NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It's fast. That's all it needs to be is fast.

We use it for virtualization of the Xen desktops and also our VMware systems. That's it.

It doesn't improve the way I work. I don't get to use it, really.

It's faster than spinning disk. I don't have people complaining about it being slow. We're still ramping up in the production but our busy season is a little bit later this year. Right now, it's faster than spinning disk.

In the GUI, I'd like to be able to click a button that says "sync load-sharing mirrors". There are certain configuration things that you can't do if your load-sharing mirrors aren't synced. It would be easier to click that in the GUI, rather than actually issue the command line every time. It's burnt me a few times on configuration.

When we did our upgrade, if we could have done it without doing a whole migration; the migration was painful. Going from 7-mode to CDOT is painful. To make that easier is the only way to get the rating higher.

We have been using it for six months.

We haven't had any stability issues yet. It's only six months old so I would hope there's no hardware issues with it yet.

We haven't had to scale it yet, so right now it's a relatively new install.

Their technical support's good. Most of the questions haven't been in regards to the AFF hardware; it's all been more configuration with the ONTAP, the CDOT. They've been helpful. We're getting through the issues.

This was just a hardware replacement and the promotional deals that NetApp had to offer basically made buying an AFF solution comparable to buying an old spinning disk solution, so it was a combination. We have two nodes that have spinning disks and two nodes that are AFF. To have the whole thing spinning disk, the difference in price made it a no-brainer going with part of it being AFF.

The networking is extremely complex. They advertise it as pretty simple but you have to get through a big install phase before it becomes simple. That's my impression.
To prepare for that install phase and make it a little less complex, make sure your NetApp partner knows what they're doing, by talking to people.

We go through different vendors depending on what we're looking at. Last time, it was Hitachi, EMC and NetApp. One reason we decided on NetApp was that we were replacing a NetApp. We had high confidence it was going to work. Then, its pricing.

The NetApp partner you're working with is important. Understand what you're trying to do and the networking stuff, to make sure that it fails over and everything works from a networking standpoint. I'm guessing it's probably where it's the weakest, so it's the most frustrating for me.

When I look for a vendor for a solution such as AFF or spinning disk, we put together requirements, check them off and weigh the requirements against the vendors. In the end, we make a decision and we also make sure they're comparable in regards to pricing. Quotes are pulled from multiple vendors.

The requirements depend on the application. We buy our storage for specific stuff. As an example, I work at Jostens. We store billions of images. The NetApp product line really wasn't a fit for that, but for our home directories, some of our virtualization desktop stuff and our VMware stuff, NetApp was a great fit.

We use both NetApp's FAS and AFF solutions. It's a hybrid that we use for FileMaker. 

Our use case is to implement it for our clients.

NetApp enables us to consolidate file and block storage into one device instead of using separate devices. Adopting one device for all those services saves power in the data center while simplifying management because you don't need to manage two different systems. We save power costs at the rack site. 

One technology we hope to acquire is ransomware detection. We have block, file, and object storage, but we don't have ransomware protection. We need a second off-site disaster recovery location. 

I work on the infrastructure engineering side. I usually get to install NetApp appliances, and I like how easy the installation is. It seems to be easier than other technologies that we use. 

NetApp could offer more training for new learners because it's a relatively new product portfolio to me. 

We have used HPE and Dell EMC. Previously, we used Dell ECS for object storage and Dell PowerStore for block storage. NetApp enabled us to unify our storage services.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.

Shared storage for virtualized environments.

Reducing data fingerprint (deduplication) and speeding up access to data.

• Deduplication
• SnapManager
• Autosupport.

Synchronous replication and active-active environments.

We use it for all of our VM storage.

I don't know if it improved the way our organization functions, but I know we don't have any storage outages or slowdowns at this point. We just did a refresh about six months ago to the A700s and we have been very happy with the performance of those boxes.

Our latency is extremely low. We average below a millisecond.

The replication would be one of the most valuable features. That's not just on the All Flash FAS, but that's a big one. The performance is also good.

I'm not sure if they can do it. We are using encryption. I'd like the deduplication crossed volumes encrypted. But I don't know if that's really technically possible.

The stability has been really good. We've had just a couple of minor hardware issues but nothing big; DIMMs that were bad and that had to be replaced. But it's been very good so far.

I know it scales but we are not looking to scale it out at this point.

Technical support is a little hit and miss, at least with the particular things that I've called for. The SRA stuff that intergrades with SRM is a problem point. It's a pain point. The support personnel aren't always knowledgeable on that product. At times, they are not even aware what product is supported and what is not, when one has been deprecated and there is a new one out, and what the bug fixes of the newer version are.

It was straightforward. We did greenfield. We went to two new data centers so the installation of it was pretty straightforward.

We used an integrator. It was very good. We partnered with them a couple times before, which makes for a pretty easy and seamless transition. And ONTAP is easy that way anyway, but they do a really good job of making it an easy transition.

We were pretty heavily invested in NetApp. We did look at INFINIDAT, but it just wasn't something that we were comfortable with.

The product is about a nine out of then. We have been very happy with the performance. There have been a few minor issues. We failover a couple times a year. In some of the failovers, the SRAs haven't worked exactly as designed. If the SRA was better, maybe not bundled in with the whole Snap solution, that might help.

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.

• Performance
• Contingency, failover, and data recovery
• It's a good vendor.

They have always been really supportive, easy to get ahold of, and easy to work with.

The primary use case for All Flash is improved performance.

• Better performance
• More reliable systems
• Less space needed versus competitors of similar storage

Simplifying the solution for performance, though they are already working on it. Also, making the UI more user-friendly couldn't hurt.

Over five years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any problems in our environment.

It is very easy to scale.

We have a good relationship with our representatives through them. Our sales representative gave us a lot of information as far as moving forward with upgrading stuff.

It has been used quite a few times and we always have always had a good response from them. They are very knowledgeable.

It was very straightforward.

We use both block and file storage.

NetApp is the leader in the field for high performance and storage systems. They have always been our primary go to. We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience.

Advice for someone looking at similar products: Just do the research beforehand and you'll be able to tell what vendors separate themselves from the rest as far as other companies' reviews out there. I would definitely recommend NetApp All Flash FAS.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: compatibility and communication. Being able to rely on them whenever we need them.

The benefits are automatic; the power consumption is very low with the All Flash and the performance is very high. So, it helped us to better serve our customers to do the VMware data source.

The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool. We are primarily using VMware environment. We use it for VMware data source for our hosting customers. We have 32 petabytes of data on NetApp's storage, so we definitely use it for primary storage.

Going forward, I would like more performance analytics on it, on the area itself, instead of using some other tool.

It's very stable.

We have a 9.1 operating system on it, and it's very stable. We did an upgrade online, and we had no issues. We did a failover testing, and nothing. It's solid.

The scalability is good.

I use it for small issues, like how to configure using multiple VLANs. It was pretty easy to set up, and the technical support were very good.

We decided, as a company, to not buy any more disk storage for our primary customers, and that's the reason we needed All Flash. NetApp was a perfect fit because we could grow as we needed and it scales out the architecture works for us. We were looking for a high-performance, small, low footprint block rate, and NetApp fits in right there.

Very straightforward. NetApp already does all the installation for us. They just come in and set the IPs, etc.

It's a pretty solid solution. If you're looking for a block solution, or file solution, on flash, you definitely have to look at it.

We have a vast NetApp experience, so the fact that it can be managed like the others is great. It has the most consistent performance for storage for VMware. We were also specifically looking for an all-flash system.

It took only a very short time to implement, as it was live just a few hours afterwards. It also integrates well with our environment, specifically with disaster recovery, high availability, management, performance, and historic and current performance metrics.

Most of the things we were waiting for are already in this version, so I’m not really waiting for any new features. It could improve on the initial learning curve, as it can be steep.

We've been using it for one-and-a-half months with 1,500 VMs exclusively as the VMware backend. It's a mix between Windows and Linux-hosted OS. We've been running clustered Data ONTAP since April 2014.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Thus far, it’s 100% stable.

Scalability is quite good in an NAS environment, and in a SAN it's good enough.

Technical support is very good, 8/10.

We also have IBM products, but we chose NetApp instead because IBM does not have the necessary plugins for integration with vSphere.

If you are new to NetApp, it is a bit complex, but if you know the system, it is quite simple. There is definitely a learning curve, but every NetApp system works the same, so if you know NetApp, it’s quite easy.

It performs like we expect and is stable. Always do a proof of concept, and if you go with AFF, especially for a VMware environment. Also, opt for OnCommand InSight software for performance metrics and recommendations.