What advice do you have for others considering NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS)?

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We just got it. We're expecting it will be faster and that we'll see some good compression and deep replication on our data. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI influenced our technology decisions. It's a factor in every decision that we make. The security is very important. I know other vendors provide similar types of types of security, and data tech and data security as well. We're using it all just for NAS right now. We possibly might use it for SAN in the future and then maybe archiving. We're very new to AI and it will be a consideration in the future. Cybersecurity for sure will also be a priority and data optimization is the most important.

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. I give it a high rating because of the support. Nothing is ever perfect. For example, ONTAP is a software solution with millions and millions of lines of code. Something can always go wrong with it. Bugs happen, but I like that you have a very good support organization behind it. I've found bugs that were so incredibly large that NetApp couldn't roll out systems to other customers for 48 hours until they solved the bug.

I rate NetApp solutions nine out of 10.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Data storage and optimization are going to be our biggest focus next. We've had problems with it in the past, and we're able to fix those issues with the solutions that we're purchasing. Our company is really into growth and innovation in general, and they're always looking for new ways to do something better. Previously, we have been doing things not to the best of our ability. Being able to purchase new hardware, new software, and have solutions architects come in and look at what we've got going on, it just makes sense to to go in that direction as well.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's really, really good. While our main driver is innovation, upper leadership's concern is always cost. We're always pushed towards cost. We found a good solution with this product. Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and optimization, cybersecurity, and AI. We're doing all three at the same time. We'll have to get the go-ahead from upper managers to pursue AI initiatives. At the same time, we're getting a big push from global security to do malware intrusion protection. We want a way to dedupe and replicate our data. We were using filers using SnapMirror, and now we're taking our snapshots across data center support on StorageGRID. It's helping us achieve our budget constraints while allowing us to work in other areas.

I rate NetApp solutions 10 out of 10. You have the right tools, knowledge, and phenomenal customer service, so it helps with everything we're doing and enables us to complete our mission quicker and easier. We can't just reach into the cloud to get support. NetApp allows us to call and start those tech cases. It's great.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. Since we're a privately held manufacturing company, we tend to buy the lowest level hardware. For example, we bought a manufacturing company, and we needed to buy a SAN. So we got a 2750, which is near the absolute lowest end. However, that fits our purpose. The fact that no matter what SAN we're running, they're all running ONTAP is a boom for management. That said, I hope that they will continue to not ignore the low end and continue to offer products, like the FAS line that will fit a purpose for a location that's just looking to put up a couple of VMware ESXi hosts and to have NetApp SAN for shared storage and for things like SnapMirror. That would make us happy. We're never going to be buying petabytes worth of storage. We have not stepped into AI at all yet. That said, NetApp does security additions built in ONTAP which is a good barrier against malware and ransomware. We're definitely leveraging that. We're going to leverage their anti-ransomware and anti-malware since cybersecurity insurance is important. Every company needs to have it. We manufacture parts for the car industry. Some have said if you're not ISO 27001 certified and if you don't have cyber insurance, they're not going to do business with us. A lot of our decisions are driven by customer requirements. I have a very good reseller that I work with. Future goals include cybersecurity. I'm going to try and push for an additional set of controllers to have another set of places to store SnapMirrors locally. Then we have an existing 200 that I would like to use as a repository for backups and snapshots and things like that. We have to be flexible enough to be able to grow as needs arise. This product gives us the foundation to have that growth efficiently, whether it's the purchase of a new filer or the additional purchase of an additional disk.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have been influencing our technology decisions a lot recently. We just recently made a commitment to AI in the space.

The project I currently work on is called IRAD, which is more of an experimental project. We get a budget or experimental money to use, and then based on that, we will decide if we want to implement long-term contracts. I am currently working on the second part of that project. The first part was successful and if the second part is also successful, we will sit down and have some serious talks about expanding our usage. There would be a lot more growth with that expansion. If the project is successful, we will be able to use it more. In terms of our next technology investments, based on my meetings with other NetApp executives at NetApp INSIGHT, my team and I are going to look into using BlueXP. After this conference, hopefully, within a couple of weeks, we can have some meetings scheduled to talk about how we could do that. Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and optimization and maybe AI. We have a lot of data in our company. It is getting to a point where we may need some help to be able to have it all centralized, and then we could pick it from one spot rather than multiple spots. I feel it is very important to be able to see and analyze our data because it helps drive decisions, and we need to be able to make the best decisions, especially for the customer. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have not influenced our technology decisions. I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We haven't tried everybody in the world, and we probably don't want to say that the solution is the best since we don't want them to rest on their laurels. That said, I would easily rate NetApp nine out of ten. Now, all other companies are copying that solution's success. The most important aspects of any solution are cost and innovation.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. Security is always the top concern. We'll always prioritize cybersecurity. I like the fact that the solution encrypts everything, that it is a trusted brand, that we know that we have the support in the event that anything happens. They back their product 100%.

We have plans to expand how we use this solution in the future. There is a ton of growth opportunity in terms of how we technically use the product, and it is also exciting how our clients will experience the speed and access security in their actual jobs. We hear a lot about ransomware, security, early detection, and proactivity. That is the space where we are focused because it feels that we are playing catch up constantly on that. Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage in general, but cybersecurity is right up against it. They go hand in hand. Our clients are asking for more and more transparency about how we are protecting their data while also serving them well. I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. I hope the same vision will continue.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a really good product. It's a really powerful product, which makes it an eight. We've had this product prior to the whole AI surge that's going on right now. And at this point, we haven't really changed our environment to react to that yet. We may do it in the future. For future investments, our goals will focus on performance needs and increasing workloads. Cybersecurity will be prioritized. It's our biggest priority. Safeguarding the data is the first job that we all have as data administrators. Having good cybersecurity, and hopefully, with the help of this product, will allow us to more confidently go down new innovation journeys and try new things. A lot of times, when you want to innovate, you need to consider first how it will impact your security. If we have good visibility on our cybersecurity, it'll allow us to innovate more effectively.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced our technology decisions. We've implemented the Snapshotting, and our next step is to implement the ransomware discovery AI tech that is built in. We're going to implement that as soon as possible. We're going to avoid the AI space for now, except for ransomware detection. We'll be prioritizing security, and any time the product introduces a new technology, we'll likely jump in. Overall, the product has provided us with some amazing tools that we haven't had before. We're so new to the family that we just appreciate the product so far.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's pretty comprehensive; we're always looking for better efficiency.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10.

I rate NetApp storage solutions eight out of 10.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10.

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10.

I rate NetApp nine out of 10.

I rate NetApp eight out of 10. If they could bring total costs down and make it easier to deploy the on-prem systems quicker, I would give it a 10.

I would rate NetApp a ten out of ten.

Our goal moving forward is to get the latest technologies as needed. In the future, upcoming investments will center around AI, data storage and optimization and cybersecurity. We might leverage AI and how we do things internally and assess what we can and can't improve. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. They are competitive. I wouldn't give anyone in this industry a ten out of ten.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's the best in the industry. The proliferation of AI and the evolving cybersecurity landscape hasn't influenced our technology decisions yet. We are in the process of moving towards AI. It's coming, and we're definitely looking at it. We've been a NetApp shop for 12 years. We do periodically try other solutions, however, that's gone by the wayside. We're basically a NetApp and Microsoft shop. Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around storage and security - and AI in the future. The key is to save money. We're moving things and disabling machines that are no longer needed. From a performance perspective, we're always trying to find different solutions that will help customers. We're working to get to data a lot faster.

We definitely like the anti-ransomware capability. That is cool to have. I am excited to go to the new version where we also have fewer false positives. There is all-new reporting which is cool, so I will have to look at how to do more in-depth reporting than what we do now. Data is always growing. We will see where our usage goes. We have had the biggest impact by going to the all-flash storage. We just purchased a C800, so that would be around for the next couple of years. We do not have any goals for our next technology investments over the next couple of years. We are not yet too big on AI. It would be exciting to try to use some of the AI features. I want to see how that works. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have had a few outages on the CVO where the host needed more performance but the CVO that we selected in terms of disk type and other things was not able to support that workload. To support that workload, we moved the host to ANF instead of CVO. We are moving towards AI, but we are not fully involved as of now. We have plans to increase its usage both on-prem and on the cloud. Data is constantly growing. We need more capacity. New business needs require new storage. New projects require more storage. Cost saving on the cloud is the goal we have. We do not know how much exactly it will come out to be because it is on a usage basis. It can grow constantly, and then for one month, it can come down. We need to make sure that the cost is constant. Our upcoming investments would be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. Data storage is the main thing that we cannot avoid. Cybersecurity is something that we need to make our environment secure. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I would rate NetApp eight out of ten. Given the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI, we are freshening up our cybersecurity, and AI is an initiative our senior management wants us to look into. We were part of another organization that separated, and they always had NetApp. We are investing in additional hardware and increasing our focus on NetApp resources to address expiring tools and facilitate expansion. We expect the expansion to positively impact our organization, allowing us to scale our business. Our company always has initiatives to expand its capabilities, and NetApp can help with that.

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.

Being a life insurance company, we are highly regulated. We have to be cautious about what we adopt in terms of AI to comply with many different state regulations and federal regulations. It is a technology we are watching. We are going to start using it probably around functions like marketing. We have a data team that is looking very heavily at that and coming up with maybe using it for the internal knowledge base that we use to help our customers. Life insurance products can be very complicated. There are a lot of rules and a lot of different ways the products work. Having a way even for our internal associates to ask AI how something works and get back some of those answers could also be a useful training tool. That is what we are looking at right now. We are not going to be using it for business-critical decisions and certainly nothing as highly regulated as underwriting or anything like that. It would probably be around making this a resource for internal employees to begin with, and then I would imagine marketing will follow from there as well. We are starting to move into a hybrid type of future with Azure. Some of the data that lives on our NetApp today does not need the performance of All Flash. One of the things that we are looking into is whether that can be put into Azure NetApp files. We can then use cold tiering or something like that. Some of it is just archive data kept around for legal reasons, but it does not need that super, top-end performance. We have also got imaging of some computers before we dispose of laptops and things like that. We are writing that to the E-Series today. It might make more sense to move some of that to the hybrid cloud solution. It will probably save us some money long term and reduce our on-prem footprint. We struggle a little bit with how long we want to be in the data center business on-prem. We think that the cloud is most likely our future, but it is not going to happen overnight. It will be a ten-year journey, and we will always have something on-prem. At the same time, we will be able to put away some of the systems that are not mission-critical and some of the archive types of things and know that they are taken care of from a technology we trust. In a keynote at NetApp INSIGHT, they talked about how so much of the data is going to be inside the purview of NetApp, and we will be able to use AI technologies to look at the data we have. One of the things I heard mentioned there which I thought would be useful is the ability to find all the duplicate copies of the data. Especially in the unstructured data world, everyone is just throwing everything under the file server shares and never deleting it. There is so much data out there that is redundant or has not been read in more than a decade. That data could probably go to a colder tier or be surfaced for review and potentially deletion. I see the potential in some of those technologies to help us understand the data we already have. In terms of our next technology investments, coming from a VMware background, we are still using NFS to attach all that. One of the things in the back of my mind is at what point do we start evaluating switching over to NVMe Connectivity and seeing the performance benefits around our larger database server by having much wider and deeper queues for IO. Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around cybersecurity. We made a big investment two years ago, and I am sure we will make more investments in the future, but we are pretty happy with where we are right now. AI is under the purview of a different department than me, so I do not have a ton of visibility into it, but I know there is a committee that is looking at that and deciding which use cases are safe for us to use given our regulations. They also make sure that we protect the privacy of all the people who entrust their data to us. We will definitely look at private solutions and not public solutions for a lot of this. We would like to move forward a little faster than we have in the past. Our company has been around for over 130 years. We are not new, and that has some of the benefits in terms of stability. It also means that we have a lot of legacy systems that we would like to move forward. We still have LUNS-connected AIX machines. They certainly continue to work great, but at the same time, we would like to start spinning down some of those platforms. AIX does not lend itself to running in the cloud very well. We want to move the company forward faster and use something that helps us navigate to what I call our new normal in terms of the hybrid nature of our data centers. As we start spanning Azure, anything that makes that easier would be helpful. I see the value of NetApp in making those migrations as easy as clicking a few buttons. For example, if an application from a share is moving to Azure next week, I should be able to take the share and move it to Azure as well so that I can easily keep the data locality next to the application. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

I rate the NetApp solution 10 out of 10.

I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. It's a product that keeps us coming back, and I've been managing NetApp products on and off for almost 15 years. It's grown and matured significantly but has never lost its core fundamentals: ease of management, support, and flexibility within our data center. While other products might offer bleeding-edge speed, they can be challenging to manage or incredibly expensive. NetApp AFF remains manageable and relatively affordable. The first company I worked for chose NetApp because it was cost-effective and reliable and served them well. In my experience, NetApp AFF has always been a dependable and high-functioning solution. We plan to expand our use of the solution in the future. We're currently considering NetApp to support our backup solution. We use Commvault for backup for VMware and most other systems not on the NAS. As a result, we're investigating new E series deployments for their stability and hardening them significantly or using NetApp C series ASAs and backing up Commvault with those. We expect these changes to result in greater resiliency, reliability, and scalability, especially with the C series. It's not just about backing up data; almost every backup vendor can do that well. The focus is on how quickly you can restore data in a crisis. We want to be confident that our backup suite won't be the bottleneck in a rapid recovery, even if we need to restore 600 virtual machines at once. It's good if the landing zone or VMware is the limiting factor. While it's a game of moving the bottleneck, previous backups were fast, but restoration took days. Now, being able to restore 100 or 200 virtual machines within an hour is a significant achievement, something unheard of five or ten years ago or prohibitively expensive. Our goal is to restore 1,000 virtual machines within a day, which is challenging but achievable when our environment has 1,500 virtual machines. Restoring three-quarters of them within 24 hours without relying on SnapRestore or similar native array capabilities is a major accomplishment. Being able to recover data from our last resort within a day is the ultimate goal. For our next investment, we aim to increase security, scalability, and speed. While we typically prioritize two of these three factors, our current goal is to achieve all three. Our immediate purchases will focus on cybersecurity and optimization. Within the next one to two years, we plan to develop an internal AI framework and transition to become a service provider for our clinics, customers, business units, and data analysts. We aim to offer a standardized framework to prevent them from independently procuring AI solutions that may be incompatible with our systems. By providing a supported framework, we can ensure compatibility and maintain our standards, avoiding the need to support potentially inadequate external solutions.

Future investments will be prioritized around AI. AI is one of the big aspects that we're working on. That, of course, eats up a lot of storage and, of course, working on shifting to the cloud instead of just on-prem. That's one of the aspects that we're chiefly working towards and making headway on. So it's a matter of just getting to the finish line. Our priority for our client is to be able to provide that service quickly, effectively, and on budget. Having our customers able to go forth and do whatever they need to do with little to no interruption or hiccups along the way is important. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I haven't really gotten too deep into it. I've gotten deep enough to know that I trust this trust this material. I'm pretty sure if I've had a lot more experience, it'll be a ten, sure enough. It is definitely a very solid system. I would recommend NetApp to anyone.

I rate NetApp solutions 10 out of 10. We are using maybe 50 percent of NetApp's capability. There's so much more that we don't touch on. Coming to these events, you learn about the new and upcoming software they've been working on.

The solution's data protection features support our business continuity plans. Typically, customers buy on-premises systems and may have some connections to the cloud. I would recommend NetApp AFF to other users because it's reliable and has a lot of features. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10. Our customers are satisfied with the performance. We never have any problems with the data speed.

I would rate NetApp AFF nine out of ten. NetApp AFF is the best flash storage solution and I fully recommend it.

NetApp AFF has helped reduce support issues related to performance tuning and troubleshooting. It has helped reduce operational costs and has proven to be cost-effective for our organization compared to other storage equipment from different vendors. It has also helped reduce our operational latency. Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF as a ten out of ten.

I rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. It's an excellent product. Use it, and you'll be happy.

We recommend the solution to small, mid, and enterprise companies. I rate it an eight out of ten.

I would recommend this solution for NAS but not for SAN. I rate NetApp AFF a seven out of ten.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as nine. It is very stable, reliable, and cost-effective.

I would recommend NetApp to people with a budget and looking for a simple solution for a small environment. But for complex environments, NetApp can be an overkill. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

This is the latest version of the solution. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It is a very good product. I would advise those who want to use the solution to make sure they have a good budget. If they need to manage many environments, it's a very, very good option. It's great for enterprises.

It's important to ensure that your use cases are suitable for the product prior to investing in the purchase of it. I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10.

I have not used BlueX, their cloud management aspect. We haven't seen any ransomware attacks. Security's pretty closed off. They're not going to tell us if something happens, so it's hard to gain visibility. We'll just know that we've got to do a restore or something. That said, we haven't lost anything. We do not use any other NetApp cloud services. We just use StorageGRID and the AFF right now. FSX looks intriguing. We'd be willing to test it in the future. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's a good product.

If you can get a demo and run it in your environment, play it side-by-side against comparable workloads and you'll see the benefits very quickly.

I would suggest customers use the box so they get a taste of NetApp. Then, they can compare the product and start using it. If NetApp supports them in their environment, that is very good. I would rate NetApp AFF as nine out of 10.

It is a good platform. If you don't have a lot of in-house experience setting things up physically, I recommend working with a good reseller. Find a good reseller whom you trust that has experienced staff and work hand-in-hand with them. You learn as you go, then once the device has been deployed, you can manage it for yourself. Take advantage of NetApp's knowledge base and support site. It has a lot of very good documentation and how-to guides that explain how to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Get comfortable with the ONTAP command line because it is a very powerful tool that would allow you a lot of flexibility in terms of accomplishing many tasks. Where you might need multiple clicks and screens in the ONTAP web version, the command line allows you to do things with a relatively simple command. I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

If you are looking for long-term stability, performance improvement, and data compression, NetApp is the answer. There are a few sites where our other vendors' contracts are running out. Most of those are getting replaced with NetApp. That is definitely in the pipeline. I would rate this solution as nine out of 10. I am holding back one point for future improvements.

With the all-new cloud availability, it's really important to think about the necessity of having your data doubled up over two data centers. With the cloud becoming more pervasive, the entire government is thinking of dropping physical data centers and going to managed, private cloud. My advice would be to think through whether you really need the functionalities of a MetroCluster. I like them a lot, but cost-wise, the cloud could be a great option.

Based on my experience, whether I would recommend this product depends on what the budget is. We have to determine whether we are achieving the right cost for the right product because the budget is the primary objective. Some cases may not require the capacity. Perhaps, for example, software-defined storage can manage it. To decide, we need to see what the application is, how much demand it needs, and what kind of performance it requires. All of these things need to be reviewed before we decide which products suit which situation. Overall, NetApp AFF is a good product. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'd rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. To customers who are considering AFF, I would say they can go for it without hesitation. If it's a choice between AFF, FAS, or something else, customers can choose NetApp AFF without a second thought. We are happy with NetApp. Out of all the solutions we've looked at, AFF is the best fit for our business requirements so far.

We've gone through a rough patch on our journey with NetApp AFF, but now, it is more stable. For the most part, you won't have too many unforeseen experiences, and there is an 80 to 90% chance that you will get what NetApp promises. One of the workloads that you may need to worry about is symlink-based applications. For example, eRoom won't work well. Symlink-based applications won't deliver the workloads. We always have issues with a few Oracle workloads, even with the latest levels. You may need to be cautious regarding these areas and block, but other than these, you will get what NetApp promises. The deployment would also be straightforward. I come from an EMC background and tend to compare this solution to it. The one thing that I love about NetApp is their SMB. That is, their NAS protocol is their strength. Block is their weakness. There were days when we would say that we would only buy NetApp for file and that we would never buy it for block. Even now, I think that seems to be the case, even though they have improved to an extent. With regard to block storage, its compatibility to other applications, and the allied monitoring tools they supply, especially for block or file, NetApp is better than most. I have worked with EMC, HP, IBM. In terms of block, I would not want to invest in NetApp. Unless NetApp is very concerned that the migration tool is not working as promised, I recommend investing in NetApp and getting a third party tool that can help seamlessly migrate the data. If I were to rate NetApp AFF overall on a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at nine.

Get yourself acquainted with the product and see what it can do. Many people may run into the issue of thinking that it can do way less than it can actually do. We do not use their cloud backup services at the moment, because there hasn't been a strong enough business case. I would not call it priority, but we are definitely highly aware of the cloud backup services if an opportunity or business case arrives. We don't work that much with SAN. Basically, we mostly use the solution for its NAS functionality. We do not have that many SAN cases. Since our StorageGRID is really new, we haven't gotten the full effect of it yet. The native integration, where we can seamlessly move onto another media, is great. It is very intuitive and easy to work with. Biggest lesson learnt: Keep it simple. I would easily rate it as 10 out of 10, because it works like a charm. When you have a problem, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, with little to no effort.

I would tell potential users that NetApp is one of the best primary storage systems with many good features. I think it's a good choice for storage services. On a scale from one to ten, I would give NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) a nine.

I'm just a customer and an end-user. I've got kind of a unique situation happening right now. I've got a NetApp DS2250 that's starting to fail - or started to fail about four months ago. I ordered the Pure Storage, and I got it in, cutting all the in-between stuff out. I was waiting for some 10 Gig switches to come in from Cisco, however, with a chip shortage, everything has been delayed. I'm still not getting those in until September. Pure Storage is not actually up and running. I'm limping along with my NetApp right now. My advice to those considering the solution is to know what you are doing before you get started. I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. I don't like the pricing and you do need to know what you are doing to use the product effectively, however, the stability is excellent.

I'm a reseller and my company also uses it. I just provide them the equipment when they need it, so I don't run it. I don't have the responsibility for the operation of it, only my own clientele. I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I would rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

We are currently using NetApp and intend to change the storage next year. Our choices are between NetApp and Pure. We are a transport company, so part of the decision will be based on the price. All storage vendors have good solutions now. We are not using NetApp AFF, we are using NetApp with the disks and a bit of Flash. We have a flash pool with our NetApp and we want to go to full Flash next year. I would rate NetApp AFF an eight out of ten.

Last year, NetApp started to move away from Chile and the Latin American region. They are not selling the solutions directly. They have an agreement with Lenovo to sell NetApp products worldwide with the Lenovo brand. I would advise others to take the help of a good implementor and get proper certifications. It is also very important to understand what do you want from the solution. I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. It is a great product with great support.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to other companies.

I would rate the product as a 10 (out of 10), but the whole package including the support would be a nine (out of 10). Cold data tiering to cloud is something that we're looking at today. Right now, we're more focused on StorageGRID and being able to to do everything on-prem. However, we are looking at things Cloud Volumes to leverage for the immediate term use case and how we could leverage a quick turnaround to the market for our customers' needs.

The product is at least a nine (out of 10). I have been working with FAS systems for around 15 years. I've come to know how easy and reliable they are. They do what they are supposed to do, and they do it very well. Now, the AFF system is just the flash version, which does the same things, but faster. So, it's almost perfect.

I would never give a 10 because there is always room for improvement for any technology. From zero to 10, I would give about an eight to nine to the AFF products because we have been very happy with them so far.

I would rate it a nine (with 10 being perfect). It is pretty impressive. I am holding back one for improvement in its scope. This is the first time that we have implemented all-flash in one of our regions. We are not utilizing it as a tiering solution.

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.

I would give it a 10 (out of 10). It's been solid. The performance is great. It has solved a lot of problems in our environment.

We have been really happy with the product. It is a robust, strong, solid platform. I would rate the product a nine and a half (out of a 10). The product is robust, solid, easy to manage, and provides a number of features with speed of operations. The resources are okay, but they are not unlimited. They are at a very high level.

For our workload, it's, it's doing what we need it to do. I would rate the product a nine (out of 10). We do not use the solution for artificial intelligence or machine-learning applications right now.

Don't be scared. They're a great partner. They've got a lot of options for you. They've got a lot of tools for you. Just don't be scared to look for them. You might need to do a little bit of digging; you might need to learn how the CLI works. But once you do, it's an extremely powerful thing and you can do a lot of stuff with it. It is amazing how much easier it is to manage things like file shares with a NetApp versus a traditional Windows system. It is life-changing if you are an admin who has to do it the old-fashioned way and then you come over here and see the new way. It frees you up from most of that so you can focus on doing all the other work with the boring tools that don't work as well. NetApp is just taking care of its stuff. So spend the time, learn the CLI, learn the interfaces, learn where the tools are. Don't be afraid to ask for support. They're going to stand with you. They're going to be giving you a product that you can build on top of. And come out to NetApp Insight because it's a good conference and they got lots of stuff [for you] to learn here. NetApp certainly has options to unify data services across NAS and local and the cloud. But we are not taking advantage of them currently. I'm going to give it a nine out of ten. Obviously you've heard my story. It's meeting all our needs everywhere, but the one last piece that's missing for me is some of those interface things and some of the SAN challenges for us that would let us use it as a true hybrid platform in our infrastructure. Because right now, we see it as CIFS-only and NAS-only. I would really like to see the dream of true hybrid storage on this platform come home to roost for us. We're kind of a special snowflake in that area. The things we want to do all on one array, you're not meant to. But if we ever got there, it would be a ten.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10. It is reliable and has good performance. Working with the product is a great experience.

This is a really good solution that definitely meets our needs. It integrates well with all of the software that we're using and they have a lot of good partnerships that enable that. There are a lot of things that can bolt right in and talk to it natively, like Veeam and other applications. That can really make the product shine. I just wish that NetApp would buy Veeam. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We are really happy customers and this is a solution that I can recommend. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution's simplicity around data protection and data management is very good. The SnapMirror and SnapVault data protection is a wonderful thing. Also using snapshots in lieu of tape or disk backups is handy. The solution simplifies our IT operations by unifying data management in an approach to staying in NAS (Network-attached Storage) environments. For example, our SAN (Storage Area Network) provides the performance. We have Brocade switches with a fiber channel connection to AFF, which matches the performance of the AFF. We also have the file services. Lots of files are serviced from that as well. We have virtualized all of the hosts and the physical machines to virtual machines. That saved a lot of money and resource and effort. The solution is helping us to leverage data in different ways. It is just more reliability and simplicity and the performance helps the business quite a bit. We used to experience a significant amount of downtime and outage. We do not experience that anymore, so business probably is more profitable. I do not have any direct insight into profitability. We are like an expense center and not the profit center: we do not use the computer to make money. We use the computer to support making gasoline and energy. Thin provisioning allowed us to add new applications and purchase additional storage. The thin provisioning is an essential part of what we do because the SQL DBAs are the worst. They ask for one terabyte for future growth when they need only 100 gigabytes in reality. Without the thin provisioning, I have to give them the one terabyte that they have asked for, which is a waste of resources. So it is a cost savings feature. The solution has allowed us to move large amounts of data from one data center to another without interruption to the business. It is affecting IT operations in a tremendous way. The reliability is key for the IT services. Not having any outage, unscheduled outage, or latency and performance issues are the most important key features. The solution has helped improve application response time. We used to have some issues with poor performance when we had the SAS disks. Sometimes we had situations when the VMware was competing for the storage. Now the AFF is just much faster and provides all the data needed for VMware and SQL servers. The solution has also reduced our data center costs. The thin provisioning, SnapMirror, and all of those features have helped our processes. I'm not sure of any exact amounts but the cost savings are quite a bit. On a scale from one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate the product as a nine. The product itself is a ten. The services are a seven. But I highly recommend the product.

We are looking at implementing SnapCenter, which gives us one pane of glass to utilize snapshots in different ways, especially to protect our databases. I used to work on EMC, and particularly, the VNX product. They had storage tiering then, and when I came onboard to my new company, they ran 7-Mode and didn't have a lot of storage tiering. It was kind of interesting to see NetApp's transition to storage tiering, with cDOT, and I really liked that transition. So, my experience overall with NetApp has been great and the product is really great. I think some of the advertisements for some of the products, that can really help us, is kind of poor. The marketing for some of the products is poor. We were recently looking at HCI, and we really didn't have a lot of information on HCI, prior to its deployment. It was just given to us and a lot of the information concerning what it was and how it was going to help wasn't really there. I had to take a couple of Element OS classes, in order to find out about the product and get that additional info, which I think, marketing that product, would have helped with a lot better. My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to do your research. Do bake-offs, as we do between products, just to make sure that you are getting the best product for what you are trying to do. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. To make it a perfect ten it would need to be cheaper.

We did have some applications that we were using in the cloud, but we came back because of financial issues. We do have performance issues from time to time that we have to deal with, but it is not specific to AFF. Sometimes the application is not well-managed by the application teams. The load may not be being handled correctly, which is not related to the type of storage but could be related to users not selecting the correct storage options for their applications. We have not tested the recent graphical update yet, but if it works well then I think that it will be one of the big advantages this solution has. We used to do the upgrades using the CLI. My advice to anybody researching storage solutions is to go with NetApp. My experience with the vendor is good. The AFF is a good tool to have, whether the client is a small business or a larger enterprise like a bank. I think the problem with smaller companies is that they don't always understand the importance of data. Perhaps they don't see storage as a solution, but rather just an expense. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

In order to automatically tier cold data to the cloud, you would have to use third-party software. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I have experience with a previous version of NetApp from quite some time ago, and everything about the current version has improved. NetApp AFF performs well, we haven't had any issues with it, and I suspect that it is going to be pretty easy to upgrade. It would be nice if the NVMe storage was less expensive, even though it's worth it. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

This is my favorite storage platform. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Nothing would make it a ten, nothing is perfect. I would advise someone considering this solution to buy it!

We are not at the point where we are allowed to automatically tier data to the cloud, but we are looking forward to it. I can't see that this solution needs any other features other than what it already has. Everything that I need is already there, except for the cloud and it's there but we haven't taken advantage of it yet. I would advise that you compare everything and put money aside, really take a look at the features and how they will or can benefit you. It's a total win for your firm. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Check out the AFF. It is super fast and reliable. We've been using it for a long time. It's the perfect system for us. I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10 because there's always room for improvement. To make it a 10, it would have to have super submillisecond performance at a cheaper price. It is about latency in our environment. We want submillisecond for everything across the board. If something can guarantee that performance all the time without increasing costs, that would be cool.

AFF is just like any traditional NetApp. It has Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapVault. I don't see anybody get even close to NetApp. NetApp is one of the best. I would rate them a nine out of ten. My advice to anybody considering this solution is to look at the best out there and NetApp is one of the best in terms of ease of use and gives you a full-functionality.

I am a long-time user and I love this product. Over the years we have asked for improvements and they are doing a great job. I will be happy to see them continue to make improvements, overall. My advice to anybody researching this type of solution is to look at NetApp. If they don't then they are missing out on great technology and a feature-rich product. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The advice I would give to anybody considering this solution is that it's expensive but it's worth it. It's worth it because of its reliability. When you're working on infrastructure reliability and uptime are the most important things. You have to provide a service to the business and make sure it's up all the time. So if you can have a system that does that, and I know that other products have their own problems, I know that I have got friends that use HP or use Dell and they have problems. Maybe it's because of the way they've configured it. With NetApp, we've never had any issue, never had an outage. If you're looking at reliability, you're going to pay a little bit extra, but that depends on your reseller. NetApp is definitely the way to go. I would rate it a ten out of ten because I've got no reason not to. It doesn't break. It's reliable. It's fast. It's easy to manage. It's scalable and we've never had any problems that we can't fix. The worst thing we can ever have is really the disc fails and then within three hours, we get a brand new one. We just plug and play where we go with no outage, no downtime, and that's probably the main thing for us is having 100% uptime and we've never not had 100% uptime.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to test and compare all of the products. Overall, I think that AFF is a solid store system and it's very easy to use. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I think it fits a multitude of needs. For someone who doesn't know how to provision storage, it gives you, SIPS and NAS storage. NAS storage gives you a SAN protocol so you can provision ISCSI fiber channel one, depending on what you're using it for. It's basically an all-in-one solution. It does everything for you. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. There have been a few times we've seen buggy releases on some of the ONTAP software upgrades. Nine is good, though. I never get a ten when we get our reviews. If you get a ten, there's no room for improvement. Nine gives you room to improve. If you give it a ten, they're not going to have any reason to improve.

I'd definitely encourage people to do a proof of concept and get trial gear in there because it's going to shine. It's something that when you actually get in there and use it, it just clicks. I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten.

We are looking into a cloud version in the future. My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to consider several things. If they are trying to save money, think that they'll have to buy more disk, or want to clean up what they have, I think that they should go ahead with NetApp AFF. It makes a big difference, especially if you see the thirty percent improvement that we have seen. It's a pretty big jump. This solution is very good, but nobody is perfect. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

One of my favorite parts of this solution is that most of the day I sit there and do nothing, watching the lights go green on unify manager, knowing that they should stay green because it indicates that it is working. That's what I look for. It works, and most of the time I don't have to do a lot with it unless somebody wants some space carved out. I've been in the storage business since 1992. I've been doing work with storage systems before there was such a thing as a storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS). Those are buzzwords that came along about fifteen or sixteen years ago and I was well entrenched in storage long before then. My expectation is not very high other than the fact that it's fast and reliable. Other than that, as far as what we can do with it, it's capabilities, I have a pretty low bar because I know what storage can do and I know what it should do and the only time I'm disappointed is when it doesn't do it. I haven't experienced that with NetApp. The only thing that I would change is the GUI, which is cosmetic. It will not make the product better, but it will make it a lot simpler for those of us who have to support the NetApp equipment, and we can do it in a more timely fashion. My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to buy it. Don't worry about it, just buy it. NetApp will help you install it, they'll help you with the right licensing, and they'll help you with all of the questions you have. They will even give you some suggestions on how you might want to configure it based on your needs, which is never accurate, but that's not the fault of the installer. It's usually because the customer doesn't know what they want, but you at least get a good start and they can make recommendations based on past experience. As far as price per performance, this solution is hard to beat. I'm a big supporter. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

good deduplication and compression ratio

In comparison to other options, NetApp is the most complete. It is the single software choice that can give you every option that you need in the enterprise world.

I don't think anybody is doing a NAS solution or a filer solution better than NetApp. If you only talk about NetApp's filer, All Flash, I would give you it a nine and ten out of ten. It's one of the best of the breed currently in the market.

I would rate the product at least an eight. I should give it a nine, if not a ten, but there's always room for improvement. I would tell someone considering this solution that it's expensive, but it's worth the money. You're going to get the speed and the backbones that you need to accomplish what you do. If you need that kind of speed and that kind of performance, you can get it out of the AFF.

I would rate this solution a ten for the huge improvement in performance between All Flash and the hybrid storage to the All Flash with the ONTAP 9. From 8.2 to 8.3 to 9, the performance is almost double. Ten is the best answer I can give.

I would rate AFF a ten out of ten. If I was in the position to tell someone else about All Flash FAS and why they should get it I would simply say just do it. I think everybody in the storage community is pressured to live on more with less and this product basically enables that to happen.

I am part of the NetApp A-Team. I've been a huge advocate towards NetApp. I would say that nothing is perfect, but NetApp is leading the way when it comes to digital transformation and digital efficiencies as well. Their focus towards health care has been out of this world. I would give that specific product a nine, moving forward to almost perfect ten.

I give AFF a ten out of ten because there are amazing features on it. It's extremely fast, it's extremely usable, and the support's fantastic. I would advise someone considering AFF as a possibility for storage, I would tell them to look at all the features, positives and negatives of all the other storage vendors. In the past year, I've done an evaluation of a lot of different storage vendors and their features. The cost-effectiveness of their products and NetApp have come far ahead of all the others and so don't just buy into somebody from NetApp telling you these are all the great things about it. If you research all of the other companies and all of their offerings, I have no doubt that you'll decide that NetApp is the top provider. From the speed of their product to their flexibility to move into the cloud to their awesome support.

We have connected this solution to public clouds. We have different clients using the public cloud solution. Our public cloud has clients signed up for SAP HANA. There are many applications which are running on front-end databases, like Oracle, MySQL, etc.

NetApp, being the behemoth company that it is, if you're looking to have a solution provider be end-to-end when it comes to file, block, scale, and cloud, NetApp is probably the leader of the market. Depending upon an application, provision enterprise applications could take from a day to a week. A lot of times, if it's just a simple application that we need to install, it takes an afternoon. However, incorporating it and twisting the nerd knobs and making sure that everything is operating as efficiently as possible that takes a week of deployment to make sure it's on the right tiered disk and making sure it has the right connectivity and it is on the right network. Sometimes, on our old, antiquated network environment, it takes a little bit longer. We might connect to public cloud in the future, but we are not connect at the moment.

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.

I am not using VMs today, but maybe in the future I will. We have not yet connected to public clouds.

It is the first company who introduced NVMe protocols, which is end-to-end. It also has very good response times. The NVMe technology that we're evaluating will certainly help us with artificial intelligence going forward.

If you have the money, you can't compare it to what we had at all, you just can't. In fact, the one that we had for production for the entire clinic is now sitting in our DR as cold storage. It went from state of the art to boat-anchor in about two years.

Know your workload, know your customer. Know what your requirements are, know what your future requirements are. Determine what's important to you. Think about the administrators, if you're not the administrator; I'm not, I just engineer it. Think about them and how they will use it. Think about the future, where you think your business will grow. When it comes to setting up and provisioning applications using the product, it depends on what you're doing. But I I can have an Exchange server up and running in about 30 minutes. At the moment the solution is not having any effect on IT's ability to support new business initiatives. I got it to support things like ADI and solutions like that. So hopefully, going forward, it will play a role in that. We have not connected the solution to public clouds. We do plan to in the future. I rate the solution an eight out of ten because there's room to improve. There's always room to grow. The security side of it: They have a large government customer base but it seems like they really don't pay attention to that side of things. There are a lot of security things, a lot of customers can't send their stuff offsite, and I'm one of them. So coming up with better ways to satisfy that part would be great.

I would definitely encourage colleagues to go ahead with it. I have had a great experience with it. I would definitely encourage them that this is the way to go. I rate this product at ten out of ten. It's easy. Once you know your way around it, there is nothing to it. You can do it in a flash.

I would recommend NetApp. I rate it at nine out of ten, and close to a ten. We've been pretty happy with the All Flash.

It's a pretty stout solution. NVMe is coming and pretty much everything we want is on their roadmap. In terms of connecting it to public cloud, we are a public cloud so we connect to ourselves. When it comes to setting up and provisioning enterprise applications using the solution, it depends on the customer use case. Some are quick, some are really complex.

I definitely recommend it. It's very complex to set up. Everything is. Even though it's complex, NetApp, out of the other two options, would probably be the least complex. I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had any failures in the production environment. The only issue, as I said, is that we've had some trouble with the scripting. Otherwise, we'd give it a ten.

Do your research. There are a lot of different storage vendors who have a lot things which are good. Pick the one that you feel is best for you.

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

First thing first, I would advise you to gather the exact requirements and challenges. Try to blend those requirements with the NetApp solution, or part of the product, that suits you. Doing so will create a better engagement in the discussion. Otherwise, it could be very difficult to say that NetApp is the best product for the use case. It takes less than half a day to set up and provision enterprise applications using the solution. So far we have not connected any of our customers to public clouds. We have some challenges in Malaysia where some of the data, especially from the banks but also from the government and oil & gas, can't go out of the country. So we are not able to do that. In those cases, usually our customers will engage a managed services provider locally in Malaysia. I give this solution a seven out of ten. There's still a long way to go and there are a lot of new start-up companies that also provide all-flash and hybrid. For some of our customers' applications, the new solutions are better.

I would recommend NetApp. It is a good product to use.

I would look at the performance of AFF, its reliability, and its outstanding tech support. AFF is the wave of the future. Spinning disk will be going away and it just makes sense to go where the industry is going. AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away. To set up and provision enterprise applications using this solution is quick. We're integrating it with ServiceNow, so it is a hands-off storage allocation. A user submits a request and can have storage in five to ten minutes. We are not yet connected to any public clouds.

I would say this is a good solution but talk to the NetApp guys and see how it really fits in your environment. We do not connect it to public clouds at the moment. We have plans to do so in the future, depending on the use cases. I rate the product at seven out of ten. Their system is pretty good but we are still facing a few issues, mainly on the software side where there is an SVMDR. We had it in the previous configuration. We did an ONTAP upgrade but had some issues replicating the whole configuration. There are a few other glitches here and there. Other than that I would say it's pretty stable.

Figuring out the basics as to what NetApp offers. It is not something that you can just dive into as you will need to have a bit of background knowledge of it. However, there is plenty of help out to to learn the technology, and it's very tangible. Give it a go. I would recommend it. We are very satisfied with it and the whole deployment of it. We have almost seamlessly transitioned our production environment into a completely new hardware environment on the back-end.

The user experience is the same as it ever was, only faster. I would rate this solution as a nine. It's not a ten because we would like to see the faster speeds on the Fibre Channel over Ethernet. AFF is definitely a good product.

It's worth the slight increase in cost for performance. In the end, you save money in the long-term (ROI).

We have put our trust in NetApp, and they have given us the customer support and a stable, reliable product. Sometimes, I have to get rid of the equipment and upgrade because it is no longer supported. It's not like we are getting rid of the equipment or upgrading because there's something wrong with it. It will last forever. I have had disk shells that we've had to just let go, which are still working, because they aren't supported.

This is the best solution in the market. NetApp is a good company. I use to work there.

With an increasing amount of data cranking out every day and a lot of analytics running on processing applications, more performance is required from storage devices. This is a database solution which is All Flash FAS is suited. I have not connected AFF to public clouds yet, but possibly in the future. It takes half an hour max to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF. It is a diversified solution.

We have been an NetApp customer for about ten years and have enjoyed the relationship a lot. The important thing for anybody to check out is the snapshot functionality of NetApp, and how well it works to provision for backup. It also provisions test environments with it. There are so many advantages to the way they do snapshots compared to other companies, and they have all these wondrous tool sets to leverage the snapshot functionality. Anybody who is looking into a storage solution needs to look at all of the attributes to the NetApp platform. Connecting it to public cloud is our next project. We are looking at DR using NetApp cloud services, so that will probably be coming up first quarter of next year. We are looking at a new series arrays for our building video security storage as well, and there is no doubt that we will be going with NetApp. NetApp just does a solid job, and their support is top-notch.

You should definitely look at NetApp AFF and evaluate it. In terms of how long it takes to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF, we have a back-end provisioning tool so it's all automated. I cannot define it only with respect to AFF because the entire orchestration works. But on average, we take about five minutes to provision a VM. I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It has definitely helped us bring our costs down and gives us a powerful storage at the back end to serve our customers. It would be a ten out of if they brought my TCO down even more.

With all-flash, you can never go wrong. I am in the process of converting everything to all-flash. We are not currently connected to the public clouds. We are looking to connect to them in 2019. It takes us days to setup and provision enterprise applications using this solution. We chose this solution because vendors are choosing all-flash over hybrid.

Try to get behind the sales guys to the people who do pre-sales tech support to really understand the roadmap and other aspects of the product. The sales guys are great but they're sales guys. If you can get to the tech guys behind them and really talk to them about what your problems are, and what you are trying to attack, I feel that works much better.

Make sure that you are very clear in terms of what you want to buy. Your specifications have to be very clear, so there are no gray areas. From there, it`s up to which vendor provides you with the right proposal, and if its cost-effective go for it.