NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

I have used it for storage services.

NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. It has helped to accommodate a non-structured environment. I have a diversification of Windows and Linux in my network, and it has supported both networks.

NetApp AFF has helped to reduce support issues such as performance-tuning and troubleshooting.

NetApp AFF has definitely reduced the operational latency. It has reduced operational latency by 30% to 40%.

Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good.

The dashboard needs improvement. The dashboard needs some uplift.

I have been using NetApp AFF for eight to ten years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

We were using a small configuration Dell server. The configuration was not so high. We chose NetApp AFF simply because of its performance and stability.

The initial deployment was a bit complex. At the time of implementation, we created a parallel setup and gradually shifted from the old setup to the new setup.

We got it done directly from the NetApp support team.

I have not worked out the ROI. After implementing it, COVID came, and we did not work much on it. Its renewal is around the corner, and at that time, we will go into ROI.

Its price is quite competitive, but there is still scope for better pricing.

I evaluated NetApp, Dell, and HPE storage. I chose Netapp AFF because I had used NetApp earlier as well, so I was well aware of the performance of this solution.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF an eight out of ten. I would recommend it to others.

We utilize NetApp AFF to deliver data to our users per our server and application requirements. My primary responsibilities lie within the data center, where I configure and manage user access.

The challenges we faced before implementing NetApp AFF were connection connectivity in our network, installations with current software, and upgrades.

NetApp AFF simplifies our infrastructure while maintaining high performance. However, some applications require high I/O and performance, so we primarily use NetApp AFF for our critical business applications. For less demanding applications, we employ alternative cost-effective solutions.

The simplified infrastructure offered by NetApp AFF has been beneficial. Previously, we were using a different product that caused performance issues, particularly in terms of disk resources. Since switching to NetApp, we have experienced significant improvements.

NetApp AFF has helped reduce support issues. Our performance is now stable, using fewer resources, and there is no longer a queue of users waiting to log in. NetApp AFF has made a big difference.

It also reduced our operational latency by almost 40 percent with fewer issues and less downtime.

NetApp AFF has helped optimize our costs. It was a 15 to 20 percent difference from what we see now.

The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization.

The support documentation has room for improvement.

I believe offering a SaaS-based option for NetApp AFF would be a valuable addition, as cloud adoption continues to accelerate.

I have been using NetApp AFF for almost four years.

Up to now the stability of NetApp AFF has been perfect.

It is easy to scale NetApp AFF.

We have instant support which is good. 

Positive

We migrated from Dell to NetApp AFF because of its better performance with our business-critical applications.

The initial setup is straightforward. We connect to the external screen and enter the basic admin information before we can start the deployment.

Adopting NetApp AFF has yielded a significant return on investment. It boasts a comprehensive suite of features that surpass those of other storage box solutions. These features include data protection, multi-sharing storage, regular snapshot retention, SSDs, and customized flash-based storage.

Before choosing NetApp AFF our architect evaluated many options including Dell.

I would rate NetApp AFF nine out of ten.

NetApp AFF is the best flash storage solution and I fully recommend it. 

Its use cases include everything from high bandwidth to low latency, AI workloads based on NVMe drives, and all the way to our basic home directories and what I call common plop-and-drop drives for the teams. 

The challenge that we were trying to address by implementing NetApp AFF was that we needed truly high-speed storage to feed the GPUs for AI/ML workloads. We also had the financial responsibility of being able to lower the QoS when we just needed basic storage rather than Pure high-performance storage.

NetApp AFF has helped with faster data, and at the same time, we are able to work with our solutions team to set up FlexCache share so that we can more easily set up data pipelines and data life cycles. We can also integrate with our corporate systems for replication.

NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. The flexibility to keep everything on superfast NVMe but also tweak the QoS has allowed us to centralize more of our storage services. We need less rack space. We are using Keystone for financial responsibility. We have centralized and standardized a lot of our ITOps.

NetApp AFF has not helped to reduce support issues, such as performance-tuning and troubleshooting, because we have not had any issues yet that we had to take a look at, and I hope we do not.

NetApp AFF has definitely helped to reduce our operational latency. Especially with the speeds of the drives and the network links and the network topology that we are able to put together, for not just huge dense workloads, we are able to scale out horizontally so everyone can get the same speed. 

NetApp AFF has not saved us much cost, but the Keystone model that we are able to run AFF in partnership with has helped to save costs. Instead of making those huge capital purchases where we may purchase 500 terabytes and not use it, the consumption-based model has allowed us to be flexible. It gives us that financial flexibility to say, "We want to experiment with this more. Add it on." We can also say, "We do not need it. Take it back, and give us that plug-and-play option."

The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares. 

The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID.

The lab that I am developing has used NetApp AFF and NetApp storage for about two years, but I know that our organization, in general, has been using NetApp for storage for a long time.

I have not thought about it. It must be good because I have not had to think about it.

Based on your current needs and based on your inter-cluster switches, you need more storage added in, and you are good to go. You can create new aggregates and SVMs, and you are good to go.

The support is great. We have a dedicated team. I can work with our dedicated embedded professional services group. If it is a larger issue, I can send a message to our support ops engineer and get an answer right away, or even proactively.

Positive

This lab is brand new, we started with NetApp AFF. 

I am a nerd at heart, so I worked with our professional services group to do the rack and stack. It was pretty straightforward. It was based on the idea of centralized controllers with expanded disk shares. We were able to work with our professional services consultant to get it set up in two days or so.

We were able to have those huge savings as our lab was being stood up, and now, as our usage increases, our cost increases, and as our usage decreases, our cost decreases. We have been able to see that trend match up with how we are using it. 

We did not evaluate other options because it is part of a centralized storage offering with our company. We wanted to keep everything on the same level for ease of use for purchasing, operations, shared ownership, and everything else.

In terms of using other NetApp solutions or services, we use less of NetApp Cloud Services, but we do use Cloud Volumes ONTAP. We also use SnapMirror and FlexCache for a lot of the intra or inter-site capabilities.

I would rate NetApp AFF a 10 out of 10.

AFF has simplified our infrastructure and delivered high performance for crucial business applications. Our move to c-series, with C800 units, consolidates infrastructure, aligns with sustainability goals, and lowers costs. This has allowed us to operate with a smaller team and streamline our IT operations, bringing significant benefits. 

AFS has also reduced support issues related to performance tuning and troubleshooting. 

Additionally, AFF has optimized our costs, and it is the reason we are using this platform today. It has minimized our footprint, lowered power consumption, and reduced upfront costs and it has reduced operational latency to some extent.

The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively.

One minor improvement could be making scale-up solutions with AFF more cost-effective compared to scale-out options.

We have been using NetApp AFF for quite some time.

AFF's stability is excellent, and I can't remember any major issues. It is also scalable, particularly when we expand our clusters, making it a smooth and seamless experience for our customers.

NetApp's support has been great. We have found value in their SAN services, which provide embedded support. Their teams are knowledgeable and responsive, offering a high-quality support experience that stands out among our partners. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

We switched to AFF from a previous vendor to get the best all-flash solution that met our price-performance needs.

AFF has helped us achieve our margin targets and deliver on our business goals. It has definitely provided a return on investment.

Pricing and licensing can be tricky. It is often a delicate balance between value and cost. However, I think NetApp is moving in the right direction, offering better value for the money.

We implemented AFF to find the right balance between price and performance. We compared it with other options in the market, and AFF emerged as the best choice for our needs. What set AFF apart were its reliability and strong data protection features. Our VDI solution provided multi-site configuration support, which is crucial for replication and failover. In comparison, other options relied more on software and hypervisor layers to achieve what we needed. AFF met our platform requirements, and in a competitive market, it offered the best value for our customers. That is why our partnership with NetApp was the right choice for us.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF as an eight out of ten.

Our IT department has two AFF clusters, but we also install them for our customers. We deploy them for tier-one use cases, like virtual machines, databases, and anything that needs fast, hot data. 

We've recently started using NetApp's cloud solutions, but our German customers are still reluctant because of the security, data management, GDPR, etc. Now, we have our cloud that we can sell to customers with Meta products. Cloud backup and cloud tiering are the two primary ones, but we also sell Cloud Insights to some customers.  Customers need backup services, but they often lack a separate data center where they can store their backups. The cloud is the most natural way to store the backup.

Our customers have latency issues or requirements for very low-latency applications. This is the problem they are addressing with AFF because it's the fastest system they can get. It's still the best solution for SAP or other databases.

We have checked other flash systems from different vendors, and the AFF is still the best because of the multi-protocol support, for example. Others only do block or file services in a very basic way. AFF does everything in one box. Now, with type 1, you don't even need to license the specific features. You can start with block storage and move to file later or the other way around. That's a plus for all customers.

I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features.

Our customers need reliability for the data. They don't want the data to go down if something happens to the data center. They need synchronous replication to another location, and the metro cluster is the only solution that works in these scenarios involving distances of 100 or 200 kilometers. 

Feature-wise, AFF is already a top-tier system. I think that sometimes, the price is an issue for some customers. It isn't so much of a problem now that there is the C Series and the ASA, both of which are a little better price-wise. That's not much of an issue anymore. In the past, that was a concern because not everyone needed a high-performance system for every workload. Some customers only required that level of performance for a small segment of their workloads, but they still needed to buy a bigger system. We can address that issue with the C Series. 

We have used NetApp AFF since it came out. My company has been a NetApp partner since 2004, and we were using the FAS systems before, but we started selling AFF to our customers as soon as it was introduced. 

NetApp AFF is rock-solid. The stability and performance are top-notch. It's hard to recall a broken NetApp. In 20 years, we've installed more than a thousand base systems, and we've never had user data corruption.

The scalability is good because it can scale out a cluster of up to 24 nodes. Usually, our customers only have a two-node cluster, so scalability is not so much of an issue with us.

I rate NetApp support seven out of 10. It depends on who you get. You can get unlucky. We usually do the first-level support ourselves because we are a partner. Sometimes, NetApp support could be better. When the customers escalate, it can feel like everything's starting from scratch. These are rare cases. I'm not directly involved in support, but that's what I hear when something doesn't work. 

Neutral

We've been installing fast-flash systems for 20 years, so I'm highly experienced with them. The complexity of the deployment depends on the customer's environment. Some storage systems from other competitors might be easier for the customers, but we are a service provider, so we do the installation and train the engineers. From the end customer's perspective, it doesn't matter if the system is easy or not because they don't need to install the system. 

We do the training, installation, and heavy lifting. The system is a bit more complicated to install compared to other competitors. We can offset this because we are highly trained and have all the experience required.

I'm not familiar with the financial and operational details. I'm more of a technical guy. However, our customers wouldn't buy these products if they didn't see a reduction in TCO.

I rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. 

The primary use case depends on business requirements and customer challenges.

NetApp offers two types of all-flash storage systems for different business requirements and challenges. They are also offering end-to-end NVMe-based storage systems within their all-flash product range.

NetApp AFF-A series and NetApp AFF-C series (recently introduced) are two different all-flash product verticals as per the following list:

• AFF-A Series: A150, A250, A400(Midrange), A800(High-end), and A900(High-end)
• AFF-C Series: AFF C190, AFF C250, AFF C400 and C800

The primary use case for AFF-A series models is where you need unified storage systems with extreme performance, end-to-end NVMe enterprise, or all-flash arrays, requiring the lowest latency and supporting twice as many workloads.

The NetApp AFF-C is the best fit where customers need a Unified(NAS+SAN) All-flash with capacity and affordable price. It is built on quad-level cell (QLC) flash technology to make it more affordable.

The organizations experiencing performance issues and looking to move from HDD to SSD flash and don’t want to pay an extra cost to get submillisecond performance for business-critical workloads, NetApp AFF-C is the best fit for them.

Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT." Organizations can run more applications with fewer disks to maintain. They can also achieve a good ROI in making their product/services more fast in production.

The organizations can get extreme performance by using NetApp end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays (like A150 and A250). The NVMe enterprise provides the lowest latency, supports twice as many workloads, and improves application response time.

All of NetApp's all-flash series storage arrays come with the NetApp all-flash software bundle by default.

NetApp also offers both "SAN-only" and "unified" options to make more flexible choices for customers. 

There is a very long list of features that come by default in the NetApp all-flash software bundle; however, what I like the most are in-line deduplication, compression, and compaction, which saves up to 90% of expensive disk space, especially in a virtualized server environment. 

The "autonomous ransomware protection" secures customer data from intruders.

NetApp introduced the C-series all-flash storage with the capacity to make their product line even more flexible and cost-effective. There is no significant improvement required that I could find so far.

However, NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan. This will obviously boost the product sales cycle in Pakistan.

Other storage vendors get business only due to their presence specifically in Pakistan even if they are offering fewer or limited features in their product line.

We have been selling NetApp Storage Systems for the last 10+ years as a partner/reseller.

The solution has made our lives easier by providing many different storage efficient features and data protection features. In the past two years, they've really accelerated their future offerings, and that has really helped us better secure our environment and also increase efficiency.

One of the main features we use is FlexCache. By using FlexCache, we were able to move a limited set of data to remote locations much more quickly than having to replicate entire datasets and improve customer satisfaction in terms of quicker access to data and even having access to data to a closer location to where they are and that has provided tremendous value for us.

Without this solution, it would have made things a lot slower in terms of getting the data set that's important for customers to access.

FlexCache currently works only on reads. The writes actually go back to the source. The product just introduced writing back locally, and the feature hasn't been rolled out yet. When that works as we expect it to, that will bring it to the table.

Better pricing would always be appreciated.

When new ONTAP cloud versions come out, they need to have fewer bugs.

We're pretty much using every single feature that the solution offers, aside from BlueXP. We're evaluating that too. We're in a cloud model and we're in the early stages of moving some workloads in.

We've explored other vendors. I can't say which; however, compared to many other source vendors, this product is unique in terms of providing a comprehensive portfolio of features that others simply don't have. It's much more unified than all the others. That's why we chose them.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's pretty comprehensive; we're always looking for better efficiency.

We are using it for configuring NAS as well as the SAN environment.

Most of our business-critical systems are provisioned from the NetApp AFF system. Compared to others, we have a minimal latency. Configuring the DR for high availability or migrating the volumes from one box to another is pretty easy with NetApp AFF.

One of the features that I like in NetApp is cluster configuration where multiple systems can be configured in a single cluster. Its advantage is that we can easily migrate the workload from one system to another without any downtime. With zero downtime, we can migrate the systems. That is one of the advantages of NetApp AFF.

NetApp AFF reduces operational latency depending on the systems, the SAN infrastructure, and the server. It is a maximum of one or two milliseconds, and some of the systems do work in 0.5 milliseconds latency.

For performance tuning, there is a tool called Unified Manager as well as the Active IQ system. The initial troubleshooting is very easy. From the administrator front directly, we can log in to Active IQ. It analyzes the logs in the system and suggests what needs to be improved. From a performance point of view, there is a tool called Unified Manager that shows us a clear picture of the historical volume latency. These tools help us to manage the system very easily, but if there is still something that we are not able to figure out through these tools, then we reach out to the support team.

We have snapshots, and we have even configured storage-based replication with this product. The majority of our virtual workloads are provisioned from this product as well. Our workload VMs are provisioned in this storage.

For replication and snapshots, it is more user-friendly and easy to use as compared to some of the other OEM products, such as HPE 3PAR and Dell Unity. 

Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use.

We have been using NetApp AFF for the last three to four years.

The product is very stable. The hardware is very stable. The operating system is also very stable.

It is scalable.

I do not face any challenges with NetApp. The support team or everything else is good. If we face any kind of breakdown or any challenge, we can easily reach out to the NetApp backend team. That is one of the advantages of NetApp. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have worked with the Dell Unity and VNX products. We migrated from Dell to NetApp because of the advantage of configuring the unified storage, such as NAS and SAN, in a single box.

Apart from that, the end customer preferred to configure DR, and NetApp has its own solution with this device. The end customer also wanted the snapshot feature, and NetApp has its own feature.

In addition, every four or five years, when the system gets old, we need to migrate the workloads to a new system. NetApp has an advantage there because we can purchase a new system and configure it in the same existing cluster. Once it is configured in the existing cluster, from the back or from storage to storage, we can do the migration without any downtime. That is one of the advantages of NetApp.

We have not worked with other NetApp solutions much. We only tested ONTAP and the AWS or the Google Platform Service with NetApp, but we are not using it in our production environment.

It is easy to deploy and use. It takes three to five hours. One person is enough for it.

The installation or the initial setup is done by OEM or NetApp engineers. After the initial setup is done, our internal team takes care of the other activities. After the management connectivity and physical parts are established in the backend, our in-house engineer takes care of it.

If you have a virtual environment with the SAN and NAS workloads, NetApp is very suitable. Apart from that, if you are looking for a DR solution, it is very easy to configure DR in NetApp. NetApp also has its own object storage, so object storage is also available in the existing platform and existing versions. If you are using any in-house S3 type of solution, that is available in this.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF a nine out of ten.