NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

I can be less proactive about monitoring it. We don't have to mess with tweaking it as much. On the production SAN, for instance, we're always on there, monitoring performance, checking how it's doing. Whereas with the EF, because there's only one thing running on it, it runs so fast, we just let it go. We had to monitor previous solutions more; it's not that there was ever really a problem.

One of the most valuable features is the overall performance it provides. You're able to throw a pile of IOPS at it and it will handle that without much issue.

We had a beefy SQL server that was trying to pull a large number of transactions all the time and it was causing problems on our production SAN environment. They wound up deciding they wanted to go with EF specifically for that and haven't had any problems ever since.

I'm a big fan of the cluster shell and everything on the FAS series. I know the E series kind of has its own OS. (I think NetApp purchased them.) To my knowledge, that doesn't even exist in the same way. A lot of that is to provide the IOPS that it does because it doesn't have to focus on all that other stuff. From a manageability perspective, I like the look and the feel of the FAS series better than the EF. I think it's more straightforward and simplistic. Even if it's not to that extent, I would like to see it move a bit more in that direction; a little more manageability, a simpler management interface. It's not necessarily that it's way overly complex. It's just that it's not as easy as the FAS series.

Reliability has been really good.

No problems with stability; every upgrade we've ever done went off without a problem. We were able to do it live to the failover.

We've never tried to scale it because the size of it's been good, so I wouldn't really know.

Technical support depends on the issue. Sometimes, it was really good; other times, it was a struggle. Eventually, we always wound up with somebody who was really knowledgeable and helpful.

One time, we had a problem with a LIF on our FAS 8060s. One of the Vservers was causing intermittent problems. The guy on the phone was adamant that it was not a NetApp issue. After about three hours of working with him, we finally just decided to hang up. I did some other testing, called him back with proof that it was NetApp and then it took about five minutes to solve. They said, “Oh well, just do this, there we go.”

They were already using EF when I started.

I have not previously used a solution other than the FAS series.

Plan out everything ahead of time. Have your fabric in place. We've had times before, where that was an oversight. It was never thought of in terms of getting networking fabric set in. Then, whenever we'd bring in the NetApp solution to plug in and the fabric's not there, then you get these long delays. Make sure you know everything that's going to be needed and have it in place ahead of time.

When I look for a vendor to work with for EF or any similar solutions, for me, the most important factors are honesty, prompt response, willing to work with us, a general feeling like that they care about our company and our needs, and not just about the sale. Without that, it's difficult to trust them or work alongside them.

Part of our business is data processing. Any time we can take processes that are slow, find the pain points and speed them up, it helps a lot of different parts of the business.

It's a way to get relatively low-cost, very high-performance, low-latency block storage as a point solution. We've been using it to target database applications where there are particular files that really need more performance than we're able to give with our other products right now.

We've really had no issues. It's been a very stable product for us.

We’ve only used technical support to assist with some upgrades. I've always been very happy with them.

We were reaching the performance limits of what we could do with SAS at that time, and AFF wasn't really an option yet. We looked around and it was clear to me that I'd prefer to not go with another vendor. We had really good experience with FAS. I'd prefer to stay with a NetApp solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup; my admin was. It seemed pretty straightforward.

There weren’t any other vendors on our shortlist. We pretty much turned to NetApp very quickly, once it was clear that they had a product that we could afford and would meet the need.

When I choose a vendor, support is a huge consideration. I want to have a stable product that, when there are issues, they are prepared to take care of them; they understand what they are doing; they understand our needs. Affordability is also very important for us too. We found all of those things in NetApp. The pricing was reasonable. I have no complaints there. It could always be cheaper, of course.

I suggest looking at your needs and decide whether EF or some of the other NetApp products are more appropriate. If the EF is the most appropriate, I don't have any hesitation recommending it.

It's fast! It can perform one million IOPS.

The database queries on our old system (HP EVA) took nearly 32 hours, but on the new one in under 10.

Monitoring and management handling in enterprise environments could be improved.

We've used it for one year for our Oracle database.

We've had no problems deploying it.

We've had no problems with stability. It runs consistently.

It has scaled to our needs.

Customer support issues have normally been cleared up in one business day, so it's been really great.

Normal issues like performance problems and parts replacement are infrequent and are taken care of quickly.

We previously used HP EVA, which was slow and old. We switched from HP to NetApp because the customer got a 7-Mode FAS for a different situation and asked what he could do about the slow speed of his EVA. We recommended EF.

In two hours, it was up and running.

I implement it for our customers.

At first, we thought we could expand the 7-Mode FAS for our client, but the workload was not matching to the system, so we chose the EF.

If you need very low IOPS and throughput and an easy to install and stable solution, then this is the perfect one for you.

For us, the most valuable feature is the performance. We have a very strong SQL workload that was struggling on several other providers, and it solved that problem for us.

If you're not using DDP, it is a little tedious to configure.

I've seen the new firmware with the 2800, and they've automated some things that were manual. It was a four-step process for every volume you wanted to create before, and it looks like they fixed that in the coming firmware, although from what I understand it will be a little while before it gets to the 550.

We've had it for about two-and-a-half years.

We have not had any down time with it at all. We had one controller failure in the two-and-a-half years, and was able to have that replaced with zero down time.

We have not had to expand the product yet. We sized it for what we thought was going to be growth for three years, and we have not outgrown it yet, so I don't see an issue with it.

We've had a very good experience with technical support, especially on the EF products. They reached out to us when we had the failure, and we had somebody onsite within four hours.

We have not had an issue from a performance or a technical standpoint. We had an issue with some monitoring that we wanted to do; finding the right person within NetApp to help us with that.

This was a new initiative.

Initial setup was pretty complex for us. We weren't able to use dynamic disk pooling, just because we were very concerned about performance. NetApp brought somebody onsite for us to help us out, and they recommended against using DDP.
They helped us with the first one, I think we had it configured in about four hours. We added another one six months later and did that ourselves.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is the support infrastructure and pricing.

When we compared it to other all-flash arrays, it was the most cost-effective solution and really the most performant that we looked at.

My recommendation to my peers is that they know for sure what their performance needs are; that they size it properly to support those needs.

Performance wise, it's phenomenal. We haven't had to touch it much since we had it up and running.

Making configuration changes on the version of firmware that we have is a little bit more difficult than other products.

The primary use case of this solution for databases.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access.

It's simple in operating and for maintenance. Also, they provide a warranty for the I/O output.

All-Flash is made by Solid State Disk, it's not like HDD or spinning disk.

The price is important, and we would like to have it less expensive.

Better integration with other brands is important so we would like to see it easier to integrate.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

We are using one of the older versions, with a capacity of 12 TB.

This solution is stable. All-Flash has drives that are very stable. If dropped it's not broken. It's not the same as a hard drive and the old-style hard drive. It won't be damaged by a power surge.

We have 50 users, some are administrators and others are different businesses.

Technical support is good. If we have some issues, especially from NetApp, they give us an early warning system. When there is a potential error, it will come up and let us know immediately that it will occur. This prevents it from crashing.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It's very simple to run the application and run the database. It's more measurable with little to no variables.

It took less than a week to deploy.

We did not use an integrator, we used the resources from our company. We have a team of five engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is an expensive product.

I will continue to use this solution. I think that the technology is still the latest one. 

If there is more development storage technology in the future with other venders then I will consider using another solution.

Depending on the business needs, there are variables to consider with the expense. It's still worth purchasing as the support is good and also the performance is very good.

Some of the engineers are still considering changing to a cheaper solution but they worry that the support and maintenance will not be as good.

I would recommend this solution. From my experience, this is still the best product available.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our company used this solution primarily for databases. The customer who currently uses it mainly uses it for the data store. He uses it as a single silo with the storage it offers, so he implements the project and uses what he needs to. The solution is not that flexible that you can change the workload so it depends on what you designed before. So you have to compute for your load or for your use before you do the setup.

The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our databases. What's great about this solution is that it speeds up our data store because it is a cheap solution for flash performances.

What I really like about this solution is that it is easy to use and the implementation was straightforward. The availability is another feature that stands out for me, as it offers a variety of ways to connect to our customers. 

One thing that may need to improve is the software monitoring as it is based on a work station that is serviced to give support to the management. The manager may not be as fast on board the controller, so it needs something else to make it easier to manage. Managing the storage is, therefore, the only single point of failure.

We've used the NetApp EF-Series for ten years and it has been extremely stable. 

I think the scalability of the solution is really good. We can scale with the space, but not with the computation capabilities or with the controllers. I believe the reason for this is that it is an old style storage system. There are some new products on the market that are more agile and more scalable. 

I am not sure how many users our customer has, but I think it is about 100 users. The scalability would depend on the kind of VM system they're working on.

The technical support is very good. The solution doesn't require that much maintenance because it's quite easy and very robust as a storage system. When we did call in the help of support, they responded quickly and offered the correct solution. 

Our client used another solution before but they found that the NetApp EF-Series is much faster when it comes to performance. And they saved a lot of money with the cost of the fast drives.

The initial setup was straightforward and having fewer features to install makes it really simple. You only need a strong internet connection and once you've applied it onto the network, it is easy to find the managing software and to set everything up.

The deployment took no longer than 50 minutes. Once installed, you only need to supply the management IP address and after that, depending on the number of the LANs to be implemented, everything is complete. 

The biggest part of the job is first to configure the IP address for the management. The maintenance is really simple and you can upgrade without interrupting services. When implementing, the main job is to do some configuration, implement the LANs, the zoning and the masking. After that, it will stay as it is for a long time. I believe firmware updates can be handled by one person alone. 

We never use an integrator - we do our installations ourselves. And so far we haven't experienced any trouble.

Our license is fully integrated now, so we don't have any additional payments. We do use volume cryptography, but I believe it is free.

I will rate this solution a nine out of ten because it has limited storage. Before you take on a project, you must know how much storage you need, but once you focus on the system, it will give you great performance, reliability and ease of use.

It increased the speed of our current hosted VMs and their performance. It has provided a little bit of ease on the management.

We have an older disk-based system that is working in tandem with it and it definitely has better performance. Because of that, we put all of our VM's on it, which we can.

• The management of it is very simple. that is the most valuable feature.
• It's been very reliable so far.
• Its high performance for the VMware volumes that we host. It has multiple applications dedicated to it because of the different guest host that are on it.

The management interface, while very reliable, it seems a little old now and could maybe use a little modernization. Instead of having a management tool, more like a management interface or similar to the HTML5 version of the ONTAP off the FAS, such as OnCommand System Manager.

It's been very stable so far. Once it was set up, it's was extremely stable.

It seems easy to expand, but we haven't had the need to do that yet.

It was very good. We had some complications in getting the performance where we needed it. They were able to sort that out for us.

We were using the E2700 and had a lot of performance bound VMs, so that was the goal behind getting this solution.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was a little bit complex because we had an InfiniBand solution. It's a little bit different than just setting it up with Fibre Channel, so that was a little bit complex, but everything else was very simple.

The price point for EF is considerably lower than the alternatives.

We considered all flash solutions that offered storage efficiency features.

We had two other vendors on our short list. One was a rebranded RAID inc. solution. I don't remember what the other brand was, but there was one other that is fairly new in the market.

We chose NetApp because most of our environment is NetApp. The unified management helps a lot. We've had really good results with everything that we've had with NetApp, therefore it works out.

You can't beat it for the price. With support, everything has been really well. I would say this would be something I would recommend.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Speed
• Price point
• Ease of management
• Also, low latency is important, as it was the whole reason behind getting a faster system.

We use this solution as storage for our application server. It is used in the virtualized environment in our data center. It hosts our critical applications such as databases and our critical application workload.

The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload. This feature is unique to this vendor and the competitors do not have it.

I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems.

Better monitoring should be implemented.

I began working with NetApp All-Flash Arrays about two years ago.

This solution is very stable. We use it for our critical workloads and it is used on a daily basis.

This solution is scalable. We have more than 500 users in our company.

We also have plans to extend its capacity.

I have been in touch with technical support and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We did not use another enterprise-level storage solution before this one. We switched to NetApp All-Flash arrays because of the high availability and the ability to assign specific margins of performance to individual workloads.

The initial setup is very easy. It includes a very good Cisco NetApp deployment engine that makes it very simple.

We did the installation on our own.

This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive.

For anyone who has critical workloads like Oracle databases or DB2, NetApp All-Flash Arrays will suit their needs, as long as it fits within their budget.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.