NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

The most valuable features are cost, performance and usability. NetApp’s really good with usability; to get it up and running quickly and usable.

We've been using for our internal cloud environments, for internal cloud storage. Response time's very fast. Capacity's very good. Performance is very good; it's quick.

We've only had it in production for about three months, so we don't have a lot of time with it. For what we're using it for, it's been fine. I don't know of any issues or anything that we need to do, that I would request additional features right now, aside from the scalability improvements I’ve mentioned.

I know we use external monitoring. There's some level of monitoring on the systems themselves, but we do use a lot of external monitoring, whether it's NetApp versus third party. I know with ONTAP 9, they're working on more monitoring capabilities and more features within the unit, but they don't have that yet. I would like to see more monitoring onboard, on the system, instead of having to throw another third-party system at it.

I've been a NetApp customer for quite a while, at least 12 to 13 years. Stability's never been an issue for any of our systems that I've been associated with; it's been very good. We haven't had any issues with those units, knock on wood, so far; it's been good.

Scalability has been OK. We've been scaling them vertically instead of more horizontally because you can only scale the FAS horizontally so far, so we've scaled out vertically.

I would like to see them improve its ability to scale vertically. With flash, you can only drive so many IOPS, the controllers can only handle so many IOPS. There's a limit; there's physics, a mathematical limit that they can do.

It's been a long time since I've actually called technical support with a case. I try not to call tech support. At my level, I usually need something like a third-level support. You call in, you have to say what your issue is, they can't help you and then they have to pass it to the next person and then usually it's third level. Usually, it's a third-level, advanced person that I would need to speak to.

They've been fine. Once you get to that level, someone that's knowledgeable, support's fine.

In this environment, we were using spinning disks. When we needed to expand capacity, that's when we decided to go with all flash, and NetApp made it very price competitive. They were trying to push those units, so it was worthwhile to get flash instead of more spinning disks.

NetApp's initial setup is very straightforward. It's very easy to get up and running within a day, as long as you have the cabling in place and the power, but that's outside of NetApp's control. Once you have that infrastructure in place and they come on site, it's very easy to get up and running within a day.

Before choosing the All Flash FAS, I also considered Hitachi. We chose NetApp because NetApp is in our internal cloud, and that's what we were expanding. We didn't see the need to switch vendors at that point. NetApp's easier than Hitachi HNAS to get up and running.

For my manager, price is the most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with. NetApp's been very competitive with pricing over the last 2-3 years.

NetApp's features are easier, and the capabilities are a lot more advanced than Hitachi and other vendors that we look at. The software's much more mature than the other vendors. That's why I like NetApp. It's easy to use. It's easy to get down to what you want to do with it; the features and capabilities are there.

Everybody pretty much can do the same. The issue is how complicated it is to get to what you're really trying to do. That's the one thing that I've seen. NetApp does a good job. They're much more mature, as I’ve mentioned. It's easy to drill down to get to the data, get it set up and get it configured, and it works.

We've only been using it three months. We haven't hit any issues with it yet; I can't say that we won't, but I'm not expecting to.

The ability to recover your data really fast is valuable, as is the availability and accessibility of the data.

It helped us a lot with our storage infrastructure because we were using another vendor, XtremIO. prior to this and things were really slow. We used to have to fight fires every day because users were not able to access their files or the files were not responding the way they should.

I see room for improvement everywhere because the technology is here. We are using it and every day we are trying to improve. That's the reason why I haven’t rated it higher.

Specifically, the current pricing bothers me; pricing is very high. It's expensive. That's the reason why I can't just provide a review and hope that people would jump onto it; pricing is usually a driving factor for a lot of companies. It’s a major issue, even though my company had the money and they spent it. Nonetheless, we had to prove that it was the solution we were looking for. A lot of other companies would not be able to afford this type of solution, so they would have to look for alternatives. Those alternatives would be other companies, start-up companies that are pretty much doing the same thing. Sometimes they are better than the ones that were the innovators.

It's been really stable as long as you have it configured correctly.

As with stability, it's been really scalable as long as you have it configured correctly.

Technical support is very good. I like the call home feature, where we don't even have to do anything. Most of the time, we don't know that anything’s broken and we receive an email saying, "Hey, go fix it." So, it's good.

We didn't really evaluate any other companies. This was the one everybody else was using. All of the reviews actually helped somebody make the decision. This solution had proved to be working; it was proven to be working at the time. We're very happy with it but we find it expensive.

Do your research. Find what would work for you. Find what's affordable to you. Most of the time, we purchase stuff without thinking about the maintenance. Maintenance is usually a killer when it comes to all these things because once you own it, you think you are done with spending money but maintenance becomes a very big issue for a lot of companies. After a while, they drop the support and everything. At that point, there's a new version that's out there and you can't use it, so that's when you have to dump all the money you just put in and start with something new. Study your environment. Make sure you are getting what you want. What you need.

The speed is really the most important feature for us. The SnapManager feature is also very important.

It will reduced query time because we have a lot of them that take a long time to execute. We created the database because we need to know which product I have available in the warehouse, and this is most important thing for me. Because we have the flash array, the queries to find this out will be much faster.

The product is great for us now.

We bought it recently and use it for BI and partially for SAP. We are planning on implementing ONTAP.

It will scale to our needs.

It's very high.

It's been perfect so far.

I looked at Pure Storage and we decided to get NetApp because they have SnapManager, which Pure Storage doesn't. I need to create a copy of the production DB and without SnapManager, I cannot do this.

Buy it if you need the speed and SnapManager.

Hands down, the most valuable feature is the speed of flash.

With anything that’s flash, it comes down to speed. If I need sub-millisecond 300,000 IOPS, for example, Flash FAS will provide that for us.

I've not been using it long enough to know.

None.

We’re just starting out, so hard to say. So far, so good.

So far, it looks like it's going to be incredibly scalable as I just install additional nodes as needed.

It's fantastic. NetApp is awesome.

Once you’ve done one, it seems very intuitive. However, the first time seems very complicated.

Buy as much as you can afford.

The primary use case is for customers who need absolute low latency and have low latency in their workloads. They need maximum performance in their virtualization and file storage environments.

We had some customers who were running virtualization workloads on classical spinning disks. We implemented an AFF system, and they got a huge performance boost out of it because the latency of the SSDs is simply much lower. Actually, most customers benefit from the improved latency and performance from the AFF systems.

Another important aspect of it is because we have customers who use SAN and NAS, they want only one system. This simplifies things by handling both the same way. You set up data protection, and it doesn't matter if it is SAN or NAS, you know the data is protected to a secondary system or to the cloud, wherever you want it to be.

A few customers are tiering out to their own S3 data center, not the cloud. For them, it has reduced their costs because they had an existing S3 solution. They just tier through that, then they need less space in the SSD tier.

The most valuable features are that it runs Data ONTAP, which is compatible with the whole Data Fabric, and its absolute performance.

Simplicity is a very key aspect of the system because you can configure everything with the System Manager. It does most of the complicated things behind your back, so you don't have to handle them. Since it integrates with the Data Fabric, it's very simple to set up a data protection scheme.

We have had customers asking about S3 support for a while now. I heard that is coming in one of the next versions. So, I would like to see S3 targeted support on the FAS system.

The stability of the AFF system is very high because it's running on ONTAP, and ONTAP is a proven operating system for about 20 years. So, it's very stable. We have thousands of systems with our customers and the AFF system inherits stability from the FAS system. We know it is stable. 

The scalability is great. The cluster scalability can be scaled out. The cluster can be scale out to up to 24 nodes. You can also scale them up if you add disks. So, scalability is not a problem. You can even scale it down if you need to, and we've also done this with a few customers. We can scale down the clusters later if the workload or requirements change. That is definitely one of the big plus points.

The technical support works well for us. We do the first level support for all our customers, so the customers call us. If we are ever in trouble and don't know how to respond to the support call, we can open the second level case with NetApp. That works very nicely. So, the customer is in good hands with us, and we are in good hands with NetApp.

We do the initial setup ourselves. We use the CLI, so we don't use the simplified methods because we have some special requirements most of the time. 

It definitely reduces costs because it simply takes less power to run these systems. While the SSDs don't take power, they are in general very big right now. So, the running cost has decreased for a lot of our customers.

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.

Our primary use case for AFF is for file storage.

It simplifies IT operations.

Thin provisioning enables us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. Thin provisioning is obviously heavily utilized so we don't have to buy a new kit.

AFF has enabled us to move large amounts of data from one data center to another. It has also affected IT operations by greatly improving resilience.

AFF SSDs have improved application response times. We've seen a five-fold decrease in the latency figure.

Datacenter costs have decreased because of the smaller footprint and less power usage. In one system we saw six racks go down to half a rack. It's probably five to one in terms of actual data space.

Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features. 

The overall latency in your environment is very good. 

We don't use the solution for artificial intelligence or machine learning applications.

The simplicity around data protection and data management is very good. We use SnapVault for data protection which works very well. SnapMirror is also good. We mainly use the command line a lot, so we don't tend to use many provisioning tools.

We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of.

It's stable.

Scalability is very good. 

The technical support is very good. We haven't had any issues. 

Initially, the setup was complex because it was new and very different, it was 7-Mode to cDot. We got a lot of support from NetApp so it wasn't an issue. It was just complex, but they provided the assistance we needed.

We are integrators but NetApp consultants also help.

We always use NetApp for our file services.

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!

• Using NetApp AFF 8060 in two-node MetroCluster configuration.
• Used for NAS protocols only. 
• CIFS and NFS provisioned through several SVMs (vFilers). 
• Shares for normal company office files, Oracle Middleware binaries, Citrix profiles, and more.

Used to run an older FAS with FC drives. We were always having trouble with performance. AFF is fast, with low latency, and plenty of I/O headroom. Management is fairly easy as we know our way around NetApp from experience with the old FAS. 

The speed is important; no more problems caused by high latency. 

MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup. 

• FC and ATTO bridges are still needed for cross datacenter replication. 
• I would like it to be an IP as our network is mainly IP-based. 
• The ATTO bridges add to the total cost of the system.

With any new technology, it comes down to the user experience. Once the system is up and running, I feel that the user experience itself sets it above several of the other competitors.

For us, it's mainly about being able to transition data from one location to another rapidly, and even do incremental updates. So, that aspect of ONTAP allows us, as well as our customers, to be able to leverage great geographic distances in order to seamlessly still present their data in one location.

The one thing that could promote NetApp's ONTAP product line to the next level would be a single pane of glass to manage all of the storage and networking resources involved. That's the big one. That would absolutely be a life-changer.

Stability has not been a concern once the system is up and running. However, before the system is up and running and during the installation, we've had some instances, but those aren't necessarily all a NetApp caveat. Those could be different hardware that's being installed in, different steps need to be taken. Getting through those sometimes is cumbersome.

We've put in several requests for some different scalable options because we provide one type of hardware. I would say that scalability went in the wrong direction when we went to NetApp Select. We had a meeting set up with the CTO at a recent conference and we were hoping to discuss different options going forward.

They actually decreased the ability to scale with the new Select platform.

The pain point specifically is with our customers. They're needing to be able to take big data with them. Most people have that data center mentality and believe that I can always reach back into the data center. However, in some of the environments we work in, it's a DIL environment, which is Disconnected, Intermittent or Limited bandwidth. In those environments, taking some of that big data with you and being able to sync at a later time is paramount. NetApp ONTAP gives us that functionality.

For me, it was the actual installation onto our company's hardware. There are several instances that came down to the unknown. The NetApp engineers, as well as my engineers, could not necessarily predict the installation difficulties. Once we overcame those, and started creating application notes for both our company, as well as NetApp's company, I believe it will help others down the road. It could help the software engineers to program different options into the installation.

We have pretty much considered everybody, from a Nutanix perspective to a Cisco perspective to a VMware solution and a couple other smaller mom-and-pop stores that are trying to get into the big data realm.

We decided to go with NetApp over the competitors because for a lot of the customers, their experience with NetApp, is what has driven us to use NetApp in a lot of our solutions; because of their experience in terms of support and in terms of usability; because we're not having to retrain on a new platform. That's a big one for them because that's more dollars they're having to invest.

The customer support is obviously a huge win for NetApp, even the pre- and post- sales staff. Then, the actual customer service representatives themselves do help. I would say that's probably one of the big ones. Once it's operational, as I’ve mentioned, it's very intuitive and very easy to use. Some of the setup steps, you get past those and it's easy to use and operate, and that's what they like.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor are ease of use and management. And the reason why is because, as we take more technology and compress it into a smaller space, the knowledge base required for one engineer to be able to manage and operate that environment becomes very large. So, the ease of use and ease of management would be the one key thing I would focus on.

Given NetApp's strength, size and customer base, they bring a wide array of knowledge to any solution. It's just trying to find the right solution within the NetApp portfolio that will meet the customer's needs. Instead of overselling the solution, find the one that meets their requirements the best and pursue that. The NetApp sales team, as well as their support, has done a good job at helping us to realize where those little niches are, to fit in the problems.