NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The most valuable features are inline deduplication and compression.

It's enabled us to move all of our database tempdb locations to the AFF and save 70% on storage costs.

It's greatly improved our tempdb access. In our environment, we tend to use and abuse tempdb and as such moving our database tempdb locations over to that device has improved performance quite dramatically.

Beyond the setup complexity issues I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of the things that I wanted to utilize – transparent vol migration, transparent LUN migration, reassignment of volumes from one HA pair to another – have all been solved with either cluster mode or 9.0. Those are things that we do on a daily basis.

It's just as stable as any other NetApp device, that is, very stable.

We haven't done a whole lot of scaling yet in our AFF solution. However, it appears to be quite scalable and now, with ONTAP 9, you can go up to 12 SAN nodes; it's been quite dramatically increased.

In general, I have not used technical support.

I was involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. We decided to go with an all-flash solution for our ESX environment specifically because we had a business initiative to virtualize our database platform. In doing so, it was not performing as well as we would like on the spinning disk. Moving to an all-flash solution has dramatically decreased the OS latencies and increased performance of the OS, which in turn improved the performance of the overall application.

We were previously using a NetApp FAS with the 10,000-rpm SAS disks; the 2 1/2" ones, the little ones.

A cluster mode setup is quite complex, generally speaking, and quite involved; not as intuitive as I would like it to be. A one-click install would be nice, something where you can just have a GUI-driven system where you put in the IPs you want to use and the interfaces you want to install them on and call it good.

We went to several different vendors; the two top contenders were NetApp and Pure Storage. Ultimately, we went with NetApp for a couple of reasons: 1) the scalability of the clustering system, and 2) we're already a NetApp shop and so adding on to an existing NetApp environment made it quite a bit easier, especially with replication and data management techniques that NetApp already employed. The storage grid that NetApp is deploying across the infrastructure makes transparency and migration of data from one device to another environment a lot more seamless. Whereas Pure Storage is fast, NetApp is faster and their devices are data islands. Taking a step back, we just didn't feel Pure Storage was going to work for us in the long run.

Our only experience with Pure is the demos that they brought us; nothing more than that. We talked to several of their customer bases and although they claim a lot of nondisruptive operations, they tend to be disruptive.

We've worked with NetApp and it's kind of tried and true. We do upgrades, we do hardware replacements and everything is transparent and doesn't affect the users, which is really nice, especially considering we're a software-as-a-service company. The less we can take our customers offline, the better.

If you've already got NetApp, you can't go wrong.

It's a fantastic system and it's solved a lot of our issues for application performance and it's probably one of the best storage systems I've worked with and yet the only reason I dock it a few points is because there's still the future. There's problems we have yet to solve, unknowns. There's always going to be issues in the future, we just don't know what they are yet, whether it's NPS storage, whether it's migration to the cloud. We have a business initiative to move to the cloud.

There are a few oddities, only because some of our systems are legacy. We have the 7-mode system, which is our primary platform, and moving to the cloud is a little bit painful for that system. You have to spin up the 7MTT tool to get it to transfer the data and the 7MTT tool was not designed with cloud in mind. It was designed for migration of a 7-mode system to a cluster mode system within the same environment. When you're trying to move it from one environment to another environment to a different site with a whole new IP scheme with a whole new infrastructure, it's just a little bit on the kludgy side. There are things that don't make a lot of sense on that front. For example, it limits SnapMirrors to four per cloud ONTAP instance. We want more than that. We want hundreds. By default, the cloud instance is supposed to support 50 and yet we can only do four with the 7MTT.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a storage vendor to work with are going to be speed, reliability and support. The better the support is, the easier they are to work with, the more likely we are to choose them.

For me it’s important that my flash system is a part of the NetApp storage system. It’s just an extension of it. My guys can use the same comments, the same tools, the same application integration as they did before. The VDI migration for example, my VDI guy doesn’t change anything. That’s a really good offer for us because then all the tools we can reuse all the integration. It’s just another disk wipe that’s there and that, for me, is the most important reason.

Flash is, for us, a default for databases, VDI, and VMware. We still have some other disks which we bought two years ago, so we migrate step by step. The VDI was the nicest to start with because their benefits were the highest as we got unpredicted workloads for the VDI’s and that is very well handled by the flash.

First, when you think of flash, everybody says that it’s faster, but that’s not the main reason. Of course it’s all related to it, but for example, with the VDI, we were very pleased with our previous disk system which also aligned with flash rules. But I was not pleased that my guys were spending a lot of time in managing their VDI’s, taking care of it, that they don't do the same thing at the same moment. When they were deploying, it was by 10, for example, not 300 at a time. They did that at night instead of during the day because they were generating a lot of iron on the disk system and the performance were going down.

Honestly, we were very pleased with the average speed in the past. But it’s now consistent. The performance is consistent and that’s much more important than it being faster.

They did a very good job already now with 8.3. If we also compare 8.2. to 8.3, there are a lot of performance improvements already there.

It needs to be cheaper, as we want more but can't afford it.

We've used it since April or May.

In general with NetApp AFF, especially from version 8.1, it’s very stable, and with 8.2 I even can say that it will never die. That’s, for us as a hospital, very important because we’re always on, we don’t have maintenance windows, we don’t have time for big changes as we’re always on the fly, so updating for us is beyond us.

That’s not a problem. It scales enormously well. We have more than six petabytes today. We have a lot of 8000’s in different guides with MetroCluster, and then because we’re already clustered from 2000’s, there’s 7-Mode systems that we now are migrating to the cluster.

We always have tickets that takes longer than you expect, but I don’t see a difference with other companies. Sometimes it works very fast and then all is good and some of the issues take a little bit long for us. And also what I find very important is your critical tickets, are they handled perfectly?

We tested another solution, but it didn't integrate well.

We're very knowledgable with NetApp, is the initial setup was very straightforward. If you're anew customer, the whole system comes complete pre-configured, so that's very, very simple. If you buy the pieces separately, then you have to configure it yourself, and if you're not knowledgable with NetApp, it's going to take some time to complete.

We do it in-house. We do it completely by ourselves because we like to do this. Also it’s important because we really want to understand it very well. How the system works in general and by doing the set up by yourselves it gives you already the knowledge of all traffic.

Go with flash. We not have more free time because we can just press a button and deploy three of 500 VDI's at once. We don't have to invest in high-performance disks because we use flash.

We find the flexibility of having the access protocols all in one box and clustered Data ONTAP to be the most valuable features.

It's quite simple to install and fast to integrate into existing ecosystems. Also, it's very easy to handle the monitoring on an enterprise grade.

For the company I installed this for, their data warehouse system and ERP is ten times faster than it was before when they were using hard discs. We can work much faster on customer situations and requests than before.

Inline deduplication would be great to have, but everything else is fantastic.

We've been using it for six months to help run VDI, server virtualization, OLTP databases, date warehouse, and mail subsystems.

No failures yet at the four customers I’ve installed this for.

It is expandable as you can mix it with normal High-Availability pairs, so it's very scalable.

Customer support issues have normally been cleared up in one business day, so it's been really great.

Normal issues like performance problems and parts replacement are infrequent and are taken care of quickly.

I’ve only been working with NetApp products.

It only took one day for the initial setup of a normal system, including performance and system monitoring. So setup is quite fast and straightforward.

I implement it for our customers.

Partner choice is important when using enterprise storage. They can give you a lot more help when you have questions, train you, and give you other managed services if you need. You can combine this with normal hardware support. There are three levels of partners--

Normal reseller: You order the product and NetApp will send you a technician to install the system.

Professional Services Partner: They install the system and implement a complete solution like VDI environments. They will not normally provide support cases, and it normally reverts to NetApp.

Service Certified partner: They will give you the hardware or replace your hardware (normal hardware service), help you with updates and maintenance work, install the AFF in the field, and they can give you a more managed services background. This same partner can help you with hardware replacement, software hiccups, and problems with the surrounding ecosystem.

The features most valuable to us are--

• A-SIS deduplication
• vServer DR, which is a new feature in v8.3.1

The peak loads on a software install for VDI desktops now have lower latency. Previously, we had a 3240 with HDDs. For normal operation the HDDs with flash cache were fine, but for virus scans and software installations/patching, we would start at midnight and end at three or four am. However, sometimes at four deduplication operations would start and that runs concurrently with the installation that isn’t complete. So as a consequence, we had terrible latency until 11 or 12 so our users were unhappy with that situation. With the AFF, we have absolutely no problem at all.

It’s still new so the only thing I can think of is if the price for SSDs comes down and we can switch everything to flash, that would be an improvement.

I've used it for three years. We're currently running VDI on it with ONTAP.

We had an easy deployment because we have a VMware environment where we use vMotion from the old FAS to the new AFF.

Very stable, 100% uptime.

It scales to our needs.

8/10.

8/10.

We used FAS and we switched because of the above reasons.

It was straightforward.

We used a vendor team who were 10/10.

Straightforward.

The situation before was terrible; we had things to do and couldn’t. It was a high pressure situation. 3,000 people couldn’t work for four hours. Now they can start working on time.

No other options were evaluated.

It’s a good product, performs well and is easy to get up and running. If you need the speed, go for it.

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.

The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers. 

We should be able to manage NetApp AFF as per the desired usage and needs. 

I have been using the product for five years. 

NetApp AFF is stable. 

NetApp AFF's support is excellent. 

Positive

We have seen ROI with the product's use. 

NetApp AFF has helped us unify and manage the shares under one domain. 

The product has helped to reduce operational latency. 

The tool has helped us optimize costs with its deduplication, data efficiency, and compression features. 

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for IBM and SQL workloads. 

The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency. 

The Bezels need improvement. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

NetApp AFF's stability, reliability, availability, and performance are top-notch. 

The solution is scalable. 

NetApp AFF's support is good. 

Positive

The tool's deployment is easy. 

I am comfortable with the pricing, which is fair compared to others. 

We wanted to enhance performance with the solution's implementation. 

We were able to simplify the infrastructure and get high performance for our business. It has reduced operational latency. 

We have been able to optimize costs by 40 percent. 

NetApp AFF has helped us with power saving by reducing the footprint of the data center. 

I rate it a nine out of ten.