NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) Review

I/O performance is good enough, but to achieve big capacity TB/s you need better controllers.

What is most valuable?

IO Performance.

How has it helped my organization?

We have moved GPFS's metadata to the SSD disks, the incremental backup is 6-8 times faster (we have over 120,000,000 files and backup takes "only" 30 hours now).

Our next step is to migrate TSM database to SSD array and we hope that allows us to once again reduce backup time.

What needs improvement?

IO intensive tasks.

For how long have I used the solution?

12 months

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Yes

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I/O performance is good enough, but to achieve big capacity TB/s you need better controllers and many more SSD drives (we have over 1 PB of storage and only 15 TB of SSD disks).

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We needed much more I/O, and the size and the GB/s performance was enough.

How was the initial setup?

It wasn't complex.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house.

What was our ROI?

We are a non-profit organisation, and we must deliver the best performance solution for our users.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The power consumption is very low, and the size is small (2U) and these are the only costs at this time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We knew that we needed SSD array.

What other advice do I have?

Buy as much support as you can afford.

**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Tech support has been absolutely amazing. I think on the technical aspects as well, my staff is able to get great support from the NetApp technical support resources that we have. What I love about NetApp is they have a health care division. At times, it's such an amazing thing because if we have a healthcare-related issue, there's no one better than having prior CIOs from health care organizations that NetApp has hired, and that are part of the health care team, to help out with any of those initiatives and support problems. Support has been absolutely phenomenal.
The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer.
The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy.
This solution has reduced our data center costs because when we went from the 8000 and 3200 series that took us from 20 racks of storage down to two.
The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today.
The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds.
The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning.
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