NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

NetApp has sped up delivery for our virtual environment. It's been a great solution. Our customers have been amazed and overjoyed with the performance of our virtual environment, which uses VDI for virtual desktops and VMware for our virtual host servers. Everything is working seamlessly. 

We plan to expand our use of NetApp solutions, and we're already in talks about this. We will be looking at the new ASA products they just released to see if they're more suitable for us than the C-series and what the cost is. We would love to have flash storage, but we'll see how much that costs.

A Flash environment would be great. We still have some spinning disk storage, and we hope to get rid of those completely and go all SSD. So we're looking for that to be within our budget

The NetApp C-Series storage soutions are the most valuable to us. I would rate them 8.5 out of 10. 

Customer support is a hot-button issue, so we definitely need better customer support. We get some support from our vendor that helps. If the C-Series had a more user-friendly GUI, that would help us get our LUNs built and data storage connected faster. 

We've been with NetApp for years. We considered switching to HPE Nimble Storage, but we decided to stay with NetApp and upgrade our environment to the C-Series. With NetApp, support has been a pain point, but the price and warranty costs are perfect for our budget. 

NetApp is offered at a reasonable price point, so it has saved us money. Our primary goal is to keep our costs low. We're hoping that the next line of products will include a more budget-friendly option. 

I rate NetApp solutions 8.5 out of 10. Improving support would increase the rating. They could also enhance and streamline the GUI to make management more efficient. 

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.

Our primary use case for this solution is machine learning.

The performance of NetApp AFF allows our developers and researches to run models and their tests within a single workday instead of spreading out across multiple workdays.

For our machine learning applications, the latency is less than one millisecond.

The simplicity of data protection and data management is standard with the rest of NetApp's portfolio. We leverage SnapMirror and SnapVault.

In my environment, currently, we only use NAS. I can't talk about simplifying across NAS and SAN, but I can say that it provides simplification across multiple locations, multiple clusters, and data centers.

We have used NetApp to move large amounts of data between data centers, but we do not currently use the cloud.

Our users have told me that the application response time is faster.

The price of the A800 is very expensive, so our data center costs have not been reduced.

We are using ONTAP in combination with StorageGRID for a full data fabric. It provides us with a cold-hot tiering solution that we haven't experienced before.

Thin provisioning has allowed us to over-provision existing storage, especially NVMe SSD, the more expensive disk tier. Along with data efficiencies such as compaction, deduplication, and compression, it allows us to put more data on a single disk.

Adding StorageGRID has reduced our TCO and allows us to better leverage fastest NVMe SDD more, hot tiering to that, and cold tiering to StorageGRID.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and performance.

I would like to see NetApp improve more of its offline tools and utilities. Drilling down to their active IQ technology, that's great if your cluster is online and attached to the internet, with the ability to post and forward auto support, but in terms of having an offline cluster that is standalone, all of those utilities don't work. If there's a similar way to how NetApp has a unified manager, but on-premises where the user could deploy and auto support could be forwarded to that, and maybe more of a slimmed-down active IQ solution could be made available, I'd be interested in that.

I need a FlexPool to FlexGroup solution.

I would like to see the FAS and AFF platforms simplified so that the differences will disappear at some point. This would reduce the complexity for the end-storage engineers.

I would rate the stability of NetApp AFF as moderate at this point. There were some unfortunate growing paints initially with the A800. Our problem was related to compatibility issues with the active optical transceivers, and it caused an outage within our data center. Our customer was not happy with this.

The scalability is very good and we have had no issues.

When we had our data center outage, we had an excellent NetApp engineer on-site. We went back and forth through it and eventually worked our way through it, but it was a multi-day problem.

We have been a NetApp customer for a long time. We just recently added a NetApp StorageGRID product for more object-store advantages in our data pipeline. It is adding more value.

NetApp is the number one leader in NFS, which is the protocol that we primarily use. We looked for a new solution simply because IOM3 modules were deprecated and moving forward from ONTAP 9.3 to version 9.6 required a full forklift upgrade, and a bunch of hardware was thrown out.

The initial setup was complex.

The move from older FAS systems with older disk shelves to the newer AFF A800 systems is a transition that is a nightmare in terms of rack space, moving data, and trying to do it online so that the customer doesn't experience downtime. It was a multi-day upgrade.

We used a reseller and a NetApp badged engineer, and our experience with them was very good.

NetApp has a good support team, good account management, good engineers, and they have the ability to stay ahead of what's trending in technology.

Ideally, the cost would be lower, it would be less complex, and the hardware compatibility would be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

NetApp is introducing All Flash FAS with the all-flash array. Our customers like performance, they don't want to deal with latency. Using an all-flash array, our customers get impact from performance.

I can definitely say it has helped our orginization. We have an SQL application server, which is in our NetApp storage. The records contain the number of transactions. Since my company is a financial company, we always look into transactions. NetApp all-flash array is faster than we're used to. The read and write, and the random IOPS are all up to speed. I don't see much of a difference when I run the 100k random IOPS with a 70% read and 30% write, and vice versa, 70% write and 30% read. That's a big improvement that we've seen since we started using this solution. It is a valuable asset.

They have come up with good back-end architecture. The features are the same as NetApp ONTAP. The only change is all-flash. There are no 7k, 10k, or 15k drives, only flash drives.

My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance.

We are very happy with the user experience from the all-flash array. Because their usual latency for the application depends on the critical application - they used to see four-millisecond latency with the non-all-flash array - with the all-flash array, they don't even see microseconds of latency. They might see microseconds, but that is not impactful.

To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash.

It's better with all-flash. 

Scalability is good. Compared to the different vendors, the scalability is very flexible, in the sense that you can scale up to whatever you want, expand your storage, expand your clusters, expand your nodes. NetApp makes it possible. Some vendors have come up with models that won't expand their nodes, which creates the need to buy different clusters. For example, let's say I have four nodes. My four nodes have the capability of taking one million IOPS, but my storage backend isn't complete, so I can't expand that. So the nodes are of no use. NetApp is not only thinking from the customer's point of view, but they are also thinking about every other prospective use and they include a lot in all-flash drives.

It's very good. I have never personally seen any issues with the technical support.

Our previous solution had performance issues. I see a lot of value in faster policies. I don't like when critical applications are running on drives with different speeds. When customers need to track all of their data and it's sitting on a 7k drive, the drive is working hard. The response is slow. With all-flash, it's better. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not complex.

We have connected to AFF public clouds but I'm not really dealing with it.

It took us less than two minutes to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF. 

We used NetApp, but we could've deployed it ourselves. NetApp Support knows the best practices. A good thing about NetApp is that even customers can easily deploy the storage. With other vendors, you usually have to entirely rely on them for deployment and all facets of the solution. 

We definitely see ROI. We save a lot more money with this solution.

Using NetApp, our total cost of ownership decreased by 17%. 

Other vendors aren't as straightforward as NetApp when it comes to the deploying, installing, and configuring. NetApp works more efficiently. By saving time, you're saving money.

AFF has affected IT's ability to support new business initiatives. Nowadays, customers in financial companies are looking for more storage. From a business point of view, you need a faster response in order to compete with other financial companies. From the customer's point of view, they are looking for a faster response from their financial company. Using all-flash array, they can retrieve their old files within seconds. That's an important edge.

AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics on VMs. It helps us with records. We need to be able to calculate more performance matters. Customers have complained that the performance latency exceeds more than three milliseconds for some applications. They will have delayed performance latency. When I used the 7.2k drives, applications could only support 300 accounts per second. If it was more than that, it would crash. NetApp all-flash array gives us one million IOPS.

I would rate this product a ten because of flash. Because AFF is better for the customer, provisionally, deployment, and performance-wise.

We are the local government, so we have a lot of customer data. With NetApp, we feel secure. We feel our data is safe. NetApp has good compute, so our apps run faster with this solution.

We use ransomware protection, which is very good technology that NetApp provides to us. We can enable it with one click and our data is secure. We do not have to use any other product to protect the data when our data is residing on NetApp. 

I would rate the ransomware protection technology an eight out of ten. Without it, it is very hard to manage our data and protect our data. Nowadays, we see all kinds of attacks on public data. Without NetApp, we would not at all feel safe.

We just updated to the latest version, and the GUI has changed a lot. It is user-friendly. Everybody can use it, not just the technical people.

Their customer support can be better.

We opened a couple of tickets for their support. Not all of them were bad. We had issues with some of them. For example, we scheduled a meeting with their support at 5 PM after hours, but their support never showed up.

We first chose to have Pure Storage, but after the PoC and a few trials, we decided to go for this solution because it is stable and scalable. It is also more user-friendly.

We have not used a lot of features that NetApp provides. The only feature that we use right now is ransomware protection. For ransomware protection, NetApp stands out for our company.

Innovation was a factor in our decision-making process. NetApp updates its products almost every day. They are on top of the technology. They now have AI, ransomware protection, cloud, and other things.

We need to migrate our data to the cloud. It is difficult to migrate the amount of data we have in a short time. Our current challenge is migration.

We would like to use NetApp Cloud. That will have a big impact on my company because it will be easier to use for us and more secure. We would not have any headaches related to expanding or scaling it. Our goal is to move to NetApp Cloud.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. These are the top priorities that we have right now.

It is hard to say if the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced our technology decisions. That is because we have to provide the information or data to AI in order to get the AI working correctly, but I would consider using AI.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Better customer support will make it a ten.

The main service of those devices is for use at our offshore platforms and that's where they'll be heading. We have a lot of data offshore, seismic data, and it needs to be stored in a reliable system. The main use case is to store the core business data from the platform at our offshore site, so that it is safe.

In general, NetApp AFF helps simplify data management across SAN environments. We have several solutions within our company and we are converging all the data from those solutions into NetApp by mounting volumes and LUNs in our SAN environment. It allows us to concentrate all the data reliably in one platform. It also gives us a single pane of glass so that we can manage all the data properly. We can visualize and get a holistic view of what we have and how secure the data is. We have the bigger picture. It gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to better management and using it has been an awesome experience.

Because it gives us a single pane of glass, it helps us to analyze the system itself and gives us a realistic view of what's going on: the issues, the warnings, and the errors. As a result, we can easily prevent a lot of problems, and that is something that we couldn't do previously. It also facilitates the troubleshooting process due to the high volume of information that it gives us. It definitely helps reduce support issues. But in terms of reducing IT support costs, it's still a little too early to talk about that. We know it is going to affect things in a good way, but we don't have enough data about that yet.

The file system in NetApp makes it easy to read and write data. It actually speeds up a lot of the operations that we are performing on a daily basis. With several of our virtual machines, we have noticed that the performance has increased quite a bit. In terms of writing, reading, and storing the data, the performance of the VMs has increased significantly. We are pretty happy with that so far.

ONTAP has also simplified our operations and that means we don't need a lot of people to manage the infra. NetApp makes it so easy. We can allocate people to other projects and those people can gain new skills in other platforms, rather than just working in NetApp itself.

We wanted the replication and SnapMirror and those types of features in case an event occurs. That way, we have a proper system so that we can recover the data properly. One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time.

Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love.

The deployment itself, compared to other platforms, should be a lot easier. We don't find it all that complicated because we have been doing it for such a long time, but it should be a bit easier. They can improve that.

When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated. I know that SAN, itself, is quite complicated. It's not the same approach as the hyper-converged solutions, but there are always ways to improve. NetApp's engineers should try to tackle that so that integration between devices, including the cabling at the back, is simplified.

Another thing that could be simplified is the Service Processor setup. That is something that requires you to perform a lot of tasks before it is completed.

Also, joining clusters should be a lot easier. With one or two commands you should be able to complete that.

I have been using NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) for the last year. 

It is a very robust solution. It doesn't break easily, even when we have power failures, which is something we have in this country. NetApp gives us the resilience we need. We know we can trust NetApp.

The scalability is very good.

The documentation is crystal clear and easy to follow.

Positive

The systems we have offshore needed to be upgraded. That's why we decided to upgrade them to NetApp. It is a solution that we have used previously in some of our other companies and we know the solution is very reliable.

For file services, we used to have Synology, but that was for small projects. It's pretty tough to compare because the magnitude of what they were serving is completely different.

The initial setup is complex. It should be easier.

The initial deployment took three days, and that was working on it two or three hours a day. We got two appliances, 2750s, at the end of last year and we completed the setup about three weeks ago. We set up the volumes and the v-servers. We are currently configuring the system and, in the next month or so, the appliance will be done and it will be transferred to the new site offshore.

Our deployment included initializing all the disks, doing the network configuration setup, including the IPs, the mask, the gateways, the DNS, et cetera. Then we had to apply the licenses for all the services. Next, we had to create the volume structure. Then we could start mounting them on other devices so that we can integrate the storage itself with the rest of our system.

We have five people working on the solution.

We started doing it by ourselves and then we had to call for help from a consultant. We were completely satisfied with our experience with that consultant.

Get it, because it's reliable, stable, robust, and it serves the purpose.

The primary use case for AFF is as a SAN storage for our SQL database and VMware environment, which drives our treatment systems. We do not use our it currently for AI or machine learning.

We are running ONTAP 9.6.

Our AFF 8040 is currently helping us in terms of response time and speed because it is a flash system. Most importantly, it enables our SQL Cluster to respond to database queries and things a lot faster. It minimizes latency and stuff like that, which is important in radiation treatment.

The latency is important in that the data that we serve from the system drives LINAC, which is a big machine that shoots radiation into cancer patients. The latency affects how long the patients end up having to sit there tied down to these tabletops for the radiation treatment. It also helps speed up the setup of the machine, which takes about five minutes because the machine has to rotate around and do all these things. Sometimes, if the system doesn't respond in enough time, these interlocks happen and the machine stops. There are a lot of safety interlocks that cause the system to stop if things don't happen right, so we aren't mistreating patients and killing people. It's not a typical file server. We tell people usually it's a black box for radiation treatment. On airplanes you have the black box which records all data, this is exactly what our NetApps do for radiation treatment.

Our AFF does simplify our SAN and NAS environments. We currently don't use any cloud because we're a medical institution that hasn't approved cloud storage of any type because of HIPAA violations. When we came from our old NAS work solution, we could only do one or the other: It was NAS or SAN. The, AFF provides the ability to do both. It consolidates a lot of our storage into one or two chassis, which makes money savings in our data center. It saves a lot of rack space, which we don't have much of anymore. We have a new building and are almost out of space already.

The simplicity of the data management in our current system is really easy, especially with the setting up of redundant volumes and SnapMirror. We have it mirrored over to an 8200 non-flash system. We use that for our DR SVMs, so if our SQL Cluster goes down, the other volumes take over, and we have no downtime because it drives patient treatment. It gets complicated fast. 

The data protection that we currently use is SnapMirrors and SnapVaults. We have our SnapVault off on an offsite with a FAS2552 system.

We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad. 

One thing that could be improved is the web interface. I would like to see some of the features in the web interface, like where the Snapshots are located, brought up a bit more to the front. This way I don't have to do as many clicks If I'm using the GUI, which I do once in a while. We are usually going in and looking at Snapshots for doing restores, etc., and if it is more upfront or to the surface, it might save a few clicks. It's not so bad.

We have had our AFF for three years now and not had any problems with it whatsoever. It's been rock solid. They haven't lost a drive or node. We haven't had a hardware failure. It has been fantastic.

The scalability of AFF in our NetApp systems in general has been ewonderful. I have another enclosure full of flash drives sitting in our dock right now ready to go in. I can schedule it, put it in the rack, and have it in the system and utilized in maybe half an hour. It works just great.

Our AFF has freed us up greatly in terms of allocating storage. Our old system didn't expand at all. With the new system, we can add another shelf in, merge data into the aggregate, and grow volumes (all live), which is great in a hospital.

The tech support has been awesome. We have meetings with our local guys once a month, whether we need it or not, and they answer our questions. I have been able to hot call them on demand on the weekends when we were doing upgrades and side things on our NetApp, then had some issues. I was able to call, and they stop and help out, which has been fantastic. They are probably our best vendor. 

I chose NetApp because I was most impressed with the engineers that we talked to about the system and its overall metrics along with the things that we were given, like latency and redundancy. I was most impressed with the demos that they did that, which included: ease of setting up an AFF, ease of deploying storage to a SQL Cluster, and just overall simplicity of how easy it is to move data around to back up things.

Our AFF has improved our application time greatly. Our database response time has gone up a lot from our previous SaaS storage that we had. The systems were nine-years-old and were about do to go. When we went to the flash, we noticed a huge increase application response rate (50 percent or more). It was like night and day.

It was more of an expensive system at the time when we bought it because flash was relatively new. We probably save the most amount of money just in the time to set up with it. We had to set up in an afternoon, then we were serving out data later on that day. Just the fact that it's been rock solid. We haven't had to sit there and baby it, fixing things, tweaking and tuning it. It just works. The biggest savings is not having to sit there and keep it warm.

I would give our AFF probably a 10 (out of 10). We had no problems with it. It's an easy upgrade. We can do everything on the fly in the middle of the day, which is important. With the hospital, it's been a great all around piece of hardware.

We use it primarily for CIFS and NFS shares, e.g., Windows shares and network shares for Linux-based systems.

It has been very helpful for us. Data mobility is big. Being able to move data between different locations quickly and easily. This applies to data protection and replication. The hardware architecture has been very good as far as easily being able to refresh environments without any downtime to our applications. That's been the biggest value to us from the NetApp platforms.

The solution simplifies IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments on-premise.

We are working on a lot of efforts right now where environments need multiple copies of data. Today, those are full copies of data, which require us to have a lot of storage. Our plans are that you'll be able to leverage NetApp Snapshot technology to lessen the amount of capacity that we require for those environments, primarily like our QA and dev environments.

We've done full data center migrations. The ease of replication and data protection has made moving large amounts of data from one data center to another completely seamless migrations for us.

• Simplicity
• Their storage efficiency
• Compression
• Deduplication
• Compaction
• The ease of being able to move data around.

Early on, the clustered architecture was a little rough, but I know in the last four years, the solution has been absolutely rock solid for us. 

Something I've talked to NetApp about in the past is going more to a node-based architecture, like the hyper-converged solutions that we are doing nowadays. Because the days of having to buy massive quantities of storage all at one time, have changed to being able to grow in smaller increments from a budgetary standpoint. This change would be great for our business. This is what my leadership would like to see in a lot of things that they purchase now. I would like to see that architecture continue to evolve in that clustered environment.

I would like to see them continue to make it simpler, continuing to simplify set up and the operational side of it. 

I can't remember the last time we had an issue or an outage.

It is one of the best solutions out there right now. It is extremely simple, reliable, and seldom ever breaks. It's extremely easy to set up. It's reliable, which is important for us in healthcare. It doesn't take a lot of management or support, as it just works correctly.

Our NetApp environment has been fairly stable and simple that we don't have a lot of resources allocated to support it right now. For our entire infrastructure, we probably have three engineers in our entire enterprise to support our entire NetApp infrastructure. So, we haven't necessarily reallocated resources, but we already run pretty thin as it is.

Scalability has been great. There have been some things I would like to see them do differently, but overall, the scalability has been wonderful for us.

The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today.

We use all-flash arrays for our network shares. We have a couple of other platforms that we also have used in the past. I really wanted to move away from those for simplicity. Another big reason is automation. NetApp has done a great job with their automation The Ansible modules along with all the PowerShell command lists that they have developed, make it very consumable for automation, which is very big for us right now. That was one of the big driving forces is having a single operating environment, regardless if I'm running an all-flash array or hybrid array. It's the same look and feel. Everything works exactly the same regardless. That definitely speaks to the simplicity and ease of automation. I can automate and use it everywhere, whether it's cloud, on-prem, etc. That was one of the real decisions for us to decide to go that direction.

The overall setup is very easy. Deploying a new cDOT system is the hardest part. On our business side, because our environment is very complex, there was some complexity that came up. In general, that is one nice thing about Netapp. Regardless of how simple or complex your environment is, it can fit all of those needs. Especially on the network side, it can fit into those environments to take advantage of all the technologies that we have in our data centers, so it's been really nice like that.

We did the deployment ourselves.

The solution has improved application response time. We are using the All Flash FAS boxes of the AFS and our primary use case is around file shares. These aren't really that performance intensive. Therefore, overall, response times have improved, but it's not necessarily something that can be seen. 

From a sheer footprint savings, we're in the process of moving one of our large Oracle environments which currently sits on a VMAX array, taking up about an entire rack, to an AFF A800 that is 4U. From just the sheer power of cooling and rack-space savings, there have been savings.

I haven't seen ROI on it yet, but we're working on it.

We did RFIs with the different solutions. We were looking at a NetApp, Isilon, and Nutanix. Those were three that we were looking at. NetApp won out primarily around simplicity and ease of automation. It's the different deployment models where you can deploy in the cloud or on-prem, speaks to its simplicity. Our environment is very complex already. Anything that we can do to simplify it, we will take it.

When you are evaluating solutions:

• What are your goals?
• What are your priorities? 

You will be looking at things, like cloud, automation, and simplicity, regardless of how big you are. The NetApp platform gives you all of these things in a single operating system, regardless of where you deploy.

The solution has freed us from worrying about storage as a limiting factor. I'm very confident that the NetApp platform will do what they say it's going to do. It's very reliable. I know that if there is an issue, I can quickly move that data wherever I need to move it with almost no downtime. It gives me a lot of data flexibility and mobility. In the event that I did need to move my workloads around, I can do that.

I would give it a nine out of 10. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because I would like to see some architectural changes. Other than that, its simplicity and the ability to automate are probably the two biggest things. Being able to move data in and out of the cloud, if and when we decide to do that, it gives us the most flexibility of anything out there.

We do not use this solution for AI or machine learning applications.

We are talking about automatically tiering cold data to the cloud, but we are not doing it yet.