NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

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.

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.

The most valuable feature for us is the ability to move the workload between peers. It also has a huge advantage of helping us cut down on power consumption.

Almost all of our infrastructure is on cDOT, and now we are able to have a single point of management for all our data.

It's very difficult to manage the CLI. Also, the license model needs work. If you read the label as probable, you need to pay for a license for all the features, even if you are using just one.

We've been using it for one year.

I guess at the end of this year or the beginning of the next, we will finish the migration of the whole infrastructure.

9/10 - The problem is about the failover of the interfaces for some problems. We had some issues last week because of the interface of a cluster physically remained up, but we had a report noting issues with traffic management on it.

8/10

8/10

No previous solution was used.

It was simple.

It was done in-house.

We looked at EMC and IBM, but we chose EF because of the need to take snapshots and to save it to another system.

It must be evaluated depending on the workload of the applications.

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.

It's quick. That was our big requirement, it had to be fast enough that there's no latency in our applications between when the end users are logging in through Citrix, and then those servers all talk back to our back-end servers. There can't be any major latency be it disk I/O or network I/O. So, it's all pretty quick.

It's pretty easy. If you ever have to add another target, it's pretty easy to go through, you just add a new one, map the drives out to our ESXi host, and then we're all set and good.

I'm not too hands-on with it, so I don't have any major input on things it needs or things it should have. As long as its functionality is there for me to use, as somebody just to use the storage on it, that's all I need it for. I'm very simple.

It hasn't gone down. We have no issues. I'm not their storage admin, so he'd probably know a little bit more about it, but we haven't experienced any major issues that I'm aware of.

We haven't had the use for needing to scale it up as we're going, so it's just kind of been as it is.

I think we used the professional services for initial deployment, and then we've gone along with it. I don't think we've used tech support for that. We've used it for our NetApp shelf that we've got; we sometimes run into some issues. But not for this thing.

I don't think we were previously using a different solution. Our business was finally letting us spend some money on some good hardware and we decided to take a chance, I guess.

I actually wasn't involved in that process, so I don't know the answer to that.

Our use case is both corporate storage and for all of our datacenter and back-end enterprise applications. We store it all on the flash, so it's quick.

We use it for multiple apps. J.D. Edwards, so it's our accounting software, and then all of our BI business intelligence is sitting on there. Those are the major ones. We'll see, we might be getting HCI soon so that might change, put some more on there. Mostly just our big I/O.

For us the most important criteria when selecting a vendor: oftentimes it's reviews. Support is critical. Ease of use isn't so much an issue. Usually we just look at the feature set and see if it coincides with what we need, what we require, and then we pick whatever most closely fits that.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking at this type of solution I would recommend this one. It depends on the size of the company. Obviously to a small, medium size business, you're probably not going to recommend it because it's probably overkill.

When I say overkill, I mean it's probably way more than a smaller or a start-up company would need. They're not gonna have that much of a requirement for that kind of speed, that quick. I'd say for small, medium, unless they have deep pockets, I don't recommend it. They can probably get something comparable that more fits their budget. Once you start hitting a certain threshold, you're definitely going to have to start investing some money in IT to make sure it's stable and stays up and you have no issues.

More things get done faster. Time is money. If we have systems that are down for more than 10 minutes, that's $10,000 out the door, basically. They want true speed and being able to get up there.

The speed is the most valuable feature. It's a really good system. It's really fast; the speed's the best thing. It's one thing we love. Everybody wants to have everything faster and faster and faster. Knowing the speed's there, that's the best thing, along with the size and storage. I'm interested in the new stuff that's coming out, with the 32 terabytes. It will be interesting.

Once I play with it a bit more, I'll find out more about areas with room for improvement.

Cheaper pricing is always good. NetApp has been doing everything the right way. They've been figuring out things really well, going in the right direction.

I’m looking forward to the new shelves, the new disks and their sizes; how small you can get for lots of storage now. The size and speed are just amazing; always a good thing. Smaller systems save on electricity, save on space. We shrunk our server room down. We actually rebuilt it. We didn't have enough space for people to sit. We needed more office space. With everything so small, we cut our server room down and fit more people in. Our head count can go up and everything. People had jobs.

I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better.

I think stability is really good. We just started using them now. We're just getting into it. We're getting more and more systems as we go along. So far, everything has been stable; we have not had any problems. It's all new.

We never used flash arrays or anything like that before. This is all SSD and this stuff is all new to us.

We'll find out about scalability. I think it will be perfect. We have small sites. We just purchased a big site, a half-a-million dollar site, for Plymouth, Michigan. We'll find out how that works out, scaling up from that point. We used to do the shelves, the SATA shelves, the SAS shelves and so on. Flash is completely new and any SSD drives is all completely different to us. It will be interesting.

I haven't dealt with technical support yet.

We go off a price list. We kind of figure out what best fits the needs of each site. We have hundreds of sites in US and Canada.

We just wanted the speed. Everybody wants better IOPS and that was basically the reason why we chose it, to have better speed. Our sites need to be up; they need to be running.

We previously used regular SATA and SAS shelves, strictly disk shelves and so on; no flash, no arrays, nothing like that.

Before choosing this product, we did not really evaluate other options. They’ve looked at IBM and EMC. They've looked at that for some servers but most of the time, everything we stick to is with NetApp. We don't go all over; we stick strictly with NetApp.

So far, it's been fitting our needs. I've not had any issues with it, but it's all brand new to me. Right now, the install is great; everything is running fine; we haven't had any problems.

Go with the NetApp EF-series All Flash Arrays, if you want good quality, reliability, speed and size. I think that's the way to go nowadays; flash is amazing. I'd give it the thumbs up to do it. Spend the money. It might cost a little more but the quality is the best, for me. Sometimes, you have to spend money for good quality.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important factor for me is the relationship. We've had a great relationship with our sales managers and sales reps and we saw them at a recent conference. That's a key thing. You get the support you need. If something happens, they're on top of it, fixing it right away. Good service is the most important factor.

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.