibility in their use

VNX has a separate NAS OS which requires its own management (but it is integrated into a single UI along with SAN), XtremIO is SAN only and Isilon is NAS only.

NetApp FAS provides many storage efficiency technologies - including De-duplication, Inline Zero Write Elimination, Compression, Thin-Provisioning, Zero-cost Cloning and High-performance Double Disk Protection

XtremIO is excellent at all of these (just lacks the Double Disk Protection which I believe it will get shortly), neither VNX or Isilon are anywhere near as strong.

NetApp FAS has Flash optimised writes - with a SSD warranty that has no restrictions on the number of drive writes

As expected XtremIO excels whereas VNX and Isilon are not optimised.

NetApp FAS provides 24×7 continuous availability - including proven enterprise RAS, Non-disruptive Operations, and Metrocluster Site Protection

Neither VNX or XtremIO provide the ability to perform Non-Disruptive Operations like FAS. Introducing VPLEX does provide these capabilities along with excellent Metrocluster site protection.

NetApp FAS has integrated data protection - with near instant creation of snapshot based backups and automated offsite replication

Neither the VNX or XtremIO have these capabilities, to a lesser extent Isilon comes close, but it is limited to the workloads it supports (i.e. it cannot be used for Server or Desktop Virtualisation). EMC’s data protection solutions are typically built using their Data Domain De-duplication appliances and conventional backup software (interestingly they have started to integrate Data Domain directly with the replication engine within the new VMAX3 – no doubt a sign of things to come).

NetApp FAS is Public Cloud integrated - to support hybrid Disaster Recovery and Cloud Bursting

Currently there is no VNX equivalent of Cloud ONTAP for AWS, but this is expected sometime in 2015.

NetApp FAS is designed for VMware vSphere - with support for Virtual Volumes, VAAI, Site Recovery Manager and vCenter management

As expected VNX and XtremIO have support for all the relevant integrations with vSphere. Where FAS has an advantage is that NetApp have already announced support for Virtual Volumes so existing hardware will be able to take advantage of Virtual Volumes – not sure we will be able to say the same about VNX.

NetApp FAS is designed for VMware Horizon View - with support for high-performance hardware accelerated Full Clones (using VAAI) and Linked Clones (using VCAI), and up to 160,000 IOPS at 80% Writes per array

As expected for large scale Virtual Desktop projects XtremIO excels and the only area where it is lacking is that it doesn’t support VCAI as it requires NFS.

NetApp FAS is designed for Microsoft Hyper-V - with support for SMB 3.0 Continuous Availability Shares and Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)

VNX has good support, whereas XtremIO lacks support for both SMB 3.0 and ODX.

I am confident that you could substitute EMC with any other storage vendor and you would end up with the same result – no single storage platform is anywhere near as feature rich as FAS.

So is FAS and Clustered Data ONTAP perfect?Absolutely not, there are undoubtedly areas whereby the traditional SAN arrays still have advantages (mostly around active/active controller architectures and metrocluster capabilities).

So what else would I like to see from FAS?

  • Sharing of drives across controllers – we are already starting to see this with the new drive and Flash Pools partitioning features
  • Detaching of the drives from the controllers – so that the failure of an HA pair within a cluster does not result in downtime
  • MetroCluster
    • Granular fail over - so volumes or even Virtual Volumes can be “moved” between sites
    • IP replication - either using FCIP bridges or native IP connectivity
    • Active/Active - so volumes/LUNs can be active on both sides of the cluster
  • Erasure coding – to eliminate idle spares and enable rapid drive rebuilds
  • Encryption – provided by the controllers rather than drives
  • Advanced QoS – to enable setting of Service Level Objectives rather than just limits
  • Integrated file archiving – to move older files to secondary storage or the cloud

Conclusion

I truly believe that there is no single storage platform that comes close to matching the range of capabilities of a NetApp FAS, but what do you think?

Do you work for a vendor or are you an end-user of a competitive storage platform? If you are let me know what you think – what are the downsides of the FAS architecture from your point of view?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are Partners with NetApp.
PeerSpot user
it_user264375 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user264375Emergency Medicine Resident at King Saud University
Vendor

Netapp

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Buyer's Guide
Download our free NetApp AFF Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free NetApp AFF Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.