NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

• CIFS (stable solution)
• Ability to support multiple protocols

• SVM application provisioning: makes it easier to provision applications for VMware, VDI, Oracle, and SQL.
• All flash: low latency and higher IOPS since it’s all flash.

Firmware upgrades consistently continue to be the weak spot in all NetApp products.

For 8 months now.

I have not yet had any stability issues.

I have not had any issues with scalability.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate them 3.5.

On a scale of 1-5, I would rate them 3.5.

Initial setup was complex. In spite of the new CDOT 9, NetApp setup is still complex. It requires configuration of all the network interfaces, SVMs, which can become a little overwhelming.

NetApp is trying to stay in competition and are offering competitive prices to existing/new consumers. The key is being aggressive.

We looked at Pure Storage and Nimble.

Be prepared for a lot of configuration hiccups before being operational.

The most valuable features are speed, latency, and throughput. We have a few workloads where we need speed, high throughput, and fast response time. We have some OLTP applications. It is very useful for that environment.

In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, the other thing is we are short on rack space. We can fit a lot of this storage in less rack space. It actually helps us reduce our cost, and increase efficiency.

Right now, even though they say that you can increase the cluster to a certain number of nodes, internally, the HA is only in two nodes. It is two-node HA architecture internally in the cluster. I think they should try to really scale it out, as a solution. For example, if you have a four-node cluster. Internally, it's still like a two-node HA. You have two-node HA and two-node HA, and you can't combine that into a four-node cluster. That is, we can combine them but internally, it's still two-node clustering. If one node goes down, you are exposed. You are only on one node in your HA.

I have already spoken with the engineering folks. Maybe they can have a common back plane, so that every node can see all the shelves. They'll have to go to their hardware folks.

It is very stable. We have been using it for the last 2-3 years and so far, it's been very stable.

We don't scale it too much because we don't want a lot of workload in the same cluster. I'm sure we can scale it if we want to.

Technical support is really good; very experienced folks; very helpful; and easy to reach them. So far, so good.

We were using the hard disk version of ONTAP in our environment. We did a PoC with All-Flash. We saw the benefits of it, so we implemented it in our environment.

Initial setup was very simple, very straightforward. We knew exactly what to do, so it was easy.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other options, but I don't think we can name them. We saw a lot of benefits. Here, we can have multiple protocols. The other vendors were only supporting specific protocols on their storage. We thought this would be more scalable in the future.

So far, my experience with ONTAP is really good. It is highly available, easy to use, easily scalable, easy to implement, and so far, we are really happy with it. We are really happy with the performance, ROI, and the cost.

I would give it a perfect rating if they reduced the cost – it is still expensive – and then, what I have mentioned about HA.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a product are that it is highly available, scalable, and easy to use. It should be able to work in our environment, basically; in a mixed-workload environment.

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.

I would say the speed is the most valuable feature; the performance. It's a lot faster than any other drives out there.

I don't know if we will be looking at more features because our company, the in-house environment, has been looking into going cloud, so it's not just NetApp. We need to look at cloud-based solutions, too.

See my initial setup answer as well.

I have been using it for almost one year.

It's been pretty stable. We've been using NetApp for 15 or 20 years now and we are more or less used to it. It's been stable; a lot of filers. Even when they go off support, sometimes we keep using it and they keep running.

Now with the CDOT solution, they definitely have made it scalable.

We use it in a lot of other venues, engineering or non-engineering. Earlier there was an issue where you were limited but after introducing CDOT, I don’t think scalability is an issue now.

Technical support depends on what kind of support you buy from them. If it's a four-hour response time, then definitely, we have been given pretty good support. I think we have been getting consistent support.

It's not about finding one guy on the phone; you have the whole team behind it. If something is not acceptable to us, then we go ahead and escalate it to our sales team and then they drive it through. Sometimes you have to take some exceptions and escalate it.

In the pre-CDOT era, upgrades were a nightmare. Replacing a node was not an easy thing to do and getting downtime was not an easy thing to do. After CDOT, I'm hoping we won't be running into that situation.

We've been using NetApp for a long time and our environment is already using all the NetApp features that they have been providing so buying AFF from them was an easy pick actually.

When I select a vendor such as NetApp to work with, I don’t look just at the performance; I look at reliability, scalability, replication, disaster recovery; to be able to do this all efficiently, plus their SnapMirroring and snapshotting capability. We've been used to whatever features NetApp provides and when we look at any other storage company, they have certain pieces here and there but they say, we don't this or don’t do that.

What we see is that NetApp supports all of protocols that we need: NAS, SAN, iSCSI. It's all in one, all together.

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.

It's the fastest that we can get through NetApp. We're deploying all these high-demanding applications and it's the best of the best, so of course we went with it, being a big NetApp customer.

In the transportation industry, we have a lot of demand for analytics and on-demand data, big data, and AFF provides what we need in terms of the quick read and write.

We spend less time thinking about performance and more time being able to worry about actual problems and the customer. Of course, the customer is the most important part of business.

I would rate it higher if it didn’t cost as much. It's a bit pricey.

Other than that, it's got what we need. I don't really have any suggestions for what it doesn't offer. I'm happy with what it has. I think it's only gotten better, especially with the 8.3 release and obviously ONTAP.

Both the GUI and the command line have exactly what you need and I have no problem navigating either of them.

I have not encountered any stability or scalability issues; absolutely no issues whatsoever. The only issue is how fast we can put them in.

We have rarely required technical support. Usually, it's just a one-off type thing and I've never had any issues getting what we needed out of them. They're always knowledgeable; never had a problem.

I was not at this company before they started using AFF.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have not evaluated other options.

Be sparing in capacity and don't just throw it around. Storage is cheap now, but AFF, as I’ve mentioned, is not cheap, so be cautious in how you use it. That’s something that needs to be analyzed before you start the process. It’s the kind of good homework to prepare. I think that goes for anything, but doubly for expensive flash. Just make sure that's really what you want and what you need.

When I’m looking at vendors, I need them to know exactly what they're selling to me does. I need them to know the competition, so they're offering a fair comparison and not just offering a vendor lock-in type situation.

We use it in the healthcare industry.

It's helped with latency. It has improved our job flows.

It's fast and reliable.

I would like to see more functionality with the external software, SnapCenter. There should also be more integration with the flash side of things. But overall, it's been pretty good.

My impression of the stability is that it's good. 

It's pretty scalable. When you add more to the environment it helps things, overall.

Technical support has been really good. NetApp support has been really helpful. We have a SAM that we use as well, and he helps us with issues that come up, bugs, etc.

We were pushing what we had too far on performance. It wasn't so good, so that's when we looked at All Flash.

It was really straightforward, for the most part. We were used to working with FAS already and this is just adding All Flash and SSD to the mix. It's a lot of the same standards we had already.

For the installation and configuration, we've done the recent ones directly through NetApp. Our experience with them has been positive.

We'll have the solid-state drives around longer so we won't be turning over controllers or disk as fast.

Our shortlist was really just NetApp, in our situation. We're pretty much all NetApp. We didn't evaluate anything else for this particular project.

I would recommend NetApp.

I rate it at nine out of ten, and close to a ten. We've been pretty happy with the All Flash.

• The Flash component for performance
• The management
• ONTAP
• The features that ONTAP now has with the availability to work with the cloud.

We have seen a speed improvement, and our applications are a lot faster.

Probably on the management side of things. It is very complex.

Probably six months.

Not really.

It is pretty scalable.

Tech support is very good, so give it an eight out of 10.

It was an older system. It was a disc based system. So, we were looking for performance improvement.

It was a natural progression from the previous system, so it was just more of an upgrade rather than a new system.

It was reasonably straightforward. We received a lot of knowledge on the net about ONTAP systems, so the setup has improved.

The NetApp ONTAP system is a very good system to work with and use. Very versatile and once you know how things work in the NetApp world, then it makes it very easy to keep the systems for a long time, to work with them, and they work very well.

It is a brand new system, and it works extremely well. Performance improvements are as expected.