NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We do storage across the United States.

We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users.

• Uptime
• Ease of use

I would like them to roll in global monitoring instead of having to buy another product for it. If it was built into the solution, that would be awesome.

We haven't had any issues, so far.

We are scaling up to the new solution. We haven't had a lot of scalability yet. We are looking forward to what it can do.

Our technical support experience hasn't been very good. However, we are hoping with our new contract that it will be a lot better.

We were using HPE EVAs, which are very clunky and old, so we moved over to NetApp.

We were just bought out by another company who has been using Dell EMC. They're not happy with that solution, so we brought them into NetApp.

The initial setup was a little complex, because we weren't very knowledgeable in the NetApp at the time. We were using a third-party, and they didn't have a lot of technical individuals, so it took a while to get it out.

We used a reseller, EVOLTECH. It has been okay so far. There are not a lot of technical individuals with their group.

From an application standpoint, we have seen a lot of return investment on the speeds and responsiveness of the actual storage.

NetApp and Pure Storage were on our final shortlist. NetApp just came in with a better price point that my VPs and CIO couldn't refuse.

Do your research. There are a lot of different storage vendors who have a lot things which are good. Pick the one that you feel is best for you.

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

• Price/performance
• High availability

Stability could be improved.

No issues with scalability.

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

NetApp is getting too expensive.

HPE 3PAR.

At this point, performance is the most valuable feature. We're just putting it into production, on a pretty heavy performance-intensive workload. So far, its performed exactly how we wanted it to. Performance is the key on that particular device.

It's offloaded workload that was compromising other workloads because of performance degradation. It's enabled us to take that and isolate it; give it the performance it needs, saving other applications’ performance as well.

We don't have it running ONTAP 9 yet. Upgrading the OS to ONTAP 9 will definitely give us some advantages. From what I saw at a recent NetApp Insight conference, about how ONTAP 9 looks and feels, there are things to look at and learn how to use that, in performance monitoring tools as well. We still had some learning to do about what's available. We're using rudimentary performance monitoring. As far as that goes, the old tools are giving us what we want, but we're looking forward to upgrading to be able to take advantage of better tools.

We are especially looking for better performance monitoring. We want to be able to truly see what the load is doing at any given point in time, and especially if the user wants to know, “We're going to load this up. We want to see what effect it has on it.” We want to be able to give them real-time numbers.

Right now, that’s not easy to do. We can't get to the detailed level that we want to. We believe that that's available going forward.

We've only had it in production a short time. We've had it a total of about six months.

In the short time we’ve had it in production, six months, we haven’t had any stability issues.

We haven't had to scale it out.

We've had to call technical support only because the performance monitoring on it has given us some skewed numbers. Getting back to us on that was a little bit slow, to get us the answer that we really needed to see, but we got the answer that we needed. All is good now.

I wasn’t involved in the decision process to invest in this particular All Flash FAS, but I've been in many, many discussions about going to that technology. I'm part of our team to say, "This is what we think we're going to need based on what we've seen. This could be the right tool for the job." In general, with decisions like this, there’s no one person making the decision.

We were previously running on a different vendor platform. We had that device saturated, and there was nowhere to go with it. The scalability was non-existent. It was disk. This was a good opportunity for us to move into this flash environment with this particular workload because of the performance.

At this point, there really wasn't another player that was going to offer us familiarity with NetApp, for one thing, and what we needed.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are the ease of administration of an appliance; reliability of an appliance; and being able to adequately monitor what's going on with the appliance (which ties in with the administration of it). Support’s got to be on it, especially if it's in production. It's like, “We need help; we need it now.” The vendor has to be there.

Those are probably the three most important criteria. Price comes in there, but you pay a premium for those particular things. If the price point is right and those things are all right, then you've got a great thing going on.

Flash right now is just a hot ticket. If you've got performance-intensive workloads, and because the NetApp suite of tools that can come along with it, then, yes, I would recommend to colleagues that they take a look at it.

It's still pretty new to us, but what we expect it to do, it's doing. As we get more familiar with it, and if we see that we can scale it out and add more to it, I think I would be able to rate it higher pretty easily.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

For us, the most valuable features were the SnapMirroring, deduplication, and inline compression. Now with 9.0, the compaction system, that's actually the big thing that sold us on it besides just the price in general. It was a very well-priced system for what we got. The data dedupe and inline, we're getting substantial rates. I think it's about 60-65% in general. That's a massive savings over what you would get if you didn't have any of that stuff.

We have a job system that runs all the time; people can run what they call campaigns. It drastically increased performance. It decreased times by three times the amount. The amount of the CIFS shares increased from about 128 Mbps – it was only a 1-gig line anyway, to a 10 gig – to about 800 Mbps. The engine actually can't pull enough and it has caused a little issue here and there, because it's basically causing a race condition. We've had to program around race conditions because we haven't had a system that was this fast.

It saved us a lot of time as well, substantial savings.

If they could do the tabbing for the nodes, that would be spectacular. On 9, they offered more insight, so I can't really say that. We haven't upgraded both nodes. We have HA pairs, and one of them is still running 8.3.2. We upgraded our DR solution to nine first just to see if it causes any issues. So far, we haven't seen anything. They have a lot more insight into that; I wish they would have it on 8.3.2 but, what are you going to do?

So far, stability’s been excellent, and the update process was actually incredibly painless. We've upgraded twice now and I am surprised that it didn't cause any issues at all. Usually, you have to have some kind of user intervention. For this product, you just throw the image on there, click update and it's done. You come back about an hour later and you're happy.

The GUI is really good, but if you don't find the option in the GUI, then the CLI is amazing. You can hit Tab and just tab out. The only thing is, they haven't done that on the nodes themselves but I was told they're working on that.

We don't have that big of one yet. We originally quoted out a system of eight nodes, and it was going to be something like 12 GBps. That seemed like substantial amounts, considering what everyone else quoted. However, it actually was going to come in at about the same price for the AFF compared to everyone else's quotes for disks. The reason they went with it is because of the trust with the vendor they were currently using and they just didn't want to leave.

We were using NetApp before, but we evaluated EMC, IBM, HP, Pure Storage, XtremIO and Nimble.

It came down to XtremIO and NetApp. NetApp offered much, much more storage. And the cost difference to buy XtremeIO was huge compared to NetApp. NetApp just totally blew it out of the water on price. We got something like five times the storage for the price. It was really worth testing on that.

Try out what you actually want to do, because that's actually the problem we had; some of our people swore up and down that NetApp wouldn't be able to do compression at the new rates that they got, or that we got. They said that Oracle doesn't compress and so on. We ended up getting them to stick some of their machines on our NetApp, and we showed them that you actually do get it.

We actually bought ours and then we tried to show those other people before they got to the bidding table for theirs. They didn't really want to listen to the facts. They went with IBM. I wouldn't say they were not unhappy or anything. They realized that they could've gotten a lot more if they just went with our ideas instead of their idea. Actually, I was told it was more of a management thing; they actually didn't even want IBM, they wanted Oracle. It all comes down to what the boss says.

• Speed
• Performance
• Low latency

We do not use it now for our customers, but just to manage our criticla internal CRM proposals. It helps us manage our entire CRM. We had problems with latency in the regular NetApp storage devices (many concurent access attemps for small data) and AFF has improved it.

The price needs to come down. Also, it has a learning curve and I needed to learn a lot to do the installation.

We had no problems with deployment.

From what I know, no problem at all with stability.

We have not scaled it yet, but we are thinking about it.

Customer service is perfect every time.

Technical support helps us every time.

We used IBM before, after the contract finished we tested NetApp, and from what I know it filled the hole. It’s excellent. It has flash pool disks on a cluster, and we switched as we got it for a good price. We have a dual strategy with Inter Telecom and normally we get good prices for NetApp products.

I set it up the first time myself. I needed to learn it and read the user guide for it, but it’s easy for technical people.

We tested many products, but no other flash ones.

I would advise you to make sure that you need flash as it is very specific and regular FAS may work for you. However, if you need flash, this is a good product to get.

The most valuable feature for us completely depends on the workload. We've run it on various environments, including VMware. We were able to migrate to VMware with clustered Data ONTAP. That was important for us.

Stability was something that was really wanted to improve on, and we've been ale to do that with AFF. Previously, we had to reprogram every three months or so, so not having to do that with AFF is huge.

Secondly, we do a lot less daily maintenance than we used to. It's a fairly trouble-free system as we simply configure it and pretty much leave it alone.

I had a few issues, but they were easy to fix. I would like for it to be more scalable as the number of shelves is limited.

We installed it in July.

Scalability is difficult. The number of shelves is limited to 2 or 4, and the number of terrabytes we potentially have doesn't match to this limit.

We don't have a lot of contact with technical support because our engineers handle any issues. But the product itself has been excellent.

The initial setup wasn't easy, and in fact took about 6 years. It was a slow start, but of course it was new back then, and it takes time.

We were one of the first and even the engineer had some trouble configuring it for us.

We can't decide for ourselves so we ask the market, this is what we want to do, what should we buy? Then markers come with the products. There isn't a lot of choice.

We've had a good experience with it so far. Right now, we're using it for our customers, but if we were to also use it for ourselves, it would be too small. I'm sure they'll improve in the future, but we'll just have to wait for the solution to support ten to fifteen thousand users.