NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It is very user friendly. Someone in my position needs to be able to bring up and shut down the system quickly, efficiently, and shut it down if there's a power outage quickly and efficiently without having trouble. It also supports VMware, which is what we use; but we use the NetApp as our only filer.

I am trying to understand it more, so I can employ it better during high tense situations.

I have been able to manage the system easily myself since we got NetApp four years ago.

The Ilom's graceful shutdown feature is no longer there in the version that I have. I believe I'm using 7.0.x, using the FAS 2040 and also the FAS 2020. I don't know where to say it needs improvement because I'm just not that versed in it yet.

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

For what we do, I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems; and everything works, no problem. I am currently trying to find out where we’re moving ahead from here.

Technical support is excellent.

I was involved in building it. I found it a little bit grueling to get my certification to build it, but I really can't speak to the NetApp filer documentation. The documentation that we use for it is different from what NetApp uses.

I didn't evaluate anything. That is done in the organization at higher levels than I am. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right because we’re not going to give a contract to anybody for a bad product. Right now, I'm concentrating on our collapse-down strategy in which we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I'm here. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer: whether the filer is going to need to expand; whether we're going to be migrating to a new filer; and so on.

For the All Flash FAS, performance is the number one feature, above the reliability and scalability. First of all, the All Flash FAS is extremely fast. We're serving something in the neighborhood of a trillion transactions per month in SQL. We are getting great performance, submillisecond. As far as scalability, we can extend to new nodes and move data around at will. It's been a really good solution.

We are a customer-driven solution. We're running the environment and have some very demanding customers that require zero downtime, extremely good performance, and the solution has worked out extremely well for us.

We have a software that is a learning environment for schools, higher education and corporate businesses. User software for learning environments. And they use our class as their learning environment.

We need everything to be reliable and to work fast, and we have absolutely found that with NetApp.

I'd like to be able to move volumes between virtual machines, for one thing. That’s a little thing that has bothered me. I think I'm pretty happy with what the feature set is right now.

We had some bumpy roads early on, but it has been very reliable. We're doing very well with it.

With the ability to move data as soon as needed, we can expand and contract as we need to. It works out pretty nicely. We’ve had no issues in terms of scalability.

NetApp’s technical support is second to none. I have worked with other vendors that have not been quite as reliable. But, getting support to come out is easy and reliable, and it's always top-grade help.

I believe we have gone through EMC and Hitachi. I think that's it, actually. I personally worked with IBM. IBM’s support was pretty good, too.

If I was selecting a new vendor today, support would probably be the most important criteria for me. That has been the big differentiator for us; always pushing P1s for us. It's very easy to get support and prioritize it as needed; they help us extremely well.

I wasn't involved in that decision-making process, so I'm not sure what the driving force was. I was actually hired after the fact because I worked with NetApp in the past.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I think the team found it fairly straightforward. We had good support from NetApp. We worked very closely with our account team. They walked us through very well and we had no issues getting going, as far as I know.

I've been a NetApp advocate for many years, so I definitely say, look into it because of the performance, the stability, the scalability, the support.

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.

It’s really reliable and fast. My customers have several other NetApp systems, but here they really needed the low latency.

Also, clustered Data ONTAP is valuable.

It sped up our data queries and we can work more efficiently. These queries are now done in seconds rather than minutes, affecting everything we do on a day-to-day basis.

I haven’t encountered anything the customer needs that this solution can’t do.

We've used the 8080 for eight months and the 8060 for two months. They're used mainly for VMware products and SQL databases.

I haven’t had any stability problems yet with our current customers.

It scales to our needs.

8/10

We haven’t needed to escalate to NetApp’s tech support.

I went from working with NetApp FAS to AFF, so I stayed in the family. The customer was satisfied with their FAS system but needed lower latency, so it was a clear choice.

The initial setup was very straightforward. When you've worked with NetApp for a while, it is very easy to setup their new systems. If you are new to the system, then there is a learning curve, but NetApp provides great documentation.

I implement it for our customers.

It’s a great choice, and you are on the right path using this product.

We have a multi-tenant shared solution that we use with Quality of Service to provide bare metal as a service and IP storage to our customers. We keep it very simple. It's an automated solution which customers configure on a portal and then it automatically configures storage for them.

The solution has drastically and positively affected IT's ability to support new business initiatives. It's a very easily automated solution using REST APIs.

Combined with OnCommand, the solution the solution helps improve the performance of our enterprise applications.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS and keep customers from harming other customers in that solution.

It's very stable. We have not yet had any issues. All solutions have issues, but we have not yet had any with this one.

We scale up to 64 nodes in a cluster and then we just keep scaling clusters. We've had no issues with scalability.

We've been a partner of NetApp for a very long time. Their support is very good. We use a lot of direct NetApp engineering resources, as a partner at our scale. We tend to work hand in hand with NetApp.

For our use case, we were automating what we were doing so we chose to use the All Flash REST APIs.

Our initial setup involved a lot of development. It was complex mainly because we had to make it simple. We had to simplify it for our own customers, so it was complex for us but it's a very easy solution for enterprises.

The solution is too new for us to see ROI yet.

Dell EMC was our other option. Both Dell EMC and NetApp are partners of ours. We went with NetApp because of relationships and ease of set up.

It's a pretty stout solution. NVMe is coming and pretty much everything we want is on their roadmap.

In terms of connecting it to public cloud, we are a public cloud so we connect to ourselves. When it comes to setting up and provisioning enterprise applications using the solution, it depends on the customer use case. Some are quick, some are really complex.

• The speed
• Performance
• The storage efficiency is very good.
• We use the SnapMirror for disaster recovery, though not for tiering.

By moving everything to the All Flash Array, our outage times have gone dramatically down, if not disappeared completely, for the most part.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for our mission critical storage systems based on our experiences with AFF. We are actually moving all of our production data onto our AFF system right now as it's been extremely fast and stable.

More reporting on a granular level within system command.

I have personally used NetApp for 15 years now. A long time.

It's extremely stable. We've never had an issue with it, even through multiple OS upgrades.

It's excellent. We added a shelf three weeks ago and it took less than 10 minutes.

We haven't used technical support yet.

However, I would recommend if someone is researching NetApp and similar solutions that they take a look at the support offered by other companies and look at what Netapp offers as well.

Our existing solutions, which were Netapp, were basically just overrun.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

We looked at not only Netapp, but we looked at EMC which was the big one. Then we started looking at some cloud providers, but we actually moved away from that.

We had a very high impression of NetApp as a vendor of high-performance sound storage before purchasing AFF, and an extremely high impression of them afterwards.

The primary use case for our All Flash system is VMware. It's NFS-based, therefore it's NAS-based.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Typically, with vendor selection, it's going to be more about the support after. Most of the features across the vendors that I've talked to are pretty much on par with everybody else.

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.

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.