NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it for typical data center workloads: Exchange, file shares, and SQL.

We have a big problem in our organization where I can't get the application engineers to give me performance requirements. Now, with the SSDs, I don't need to worry about that anymore. All of our applications are high. Our test applications perform at a higher level now.

It has improved performance of our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs because we have a higher IO from the disk now. We run a lot of write-intensive VMs. For sure the solution helps out.

Our total cost of ownership has decreased because of the nature of the SSDs, their mean time to failure is much higher. They don't fail as often and that's going to reduce it. And because we upgraded to the All Flash and the bigger SSD, we reduced our footprint. I increased my capacity 500 percent and reduced my footprint in the data center by 95 percent.

The most valuable features are

• the IO performance that we get
• the cluster part 
• the increased workload and performance with the SSDs.

And the CLI portion of ONTAP, in general, is much easier to use.

It's a little behind on security. It's starting to get into multi-factor authentication, they just started to introduce it but not for all products. In my area, we are really big on security, using smart-card authentication. Multi-factor authentication is a big thing for us, being on the federal government side of things. We need all the products to have the ability to do smart-card authentication. That's the biggest one. That's the drawback of this solution. But otherwise, it's getting there. It's starting to catch up.

It has been very stable so far. It's about a year old, we haven't been using it for long, but so far it has stood up very well.

We haven't needed to scale it yet. We probably won't. But obviously, because we are in a multi-node cluster environment, with the switches we can scale out very easily if we need to.

I mostly interact with my sales engineer who is very sharp. The few times that I've had to interact with technical support, it has been very good.

The gear we were on was about ten years old. We always buy behind the technology curve. I noticed that spinning disk was going away and that the industry moving towards SSDs, so I wanted us to try to get ahead of the curve a little bit, to give us some more horsepower to do some more initiatives that we want to get done in the future.

It was very straightforward. There are setup tools so if you're not very familiar with NetApp, they walk you through the process step by step: How to configure all the interfaces and the SVMs, etc. I'm more experienced with the command lines, so I deployed it that way. But it's very receptive to PowerShell scripting, so it's easy to use.

We used an integrator, reseller, and consultant for the deployment. Resellers are resellers. I don't have a good or bad opinion of them. As for the integrators we had, I'd rather do it myself quite honestly. But it was okay.

Because we're federal government, we really can't choose. We've had NetApp for years. I did evaluate a lot of other products. Honestly, at the end of the day, storage is storage and disks are disks; it's all the bells and whistles on the front. Other solutions could probably have accomplished the same task. Ultimately, it comes down to dollars and cents, but I'm not really involved in that side of it. I'm sure they chose NetApp because of the cost.

Know your workload, know your customer. Know what your requirements are, know what your future requirements are. Determine what's important to you. Think about the administrators, if you're not the administrator; I'm not, I just engineer it. Think about them and how they will use it. Think about the future, where you think your business will grow.

When it comes to setting up and provisioning applications using the product, it depends on what you're doing. But I I can have an Exchange server up and running in about 30 minutes.

At the moment the solution is not having any effect on IT's ability to support new business initiatives. I got it to support things like ADI and solutions like that. So hopefully, going forward, it will play a role in that. We have not connected the solution to public clouds. We do plan to in the future.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten because there's room to improve. There's always room to grow. The security side of it: They have a large government customer base but it seems like they really don't pay attention to that side of things. There are a lot of security things, a lot of customers can't send their stuff offsite, and I'm one of them. So coming up with better ways to satisfy that part would be great.

• Performance
• Block storage

It improves organizational performance.

• I want to see more send features.
• It takes awhile to learn the system.

It is stable.

It does not matter much in our environment. We have not thought of scaling out.

We have used the technical support. They are good.

We had EMC, then we introduced NetApp. We switched due to cost.

I was involved in the initial setup. There was a little bit of an issue, but it turned out okay. Basically, we had to call NetApp for assistance during the setup due to an odd issue.

We use AFF as part of a cluster with other NetApp class systems.

I would definitely recommend AFF.

There's always a little room for improvement.

We have had no issues, but we never went to production.

The technical support is excellent. Anytime we've had any kind of questions, our rep can help us or we'll call into NetApp auto-support. We have not had any problems. Tech support is knowledgeable and their response times are good.

We compared this tool against EMC’s XtremIO head-to-head, and the NetApp blew it out of the water. There was no competition. We were already a NetApp shop, so they were our preferred tool anyway. It has more features and links to my OS, innovative CIFS, and deduplication. We had the knowledge of the system already. It wasn't reinventing the workforce.

The installation was pretty easy. It was my third setup, so it was nothing really new. There's only one minor switch that turns it into an AFF.

We use the system to do stuff that isn't quite out yet. We love to do some oddball things. We're one of the first to use NetApp shift to compete and migrate away from VMware. We didn’t run into any issues with it, and it beat the competition.

When looking for a vendor, it's usually value first, which is not the right way to do it. That's what it comes down to. The value and then next is feature set.

Dedupe (cost saving): We were able to achieve a lot more capacity than expected.

• More desktops on storage
• Ease of management

• Software packaging and ordering.
• We wanted to integrate with replication and Commvault options, and that was difficult.

We have been using the solution for about six months.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support at about 8/10.

Other solutions were not all-flash compatible.

Initial setup was easy.

Compare and look for your use case.

We evaluated Pure Storage, SolidFire, EMC Unity.

The migration plan should be clear upfront.

First of all, we have very low latency. We just moved a good piece of our stuff over from spinning disk onto All Flash FAS. We didn't have performance problems before, but now we are screaming. Things are really fast with really low utilization now. We're surprised at the low utilization and high performance.

I like that they keep the same operating system as they do for all of their stuff, so you learn all their platforms. It's easy to learn and user friendly.

They haven't added all the features in that they have from everything else because they're still kind of new to the all flash game. They haven't added all the features in that you can get on a spinning disk system. It's getting there, but it's taking time.

We have not had any problems with stability.

The scalability meets our needs.

We have a support account manager through NetApp and he helps us out anytime we get stuck on something. We let him know about it and he jumps in and takes care of tickets or problems.

We used their professional services. They came in an installed it for us and it went really well; flawless. They just went in and took care of it all. Then we just put our configurations in and away we went. I thought it went pretty slick.

Currently, we are comparing NetApp Flash with HPE for one of our customers for one of our applications. We are comparing those. I'm not involved with that, so I don't know really how that's going, but I know that that process is under way.

I've been really happy with NetApp All Flash FAS, and I'd hope that others find the same success. I've been really happy with them.

Before we started working with it, we moved input data and resources over. We virtualized the environment over to all flash and it went smooth. We didn't have any problems with it. There wasn't anything crazy we had to do for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technical support is excellent.

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.

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.

It has improved my organization by being able to remove potential hardware issues from the equation; knowing that we're getting top throughput and performance from the system; and then being able to contain customer workloads within their subscribed tiers using QoS.

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

The most valuable feature is the low-latency, high-performance utilizations of the system; being able to deliver a high-tier storage performance for high-impacting customer applications.

There's nothing that I can think of that they haven't introduced with what they announced at a recent NetApp conference, with the built-in workflow automation, where you can basically deploy it in a matter of minutes for a dedicated workflow. They've built all that into the ONTAP 9. From my experience, that might be the only missing piece: If you have standard deployments to follow in those workflows, it's almost a push-button build, essentially.

Across the entire FAS platform, or maybe even across the entire product line, I would like to see some sort of bare-metal deployment configuration standard. It would be nice if we could use DSC, Puppet or something like that to do bare-metal deployments within an environment for standard configurations, such as auto-support and so on. You can accomplish that now via PowerShell and scripting, but if you could have a server that constantly monitored that and kept everything within a standard configuration for that node; kind of like the rest of the industry is doing with platform standardization.

You have a lot of flexibility to do that through scripting and other means, but there's nothing enforcing it. In other environments, for bare-metal hardware for compute, you can run Puppet or DSC (Desired State Config) through Microsoft. You can create configuration files for that physical hardware. If anyone goes in and makes a change, you could either alert or alert and automatically set it back to what it should be. Something to monitor, some way to do that at a bare-metal level, in the hardware-node configuration; that would be the only improvement I can think of.

Stability is the same as the whole FAS series line; very stable, huge up time, non-disruptive upgrades and capabilities. It falls in line with the rest of the family.

It scales both horizontally and vertically with clustered Data ONTAP.

I have not used support directly for the All Flash.

For other issues, NetApp support is not as good as it used to be. They've restructured their support organization a couple times over the last couple of years. It seems difficult to get a high-priority ticket through for an experienced engineer. It takes a while to get a hold of somebody who can actually help you with your problem.

Because we're a partner and we have certified engineers on our staff, when we call in, we don't need Tier 1 support. It's very hard to get escalation up to an escalation engineer who's going to be able to solve our problem. It didn't used to be that way. I've worked with NetApp for probably over nine years now.

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

We decided to invest in the All Flash FAS basically because of constant customer demand for a higher-tier, flash-based storage option. We didn't currently have anything with any other vendor available. It wasn't a storage offering that we had; not necessarily one that we thought we needed, because we use QoS and service levels within our environment, but customer demand mitigated purchasing an offering.

Previously, it was all hybrid NetApp FAS. We run NetApp throughout our entire environment, but we didn't have anything dedicated flash SSD. We would run flash pools in hybrid aggregate configurations, and then we would use QoS and service levels to guarantee SLOs. Customers, not really knowing what they want, hear the word "flash" and think they want flash storage for their application. Then, when they ask for it, and you don't have it as an offering, you're now an incomplete solution. Out of industry necessity, I would say, we've added it to our portfolio.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, the same as any other FAS solution, except for when you get into the disk slicing and other features for setting up your root aggregates. It’s pretty standard configuration, pretty easy. That has been our experience.

We looked at a couple of other options, just to see. It was between the All Flash FAS, which, because we're primarily a NetApp shop, was our first choice; we looked at Nimble and Tintri as potential other options; and then we also talked to NetApp about SolidFire as well.

We ended up going with the NetApp solution because there wasn't enough of a compelling reason to switch to a different architecture, to a different competitor, to take us outside of our current architecture, standards. There wasn't a good enough reason to not make that decision.

The main criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are full feature sets within a product, multiple avenues for manageability, and tie-ins to other possible orchestration applications; something that fits very well into the modern architecture and the direction that the industry's going, with automation, cloud and service on demand; and the ability to tie in to all of those, seamlessly into all of those requirements.

Make sure that you understand the entire storage portfolio, that you understand your requirements. Don't get into the situation that a lot of people get into – that we typically got into ourselves – and purchase something because you need it as an offering. The All Flash FAS solution is a great solution and it fits right into your current infrastructure if you're running clustered ONTAP and you're familiar with All Flash FAS, but understand your workload and make sure you're getting what you need.

I don't know that I have that good of a reason for my rating. Based on what I saw at a recent NetApp conference, when it comes to solid-state requirements, the SolidFire solution is probably more in line with that type of workload because you can set the minimum requirements. SolidFire introduced the minimum requirements for a workload, which will guarantee that workload that SLA. Within the FAS solution, you can just guarantee the SLO. You can set ceilings on everyone, but you can't guarantee that someone's going to get that performance every time if they need it. I would say that's the only thing, and then SolidFire fills that need in the portfolio. I'd say that would be the only reason why the All Flash FAS doesn’t get a perfect rating.

We are looking into purchasing SolidFire as well.

The most valuable feature is the IOPS speed, everything that comes with it. It's just a great platform to be on, for example, with VMDK files, data stores, and VMs in general. Users say things like, "What happened? How come it's so fast. What did you do different?"

All the features that we were sold and told about, they all work; it's been good.

First of all, the cost was a benefit to my organization. The cost was great for us. It just made sense to do it. Then, speed. Then, just overall manageability of the system itself.

Higher performance would be an improvement, absolutely.

They could bring the cost down but, as I’ve mentioned, the cost was right for what we needed.

Regarding whether you are happy with the user interface, I think that depends on whether you're used to the CLI or you're used to the GUI. I'm a CLI guy, so I like it.

I've had zero stability or scalability issues.

For the AFF, I haven't had to use technical support; I'm good.

We were on a very old 7-mode system; that's what we migrated from. That was our next step, to stay with ONTAP because we liked the features of ONTAP, and we wanted the speed and performance of the All Flash FAS.

Initial setup was very straightforward, just simple. It wasn't difficult at all.

Follow the instructions. That's all. It's straightforward; it wasn't hard at all.

Pricing was very competitive but right on the mark for us.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated EMC and Pure. The decision came down to what we were used to managing and what we trusted.

In general, when I’m looking at a vendor to work with, I look for honesty. That's all I look for. I understand they have to make money and I understand we have to spend money to get it, but I don't want to be taken; I don't want to feel like I'm getting taken as it's being sold to me.