NetApp AFF Previous Solutions

Anna Sofo - PeerSpot reviewer
Commercial adviser at Personal Data S.r.l. Gruppo Project

We sometimes offer clients alternatives to NetApp like HPE and Dell EMC. While we typically recommend NetApp, some clients prefer other storage vendors. We had one client who used Pure Storage, but they asked us to try NetApp. Today, none of our customers have Dell EMC. 

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Tyrell Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Pikeville Medical Center Inc

We previously used different solutions. We opted for AFF because of its flash capacity. The all-flash capacity is fantastic.

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Alistair Kennedy - PeerSpot reviewer
Lifecycle and Data Insights Manager at Computer Concepts Limited

We switched to AFF from a previous vendor to get the best all-flash solution that met our price-performance needs.

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Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
EO
System Administrator at Haaretz

I used to use Dell PowerStore. It is very simple to set up. It's better for medium-sized companies that are pretty straightforward. 

We previously used HP around 16 or 17 years ago. I cannot recall why we switched to NetApp.

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Chuck Custard - PeerSpot reviewer
Exec Director - Global IT Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For storage we used both Dell and EMC. We switched because of the cost and the level of support. NetApp support is far better than anything we ever received from either Dell or EMC.

In terms of the solution’s Cloud Backup Services, back in the day, we were using a disk-to-disk-to-cloud solution for backup. NetApp had actually purchased a company called AltaVault and we used that solution. We were all onboard. Last year, NetApp announced that they were no longer going to support the AltaVault platform. We've since moved away from that but we do still have NetApp in Azure for our SAP implementation, but it's direct in the cloud, not a backup to cloud.

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SaneeshC - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. engineer at Sify Technologies

We have worked with the Dell Unity and VNX products. We migrated from Dell to NetApp because of the advantage of configuring the unified storage, such as NAS and SAN, in a single box.

Apart from that, the end customer preferred to configure DR, and NetApp has its own solution with this device. The end customer also wanted the snapshot feature, and NetApp has its own feature.

In addition, every four or five years, when the system gets old, we need to migrate the workloads to a new system. NetApp has an advantage there because we can purchase a new system and configure it in the same existing cluster. Once it is configured in the existing cluster, from the back or from storage to storage, we can do the migration without any downtime. That is one of the advantages of NetApp.

We have not worked with other NetApp solutions much. We only tested ONTAP and the AWS or the Google Platform Service with NetApp, but we are not using it in our production environment.

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WK
Chief AI & Full Stack Systems at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

This lab is brand new, we started with NetApp AFF. 

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Richard Lozano - PeerSpot reviewer
VP, IT Operations at ZOO Digital Group plc

We used a different storage solution prior to AFF.

We made a switch to AFF because we wanted to keep everything consistent and wanted to have ONTAP everywhere. So, we decided to standardize on NetApp AFF for all our storage needs. It has been working out well for us.  

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GM
Lead Infrastructure Architect at Fortune Brands Innovations (Moen)

We previously used EMC PowerMax. The biggest reason for the switch is that we needed a cloud-ready, cloud-first solution. PowerMax is still a fine platform if you are committed to on-prem and have high-performance on-prem workloads and use cases. It could still be a perfect product for you. However, PowerMax may be limiting if you know your business requirements will take you to the cloud. That's where we were at. Our business was pushing us into the cloud, and we needed more of our workloads to be replicated in the cloud or cloud-native. PowerMax wasn't the right solution for that. 

PowerMax is an aging platform so it doesn't have the flexibility to easily migrate into the cloud. We need our hot-tier data readily accessible on-prem and to be able to access cold storage in the cloud through Azure or whichever provider you want. But we use Azure. That was a key factor for us. We currently use cloud tiering to Azure for automated cold storage processes (mainly for file level data) and we are still exploring additional use cases for future and expanded operations.

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Pedro Paz - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Eni Energies et Services

The systems we have offshore needed to be upgraded. That's why we decided to upgrade them to NetApp. It is a solution that we have used previously in some of our other companies and we know the solution is very reliable.

For file services, we used to have Synology, but that was for small projects. It's pretty tough to compare because the magnitude of what they were serving is completely different.

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Naveen Radhwani - PeerSpot reviewer
Head IT at TO THE NEW Digital

We were using a small configuration Dell server. The configuration was not so high. We chose NetApp AFF simply because of its performance and stability.

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Mangalam Amriish - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant at Techwave.

We migrated from Dell to NetApp AFF because of its better performance with our business-critical applications.

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KT
Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We have used different storage solutions like EMC, HP, and others before making the switch to NetApp AFF.

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PS
Lead Infrastructure engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

We've used Dell EMC in the past, and we use Pure now. 

Pure is easier to manage just from an interface perspective, however, I would say the performance of both is close to equal. We chose AFF primarily for the level of performance. That said, the team that works for me has more experience with Pure. The issue we have is that the footprint is way smaller.

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KD
Storage Engineer at a religious institution with 10,001+ employees

Before AFF, we used Hitachi. We switched to simplify from the fiber channel over to NAS. We were looking to simplify and make the network the cost point instead of having fibre channel expertise and network expertise.

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SG
Storage Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

We've had NetApp since day one. Within our organization, there are multiple other teams and almost all of them use NetApp on classified networks. We have a little bit of HP and I think there's a couple of EMCs floating around somewhere, but they're slowly going away. Most of them being replaced by NetApp.

Mainly, NetApp is very robust, very reliable, and they cost less. Nowadays with the government worried about costs, trying to keep taxes down, that's a big plus. It just so happens that it's a very good product. It's a win-win.

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SS
Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We were on spinning disks with NetApp before, but we also had IBM XID. We switched to NetApp AFF because we were already heavy users of NetApp. We liked the cost, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to all of our workloads. Now, we're a single storage provider or user.

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MS
Infrastructure Team Lead at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees

We had an AFF already there. We just upgraded. In my previous company, where I was for five years, we used NetApp extensively. So I had a lot of experience and interaction with it.

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JT
Manager, Data Center Services at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Before adopting NetApp, we relied on Direct-Attached Storage solutions.

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DB
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

Before using AFF, we had some of the older FAS 8040 systems. We still have a couple in operation and some from way back in 7-Mode still on our current cluster.

We have been a NetApp shop for a while and just wanted to continue working with them.

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BC
Storage Manager at State of Nebraska

We have several different SAN and NAS products in our environment. With the traditional spinning storage, We are running into bottlenecks with performance problems. The AFF products have given us the opportunity to move people to all-flash high performance storage tiers, which will make their virtual machines, database servers, and SQL run much better in a flash environment for us than in a hybrid or spinning disk environment.

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SG
IT Manager at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Various other departments within our organization have their own storage solutions, so we had EMC Xtremio and EMC Xtremio in use. Additionally, we've implemented Pure Storage for a separate area of our operations.

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RN
Storage at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

We had normal disk storage instead of flash. NetApp AFF  offers much better performance. Higher throughput and less latency.

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CD
Sr Linux SysrAdmin at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We have always used NetApp. We did not previously use a different solution. 

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NK
Sr. System Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

We used two separate 7-Mode clusters and we SnapMirrored the data to the other side. We moved to NetApp AFF because of the speed and because solid-state disks were the new technology at the time.

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MB
Senior Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We were using a different vendor for virtualization, then we switched to NetApp. The feedback from the VMware team is that things have improved. 

We were using Oracle Veritas previously. Sometimes, their technical support was not that user-friendly. While the hardware was good, it needs to be good going end-to-end. So, if we had an issue, then they were not as helpful, technical support-wise, as we have seen from NetApp. Apart from that, the features that NetApp provides overall are better than what Oracle used to provide.

I have worked on HPE products, but that has primarily been on 3PAR, which is mostly for SAN protocols.

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HS
Enterprise Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I'm also familiar with Dell EMC.

We've used PowerMax, and we have used StorageGRID. 

We use AFF as this is the main environment for our corporate environment.

NetApp has been in the environment for quite some time, so we have built that comfort level with the product. 

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KN
Sr Data Storage at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We also evaluated Pure Storage. They also provide an all-flash array but I like NetApp better. With NetApp they allow us as a system administrator, we are able to do everything we want.

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MV
Data Center Engineer at Belimed

I have worked with HP in the past. In comparison, NetApp has various protocols like NFS and CIFS. Also, it is much easier to use and integrate than HP.

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SM
Systems Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

I chose NetApp because I was most impressed with the engineers that we talked to about the system and its overall metrics along with the things that we were given, like latency and redundancy. I was most impressed with the demos that they did that, which included: ease of setting up an AFF, ease of deploying storage to a SQL Cluster, and just overall simplicity of how easy it is to move data around to back up things.

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RA
Director, IT Infrastructure Services at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have seen performance improvements between AFF and our older NetApp, which was several years old.

We moved to the AFF model for performance, going from just spinning hard desks to all-flash. Also, its deduplication rate is another positive that we have seen. We have been able to extend it further than its physical capacity by utilizing the deduplication that the platform offers.

We don't have a SAN environment. We are just using it as a NAS. It is not any more or less complicated than our environment was before. We are still utilizing the same things, like export policies, quotas, qtrees, etc. that we were using with our older platform. It is about the same as it was before. 

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DB
Consulting Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We use all-flash arrays for our network shares. We have a couple of other platforms that we also have used in the past. I really wanted to move away from those for simplicity. Another big reason is automation. NetApp has done a great job with their automation The Ansible modules along with all the PowerShell command lists that they have developed, make it very consumable for automation, which is very big for us right now. That was one of the big driving forces is having a single operating environment, regardless if I'm running an all-flash array or hybrid array. It's the same look and feel. Everything works exactly the same regardless. That definitely speaks to the simplicity and ease of automation. I can automate and use it everywhere, whether it's cloud, on-prem, etc. That was one of the real decisions for us to decide to go that direction.

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KL
IT Operations Manager at Idaho State Insurance Fund

A big guiding point for upgrading hardware of any type now is to look at the support costs. If support costs get high enough, it financially doesn't make any sense to not upgrade.

Usually once a new technology matures enough, you can look at TCO and decide to make the decision to move ahead. So, we invested in this solution because of costs and the technology improved to the point where we knew it would be stable.

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DA
CTO at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

I did previously use another storage solution.

I have been using NetApp for more than 20 years, and I know NetApp's technologies and support. There is reliability that there is going to be a continuation of technology, and so those are reasons why I continue to choose the solution.

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DR
Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

I have worked with IBM Storwize. In no way are these solutions similar. Most people who are buying and operating with AFF are buying a fully functional storage system. You are getting way more than just allowing someone a terabyte here or there, such as performance metrics, quotes, and service options. Because of this, I would not say that I have not worked with a competing product.

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it_user527232 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was not that involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. I do know that, because I did have experience with it, I probably influenced some of the purchasers within my company. They knew that they had somebody on the team that was able to work with it.

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RV
Manager, Storage Engineering at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We chose NetApp AFF because it has advantages over other file platform vendors. 

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HM
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I have also worked on an IBM DS8000 series and some similar products from EMC.

IBM had released the 8700 with the AFF configuration. However, I was with another company at the time. The majority of my experience is with NetApp using the CLI, but with the IBM product, I was using the GUI. I prefer the CLI in both systems.

With respect to the pros and cons between the vendors, it is difficult for me to judge. Each filesystem has benefits with respect to the vendor and the technology that they use.

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MM
Senior Network Technical Developer and Support Expert at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Prior to this solution, we were running a NetApp 7-Mode implementation with twenty-four filers.

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JC
Storage Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We knew that we needed to invest in a new solution as it was mostly a cost-effective decision. When the purchase of our AFF system was announced — which was an AFF8040 — it was not any more expensive than SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives. So the cost was about the same and the solution was very effective. Sure enough, we made the right decision. It is performing very well, too, even though it is almost obsolete now.

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BP
Storage Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We were running into a lot of storage roadblocks that were performance based. Also, the IBM product that we were using was at the end of life for 90 percent of our enterprise.

I spent 15 years with IBM. Anytime I go into a data center, and I see Big Blue, it is the first thing that I replace.

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JM
Network Storage Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

About 10 years ago we used to have EMC. Then we had both EMC and NetApp, and we ultimately replaced all the EMC with NetApp. Back then, we went with NetApp because of the cost. We got more for our dollar.

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VK
Storage Architect and Engineer at United Airlines

We were using a bunch of other products prior to using this solution, and we are still using some that have been deployed because of the sixteen terabyte limit on each line of the fiber channel.

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MB
Specialist Senior at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Our previous NetApp system was a SAS and SATA spinning disk solution that was reaching end-of-life, and we were overrunning it. We were ready for an upgrade and we stuck with NetApp because of the easy of cross-upgrading, as well as the performance.

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FK
System Administrator at Bell Canada

Initially, we were working with EMC VNX devices. But as life kicks in, we were looking for a long-term solution and what our roadmap was in terms of storage aspects. We saw the true benefit in terms of cost as well as the efficiency to be able to leverage storage. We found AFF to be a better fit for our use case. 

We had the Dell EMC product line for a long time in terms of portfolio and different options of gears. We looked at NetApp gears and capabilities, not just the storage component. However, the capability of being able to go beyond the storage, as a software-defined solution is something that attracted us to NetApp. It is a fit all solution for now.

In our previous storage, we were doing a lot of roadmapping and giving customers a certain amount of storage. Whether customers used or allocated it, it was sitting in there. With the AFF thin provisioning, it has given us the benefit of being able to reduce our footprint from four arrays to a single 2U array. So, we are able to leverage efficiency and virtual volumes with thin provisioning. This gives us almost three to four times more storage efficiency.

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RC
Data Protection Engineering at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Prior to this solution, we had all these different disparate types of storage. It was a problem because, for example, but we'd be running on low NAS but there was all the extra storage in our SAN environment. The solution seems a little cheaper, but when you added the whole cost up, it was cheaper for us to just have a single solution that could do everything.

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PH
Network Professional at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

The reasons we switched were performance and the number of IOPS in the previous product. It was an older product which was dog-slow. Some of the larger file servers were the worst. And that played out to everything else that was sharing the storage with it.

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it_user351162 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Butchers Pet Care

We use HP’s servers and are happy with them, but when we upgraded to flash for FAS, we looked only at NetApp and the other options that were potentially cheaper, but decided on NetApp in the end because we were happy with them.

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PS
Service manager at VST ECS

We used HPE and Dell as well. They provide better customer service than NetApp as they have local authorized partners. So we get a prompt response from them in case of any failure issues.

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it_user527370 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Colorado Judicial Branch

We've had 30-40 controllers for about five or six years now and we've previously had the NetApp 2000 series. We have kind of been a NetApp shop. We've had different vendors like Pure Storage previously come in just to talk about stuff. I think the main reason we went to All Flash was the price point.

When we were looking, we were doing a big project in which we were re-hauling a lot of our core infrastructure. We wanted to refresh the hardware on the NetApps. At the time, we were looking at doing a hybrid of spinning disk and SSDs; maybe doing flash pools and that kind of stuff. Then, working with our vendor and working with NetApp, we were going to need more space anyway so the cost of the new system plus additional shelves for the space was pretty much the same price at which they could give us an All Flash system. With the 4-to-1 compression and the similar features All Flash has to offer, it was kind of a no-brainer to move to that; a lot of performance increase as well, being on All Flash.

A lot of our workloads aren't really disk-intensive, so we don't really need all flash, so at the time it wasn't needed, but the price point that NetApp was able to bring it in at was a deciding factor. Also, at the time that we reviewed Pure Storage, a lot of our systems were using multiple protocols on the same controller; we were using fiber channel, NFS, CIFS. The Pure Storage systems, at least when we reviewed them at the time, they didn’t really support all of those protocols on the same controller. We would have to buy multiple systems to be able to cover all our protocols. That made them more expensive. That was definitely a disadvantage for them.

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it_user527322 - PeerSpot reviewer
NAS Team Lead at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were not previously using something else; we were always a NetApp customer before. We just wanted flash. We were using and we still are using spinning discs.

The All Flash storage was a direction from the upper management: This was before the All Flash FAS was available. Reduction of the physical footprint of storage by going to SSD storage from traditional SAS or SATA drives. Reduced power and cooling requirements.


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DG
System/Storage Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We started looking into NetApp AFF because our previous solution was outdated, and we were having storage problems. They were older FAS storage, also by NetApp.

We were interested in getting something a little better, including improvements in the storage and the latency.

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SM
Storage Administrator at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We performed a PoC using Cloud Volumes and Cloud Sync, and we were happy with the time, durability, and availability.

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DS
Payload Integration at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We have always been a NetApp customer, it's a very good product. We knew that we wanted more performance. It wasn't a hard decision. 

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RC
Head of IT at Inacap

If you are compare it with our last application, IBM FS840, AFF is incredible in comparison. 

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AM
Senior storage engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Our old solution was working fine but the system was going out of support so we needed to do a refresh.

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it_user750609 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Information Systems Engineer at Varian Medical Systems

It was all disk space, it was on a FAS system, it wasn't AFF. We switched because of growth. The amount of IO that we needed from our existing system just couldn't handle it.

I felt that NetApp was a little late to the game, but I guess that made them a little bit more mature when they got there. However, I've always been a fan of NetApp, an advocate.

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it_user750723 - PeerSpot reviewer
It Manager at HSBC

We were using NetApp. We were using FAS NetApp, and it was just the new system, the new growth that we needed.

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it_user527136 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Our main kick off was our VDI environment, our work stations, heavy writes. Typically, we were running SAS disks and they were doing good but for the right performance, you really had to have huge aggregates to carry that load. With AFF, you don't really need that because the IOPS are there and it can handle it.

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TG
Enterprise Solutions Architect, Technology Infrastructure & Innovations at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We have been a NetApp customer for a long time. We just recently added a NetApp StorageGRID product for more object-store advantages in our data pipeline. It is adding more value.

NetApp is the number one leader in NFS, which is the protocol that we primarily use. We looked for a new solution simply because IOM3 modules were deprecated and moving forward from ONTAP 9.3 to version 9.6 required a full forklift upgrade, and a bunch of hardware was thrown out.

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MV
SAN Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our previous solution had performance issues. I see a lot of value in faster policies. I don't like when critical applications are running on drives with different speeds. When customers need to track all of their data and it's sitting on a 7k drive, the drive is working hard. The response is slow. With all-flash, it's better. 

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it_user527127 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

We previously used HPE, but that was a long time ago. Since we moved from HPE to NetApp, we’ve only been working with FAS.

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it_user527157 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr IT Specialist II at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We evaluated Pure and Tintri. We're an incumbent customer of NetApp’s 7-mode product, so for the migration from 7-mode to CDOT AFF was easier than transitioning to Pure or Tintri.

Some of the competitors did not offer multi-protocol solutions, so the architecture for those solutions would have been a little bit more complicated.

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VS
Storage Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

As storage space is getting cheaper, we wanted to move to newer hardware.

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PH
Technical Lead at USAF

We've been with NetApp since I came on the project and because I had NetApp experience before I brought it with me.

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GR
Principal Engineer at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

We knew it was time to switch to this solution because it was costing us a fortune in maintenance, especially when our hardware was getting over the three to five year old mark. With spinning disc, it's not like we can neglect that because drives fail all the time and the previous iteration of storage we had was a NetApp FAS, so we've gone from NetApp to NetApp.

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DS
Systems Administrator at Anthc

We also have Pure Storage.

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it_user750651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Leads Systems Engineer at Tuscon Medical Center

We were using an EMC solution before this one. We switched when we ran out of performance on what we had.

We were using an EMC solution before this one. We switched when we ran out of performance on what we had.

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PK
Administrator at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I have previously used Hitachi, but it is very slow.

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it_user805152 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Our previous solutions were Hitachi, Siemens, and NetApp. We switched to AFF because it had all-flash, better performance, and better response times. It also scales better.

We used to do applications running on mechanical disk. With the introduction of SDDs and AFF All Flash, this has given us substantial improvements in our applications' performance.

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it_user577449 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Biomedical System Services at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think we were previously using IBM FASt100 in the 2000s. From there, we moved on to NetApp.

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it_user748323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We've been a NetApp customer for 10 to 12 years now. We use their non-flash stuff a lot. We use hybrid flash, and after that, hybrid arrays. All Flash was the next logical move. Our next move is going to be the object storage, as well to spin off some of that data, the snapshots, on to object storage, because they've got flex groups.

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it_user527142 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We've previously had several other vendors. We used Hitachi. We used their HNAS product. We had Celerra from EMC. We've had a couple of other older vendors that aren't even around anymore.

We switched from HNAS because of the performance, both in application and backup performance. It was not nearly what it needs to be. Their storage pools and the way we could grow the HNAS environment was nothing compared to what the NetApp does. All of those things together made that an easy switch.

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it_user527379 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate System Engineer III at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

To a certain degree, I was involved in the decision process to invest in the All Flash FAS. I recommended of it and then obviously, higher up the food chain, they decided to go with it.

We weren't previously using anything else with all flash. The company I was with was a NetApp consumer long before I got there. No real big changes on the commercial side of what we bought; just kind of investing in the new technology of all flash.

The decision to invest in it in the first place was strictly for performance testing, to make sure that applications weren't running into performance issues with spinning media.

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it_user527319 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Administrator - Storage at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we lease our equipment and it was due for release return.

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GR
System Administrator at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our HPE system was old so we switched to a new one.

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LR
Senior Data Center Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Previously we had not used another solution. We have been using NetApp for years, we went from refresh approximately two years ago, then sixty to forty to the A300 All-Flash.

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DC
Tech Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We didn't switch over. We have been using NetApp for 15 years.

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.

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EA
Senior Systems Administrator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We didn't technically switch solutions. We just augmented it because we have been a NetApp customer for awhile. Thus, we're going from FAS to AFF, which is just a natural progression.

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PH
Executive director IT Systems at MemorialCare Health System

We were moving to a new data center, so we needed it.

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ST
Consulting Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Customers were already using the application. We took their feedback. It was the best product based on our requirements.

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AB
Senior Manager of Product and Services at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We did not have any other flash solution. We were running a tiered storage approach but because of market demand, where our customers wanted efficient performance, agile cloud storage, that is what drove us to evaluate the newer technologies. With all the technical evaluations we did, we settled on All-Flash.

We chose NetApp because we had the SolidFires in place and we already had the standardization. We also went with NetApp because of the partnership and the support that we get from NetApp. In addition, it proved that it was technically better than the competitors in the benchmarks.

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it_user527364 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Global Storage at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Our production environments are currently normal, non-flash FAS appliances. They are stressing the hardware significantly, so that's why we looked at All Flash. They run thousands of compute nodes. They want to run more but they can't right now, because the system is already maxed out. We're hoping they can scale that and run a lot more on the all-flash array.

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it_user220509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. System Architect at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We replaced 2 E-series, and the decision was made to get a larger cluster mode system with two nodes of All Flash FAS, specifically so it would be one cluster, and could be managed as one cluster.

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it_user527418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We knew needed this type solution based on a lot of research. We needed to provide an experience similar to the desktops. That really pushed us towards the flash array.

I did not previously use a different solution; we were just using regular desktops. We did not have an environment to support at that time.

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AS
Solution Architect at Prow

We chose NetApp AFF because it is flexible and reliable. It offers a unified storage system. 

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CM
Network Services Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were on a standard NetApp but we upgraded to the FAS because of performance. We had it in for a test and it succeeded. That's why we bought it.

I have been with the company for 20 years and we have had NetApp for 20 years. We did switch over to IBM, about ten years ago, right before we went to Epic. But Epic said, "No IBM. NetApp." We were switching from NetApp to IBM, because IBM had a little bit of advantage, a long time ago. Then Epic came in and said, "No, switch back." So, we're back.

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SP
Technical manager at Macrovention

We have customers who are not NetApp customers. We teach them what the capabilities and challenges are. Our main goal is to comply with and meet our customers' challenges. If NetApp really fits their needs, we move on from there. In a case where we need to transition the whole infrastructure from a different storage brand to NetApp, we'll do that.

If the customer is an existing user, it's easier for us to convince them. If they're a non-NetApp user, it takes time because we have to do proofs of concept to justify it to them. If they agree technically, then the commercial conversation starts. Normally, the commercial conversion does not take that long, because the technical team has agreed to the solution.

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it_user750546 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Administrator at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's been there as long as I've worked there. So, before that, CIFS, user shares, that kind of thing. It was never really an option for high performance storage.

We've been using Netapp for many years, long before I even came to the company.

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it_user335835 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Manager (Storage) Cloud Managed Services at IT Convergence

We have traditionally used SATA disks; then we migrated to SAS, and then to a hybrid which included a flash pool. Now we have embarked on all flash. This journey has been really exciting for us. We have used each of these storage systems to package storage services for our customers.

We were previously using HPE 3PAR. I was not involved in the switch between 3PAR to FAS, and I’m not sure why we switched. When I joined this company, we already started with NetApp.

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it_user527220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Manager IT at a tech company with 51-200 employees

This is where my organization's innovation comes into the picture. They keep their eye on the market and what's going on. We started that relationship around two years ago and we started ten years ago with NetApp.

We also keep an eye on how we can improve from a data center perspective. We are a big data center provider and we look at how we can make our data center more cost effective.

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it_user527130 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

We were not using a different solution beforehand. We had been using physical servers for all of our SQL and Oracle.

Testing with some of our programmers, there were some issues with speed compared to physical servers, physical disks. When we did the testing, the older physical servers were actually faster than some of our virtual. We had to do some testing with that and we determined that by going to the flash, we’d get rid of that latency, that issue of slowness.

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it_user527154 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Network Operations at Vornado

We recently moved from EMC to NetApp. We were pretty much running out of space on our current infrastructure for storage and we knew that we needed something else.

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BS
IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 201-500 employees

I just switched over to Pure, so my flash storage is more than adequate now.

However, previous to this solution, we did not use a different product.

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AH
Systems Management Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

Before moving to NetApp, we were with their major competitor.

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DM
IT Director at a legal firm

That decision to got with AFF was made before me. They switched from a NetApp FAS system, which is spinning disc storage. We came over to that from a Hitachi BlueArc system that was very old. The FAS system was doing well, but when it came time to add more storage, it was obvious that the choice for flash was the way to go, specifically for virtual machines and applications. It would have been chosen for virtual machine storage and application delivery.

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it_user527160 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and Unix System Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We were previously using SAS and SATA. That said, with our Oracle environment, no one's been complaining. We've been getting quite satisfactory throughput. We just migrated from 7-mode, all on spinning disk, to Clustered ONTAP on newer hardware, smarter back-end aggregate design. We've really implemented more of the NetApp best practices. Actually, we're getting great performance out of our traditional arrays. For us, it's really a matter of education about how to deploy the All-Flash FAS units.

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it_user527376 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Storage Admin at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously had a FAS and then we also had an IBM flash storage array. The IBM was not as reliable. We had several hardware issues with it. Then our NetApp sales rep came to us with the AFF. We had a pretty long-existing relationship with NetApp already, so we decided just to try and concentrate on NetApp solutions. It's worked out very well for us so far.

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it_user527271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Exchange Administrator at Albuquerque Public Schools

I was consulted during the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS. It was an addition to FlexPod. We were told we needed to have flash storage to support an application when the truth was, we didn't actually need flash storage but there was an edict to do that. We went with the AFF in order to support the demands of a customer. We're happy enough with it to buy another.

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it_user346323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Manager at OUTSCALE

We started with NetApp five years ago and are still with them now. At the point we started, there were no competitors. At that time, it was a really great choice and it still is today.

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it_user527238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. SAN Engineer at a religious institution with 1,001-5,000 employees

It was lifecycle for us. Equipment had aged out so it was time to replace.

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it_user750558 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager San Operations at a media company with 10,001+ employees

We had a different NetApp solution before. We actually started running the numbers, and due to the age of the systems, we were starting to lose multiple disks at a time. We were going to have a point where we lost data, so it was time to replace them. NetApp was the only vendor that really worked out during the quote process.

We had a different NetApp solution before. We actually started running the numbers, and due to the age of the systems, we were starting to lose multiple disks at a time. We were going to have a point where we lost data, so it was time to replace them. NetApp was the only vendor that really worked out during the quote process.

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it_user202125 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Storage/System Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used to deploy other large storage vendor products that didn't integrate well with the application stack. Automation and efficiency has been a driver in the company, which made us switch to NetApp.

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it_user527217 - PeerSpot reviewer
IS System Analyst at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

We were having performance issues with that specific application and we were trying to fix that. Then, once we moved, we came to the conclusion it wasn't the speed problems; it was the application itself. So now, we're trying to get them to fix it. It was actually more proof of that for them.

In general, when I choose a vendor, the important criteria that I look for in a vendor are cost and performance. That's what it comes down to: Who has the best prices? The most bang for your buck.

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it_user527169 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Storage Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were previously using the FAS series with spinning media.

One of the key factors in our decision to move to a new solution was that NetApp was marketing it very well. We were running five-year-old hardware and we were about to do a tech refresh on them. We looked at spinning media, FAS and the AFF solution. AFF was making some sense cost-wise and performance-wise, so that's why we went to AFF.

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it_user527238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. SAN Engineer at a religious institution with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used a different solution, which was coming to the end of its lifecycle.

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it_user527151 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were previously using NetApp with spinning drives, and we were also using some of the EMC DMX.

Now, we are using NetApp exclusively.

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it_user527286 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of IT at Wyrick Robbins Yates & Ponton LLP

We did not previously use a different solution. We were a NetApp shop before that, but we were using a different controller and we weren't an All Flash FAS shop. We could see the latency. We used all the utilities, so we could see what was going on, the need and how it would help our business.

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it_user524088 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used EMC products for backups, then we migrated our data to NetApps because of the SnapDrive, which is really easy to restore. I am not comparing it to EMC; but we are more happy on the NetApps regarding the backups. We see a big difference between NetApp and the EMC solution we were previously using, and it's multi-protocol. Right now, there might be many products are offering it, but NetApp has been offering multi-protocol for years. We use NFS, we use CIFS, we use iSCSI, we use fiber channel; all in one really. It's got everything in one solution.

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it_user732744 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Dhaka Bank Limited

Earlier used EVA, MSA and XP from HPE. In order to enhance our capacity, we proceeded to switch to NetApp. Interestingly, after proceeding to NetApp, we discovered more features, which we had not even thought about.

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it_user750711 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Outfront Media

We mainly run virtual environments, VMware NFS. We were previously using just SATA and SaaS disk and we went to the All Flash and the performance was way better. It was a great improvement over the previous system.

We maxed out our previous system in terms of its space and also the IOPS and the actual performance we were getting out of it, as we continued to grow.

We were a small company. Our parent corporation rolled us into our own corporation, we did an IPO. Then we grew a lot from that, so we had our older system that we had previously and, as we grew, we threw more databases and the like at it. We saw the performance was definitely not able to keep up. Once we implemented the All Flash FAS, it really wasn't an issue any more.

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it_user750630 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Age Of Learning

Before NetApp, we were using lots of cheap storage solutions. We were just running these servers with blocks of disks. They're made by another vendor, I can't remember the name. We would just buy these disks and use them up. Then, we ended up going with NetApp. Then, we do some on cloud stuff with S3 buckets. Really, NetApp was our first choice when it came to an enterprise solution, when we were ready to go.

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it_user750759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ceo at Enterprise Computing

Previously, we were using external drives for backup solutions before we came across NetApp. We switched because of the features NetApp comes with, then the ease of use.

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it_user750669 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Admin at Commonwealth Of Kentucky :Cot

We have multiple platforms. We have EMC, VNX7600s, and we just got rid of a VNX5600 and 5400 that were not able to keep up with the compute for what we were driving through them. We had on one of those systems, the VNX5600, we had 250 terabytes of free space that couldn't be utilized because the processing power on the platform couldn't keep up with what we needed. It was over-utilized, therefore we went with NetApp because it has the ability to handle the load that we throw at it.

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it_user527355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used the FAS8040s, with a mix of SAS and SATA flash pools.

We knew we needed to invest in the All Flash FAS or a similar solution by looking at our performance metrics and realizing that we were really struggling from an IO perspective. We just had more IO than our existing system could handle, and it was the next best option.

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it_user527091 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Sinclair Oil

Most of the time, investing in the AFF was a result of upgrading our current technology of stuff that we have in there, whether it be older NetApp stuff that we're replacing with a new AFF, or a need presents itself, such as a new project that we would have to look at. We don't have a policy of always having the newest technology in here, immediately; it's project-based or replacement based.

We've been with NetApp before I got to the company. They've been with NetApp for a while and I worked with NetApp in previous companies as well.

When I’m choosing a vendor like NetApp, I look at the support and how the company treats us as a customer. We don't want a company that's just going to sell us a nice, great big box, bow-wrapped, and then never speaks to us again. With NetApp, we've had a lot of continuity with, not only the SEs but, the sales staff and so on. They continually come in and make sure that we're good; checking to see if we have any projects that are coming up; checking to see if we have any problems that we need to solve with them; being very proactive and so on. Some of the other vendors that we've tried out have been, sort of, "Okay, it's in, thank you."

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it_user527304 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We're still in the VMware environment but we moved from an old 7-mode cluster using old SAS drives to a new all-flash pool, mostly for performance purposes. We had some expectations and we're blown away. They all paid off, to the point the users actually saw big changes as well. We knew we'd see things on the back end, but we weren’t sure they would trickle down to the end user.

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it_user527358 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a media company with 51-200 employees

Before we implemented the All-Flash FAS, we had, and still have, a mixed environment of mostly Hitachi and Dot Hill. We also have LTO tape storage that we implement. I'm all over the board.

Even though I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash FAS, we selected NetApp and the All-Flash FAS because of the speed of the flash, the reliability and the stability; it stays up.

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it_user352080 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Center at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We ran VDI on EMC for five years, and it ran out of performance so we had to offload. We then decided to turn to NetApp AFF.

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it_user351144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Grand Consult

We didn't have anything similar in use previously.

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PY
Storage Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our previous solution was spinning disk, and our application demands more in terms of storage and performance. NetApp AFF just seemed like the natural route because we didn't want to get left behind.

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CJ
Sr Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have used NetApp for a very long time. Our reason for implementing AFF was that we wanted to go for an all-flash solution. We didn't want to keep using hard disks, but we still wanted to continue using SnapMirror and Snapshots. This was the way to do it.

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ZM
Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Our previous solution had issues with capacity, monitoring, and performance. These are the core areas where the customer was feeling the pain. So, we get them to a different place with a proper solution and fix for the issues. I feel like AFF has the features the customer needs. 

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MW
Storage Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees

We were at the edge of the performance on our previous system. We took a risk with the AFF because it was more expensive than going with the newer model of what we had, but it was definitely worth it.

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it_user750615 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Yes and no. We're in the process of retiring some old storage frames, old Hitachi frames actually. I believe it's just disk-based. There are actually three different Hitachi frames and they're different. One is all flash, one is hybrid, and the other one is purely disk-based. So there's a mix. We have another all-flash platform that we could move workload to, but the NetApp fit the workload a lot better for this in my opinion. So it made sense.

The original intent was actually to extend our NAS - we primarily use NetApp for NAS and a lot of our environment. But we've pitched the AFF that we just installed, the A700, primarily as a SAN platform. So we're really trying to leverage more towards that now.

It will eventually be used for both block and file storage. It was originally slated for file usage NAS, but we're leveraging it more for block.

I had worked with NetApp as block storage in the past, and I always had a high opinion of it. I think NetApp is the best in the industry at providing a unified platform for file and block. Hands down.

We don't get too deeply involved in the cost analysis, but management and engineering rely heavily on the input from myself and my co-worker on the storage team, for these kinds of decisions, on a technical level.

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it_user750534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We have a kind of recycle policy, and the end of warranty. We look at every purchase in the last three years, book value. We'll use that analysis as our first indicator.

The second one, the demand from our customers, our internal customers. What kind of application they are going to use, what kind of power they will need. We'll check with NetApp, our account team, whether there are any new solutions available from NetApp, or we can use the existing one. Mainly the NetApp account team will help us on this.

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it_user527313 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

We are a long-time NetApp customer. We knew that we had some workloads that were exceeding what our existing platforms could provide. We ended up saying, "Hey, the All Flash FAS is the next logical step for us".

We were using spinning disk. We actually also purchased a flash pool, which is a hybrid, this last go around; all NetApp. That'll be our first hybrid, but we knew that we also needed this all flash array to be able to step up to the plate with some of these other workloads.

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it_user527214 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at College board

We knew we needed to invest in the All Flash FAS because we were on 6200 series with 300 GB drives. We were very obsolete and we didn't want to go to a large platform, so we went to that. The price point was easy because they priced it so cheap.

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it_user527334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at American Health Network

NetApp All Flash FAS:

I was involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. We were modeling it against Pure Storage. We already had 3220 running for a couple of years, running VMware. I made the decision; I didn't want to split between multiple vendors. I wanted to keep it all underneath one hood. The AFF allowed us to do that. We could not put our SQL environment on spinning disk, obviously; not with the scalability that it's at or the number of users we have hitting it.

We were previously using Fusion IO cards, striped. They’re PCIe slot cards – some are on x8 slot, some are on an x16 slot – with Windows striped between all those cards. That was what I walked into when I was hired by AHN. They were using SQL mirroring. In the event of a system failure, they could always fire up the mirroring to resume production. Doing it with a NetApp has pretty much eliminated that all the way.

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it_user527391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer II at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash system. It was just given to me, I took it and I just ran with it.

Before we switched to the All-Flash, we were using the old FAS. It was also NetApp. It was a 3100 series. They got deprecated and we went to the All-Flash.

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it_user352137 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Group IT Service at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Previously, we used EMC.

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it_user351210 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

This is the first all-flash product I've used.

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SB
Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Prior to NetApp AFF, we were using an HPE Storage solution. It was a little more difficult to swap out the drives on the XP series. You have to shut down the drive and then wait for a prompt to remove it. It's a long process and if somebody pulls it out hot and puts another one in then you're going to have to do a complete rebuild. It is not as robust or stable when you are swapping parts.

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RA
Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were pushing what we had too far on performance. It wasn't so good, so that's when we looked at All Flash.

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VS
Senior Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were not previously using another solution.

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it_user750720 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We've been a NetApp customer for a while so we've used disk-based and hybrid storage from them.

We use Nimble for our primary VMware storage right now. We haven't switched that back to NetApp yet. We're going to see how the next few years go and then we'll figure out from there.

We were using Exchange, we were using NetApp storage before, and we knew the SnapManager products were a huge part of that. And when you couldn't get the same functionality out of trying different things with different vendors, you don't want to beat your head against the wall reinventing the wheel with what you're doing. It was a natural progression for us.

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it_user750705 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at George Fox University

We didn't need invest in a new solution but our support was up on our system. So we had to upgrade. We had a 15K SAS disk before that was sufficient but it was going end-of-support at the end of this year or the end of next year, so it was a good time to upgrade.

We chose NetApp because we put a lot of money into the training already. I'm very comfortable with it. I like it. It's pretty industry standard. It's very a valuable skill. So I'd rather not go to some smaller start-up vendor and then, if I ever do look for a new job, I can say, "Yeah, I'm very experienced with NetApp," not whatever other company. And HPE was horrible four or five years ago.

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it_user748317 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

The initial reason for going to NetApp was that our original solution, which was Dell Storage, just wasn't cutting it. We did our own in-house testing, performance-wise, resilience-wise, etc. The Dell Storage just wasn't cutting it. Dell's other solution at that time was Compellent, and NetApp was just better. The initial reason we didn't go with NetApp was because of cost, but they were able to meet us in the middle and we just went from there.

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EM
Systems Mgr at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Previously, we were using the older generation of the NetApp MetroCluster (6240 unit). We switched as this unit was not performant enough, i.e., it had a high maintenance cost for the performance delivered.

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it_user527340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Technical Lead at Mercadolibre.com

We decided to switch to all flash because we needed better performance and lower latencies that are stable with higher IO. That's something that traditional arrays can’t do.

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it_user527205 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We drove the decision to invest in AFF a little more than our database administrators had. They were fine with the performance, but we were seeing some things on our side that made us think it was time to go with a flash solution. They were driving too much IO over SAS and SATA, and we wanted to make sure we had the right solution for them going forward. We also wanted to futureproof it a little bit.

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it_user527163 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used Oracle. There was a Pillar Axiom line for storage. We also previously had an EMC solution. I don't remember exactly what line that was.

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it_user352293 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Coordinator Storage/Backup at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used Pure Storage.

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it_user352155 - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT Infrastructure Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have used Fusion-io for flash but nothing in SAN. We were looking to address performance issues, and NetApp addressed them.

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it_user351168 - PeerSpot reviewer
R&D IT Admin at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Before this we were using 7-Mode and other NetApp FAS products. We upgraded for speed and newer features.

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AB
Consultor and Co-founder at OS4IT

Our clients were using other solutions, such as Hitachi, and they switched because of its scalability, functionality, and support.

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CH
System Programmer at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We have a large amount of unstructured data, so we felt that AFF was the right solution for us.

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TF
Senior Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our last solution was at end of life and warranty. We went from NetApp to NetApp, so we stayed with NetApp, but we move to the latest, greatest solution.

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it_user750702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior It Solutions Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We have other storage as well but we have been using NetApp for a long time.

We have a weekly call with the NetApp representative, we have been getting that from them. From them we understood that we needed to get a new solution.

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it_user750582 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineering Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

We were using Hewlett-Packard P2000s, and they were fine, but it was basically just a rack of disks that allowed us to do SAN solutions. They were actually pretty good, too. They didn't have the high availability features, and they couldn't do replication. They could do some snapshotting, but it was nothing like what we have now.

What happened is, it was kind of an end-of-life, they were getting real old, long in the tooth, and we needed more room. When the entire enterprise looked at vendors, they had brought on NetApp. When we looked at it, we thought, "This is great," and here we are. That's why we bought it. It just filled in. It did everything we needed it to do.

We've been extremely impressed with NetApp. I like the interface. I like all the tools they give us. The support is incredible. Our rep is awesome.

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it_user750639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Engineer at Providance Health Services

No, we didn't use a previous solution. We came to AAF 300 All Flash because we were refreshing all of our NetApp applications.

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it_user527148 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We were using the hard disk version of ONTAP in our environment. We did a PoC with All-Flash. We saw the benefits of it, so we implemented it in our environment.

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it_user527103 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at Desire 2 Learn Inc

I wasn't involved in that decision-making process, so I'm not sure what the driving force was. I was actually hired after the fact because I worked with NetApp in the past.

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it_user527385 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Windows Engineering and Virtualization at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was not at this company before they started using AFF.

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it_user527388 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. We decided to go with an all-flash solution for our ESX environment specifically because we had a business initiative to virtualize our database platform. In doing so, it was not performing as well as we would like on the spinning disk. Moving to an all-flash solution has dramatically decreased the OS latencies and increased performance of the OS, which in turn improved the performance of the overall application.

We were previously using a NetApp FAS with the 10,000-rpm SAS disks; the 2 1/2" ones, the little ones.

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it_user353367 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager Infrastructure & Operations at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We tested another solution, but it didn't integrate well.

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it_user351156 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Ahd Hellweg Data GmbH & Co. KG

I’ve only been working with NetApp products.

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it_user346131 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used FAS and we switched because of the above reasons.

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SS
System Administrator at a government with 201-500 employees

I have been using NetApp solutions for the last 15 years. I have also used EMC, which is also good, but flexibility-wise, NetApp is better.

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JS
Senior in technology and engineer at a marketing services firm

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because everybody is moving forward. We don't want to stand still.

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it_user731157 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Business Partner at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It was an older system. It was a disc based system. So, we were looking for performance improvement.

It was a natural progression from the previous system, so it was just more of an upgrade rather than a new system.

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it_user750561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at Bay View Financial Trading

We needed something quick for our SQL DBAs, so that was the recommended path that we take, and it's been great so far.

We were using the 600 Gig drives, regular SCSI drives, and they weren't fast enough. We switched because of the complaints of how slow the disk worked prior to us moving over to the flash.

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it_user750672 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Sys Admin at a tech services company

Our existing solutions, which were Netapp, were basically just overrun.

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it_user351153 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator for Storage and Virtualization at Eurofins

We used NetApp FAS previously and switched to the flash version.

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it_user351150 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Specialist at Fujitsu Sweden AB

I went from working with NetApp FAS to AFF, so I stayed in the family. The customer was satisfied with their FAS system but needed lower latency, so it was a clear choice.

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SL
Systems Engineer Manager at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

We were using HPE EVAs, which are very clunky and old, so we moved over to NetApp.

We were just bought out by another company who has been using Dell EMC. They're not happy with that solution, so we brought them into NetApp.

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it_user527295 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Storage Administrator at Mentor Graphics

I wasn’t involved in the decision process to invest in this particular All Flash FAS, but I've been in many, many discussions about going to that technology. I'm part of our team to say, "This is what we think we're going to need based on what we've seen. This could be the right tool for the job." In general, with decisions like this, there’s no one person making the decision.

We were previously running on a different vendor platform. We had that device saturated, and there was nowhere to go with it. The scalability was non-existent. It was disk. This was a good opportunity for us to move into this flash environment with this particular workload because of the performance.

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it_user527139 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

At the time, we had been NetApp customers for quite some time. We had been using a FAS3220 and we were starting to see performance issues. Our sales engineer said, “Why don't you guys try take a look at this?” We did some research on it. We actually POC'd it with a few others, that will probably remain nameless at this point in time, and obviously, NetApp outperformed the others; oh, we loved that.

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it_user527307 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees

We were using NetApp before, but we evaluated EMC, IBM, HP, Pure Storage, XtremIO and Nimble.

It came down to XtremIO and NetApp. NetApp offered much, much more storage. And the cost difference to buy XtremeIO was huge compared to NetApp. NetApp just totally blew it out of the water on price. We got something like five times the storage for the price. It was really worth testing on that.

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it_user353850 - PeerSpot reviewer
System specialist UNIX/SAN with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used IBM before, after the contract finished we tested NetApp, and from what I know it filled the hole. It’s excellent. It has flash pool disks on a cluster, and we switched as we got it for a good price. We have a dual strategy with Inter Telecom and normally we get good prices for NetApp products.

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TC
Data Center Engineer at a non-profit

The gear we were on was about ten years old. We always buy behind the technology curve. I noticed that spinning disk was going away and that the industry moving towards SSDs, so I wanted us to try to get ahead of the curve a little bit, to give us some more horsepower to do some more initiatives that we want to get done in the future.

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it_user750699 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Storage Admin at General Dynamics

We had EMC, then we introduced NetApp. We switched due to cost.

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it_user527247 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We compared this tool against EMC’s XtremIO head-to-head, and the NetApp blew it out of the water. There was no competition. We were already a NetApp shop, so they were our preferred tool anyway. It has more features and links to my OS, innovative CIFS, and deduplication. We had the knowledge of the system already. It wasn't reinventing the workforce.

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it_user531243 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Other solutions were not all-flash compatible.

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it_user527199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mission Command Systems at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

I didn't evaluate anybody; higher levels than me did that. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right. My organization’s not going to give a contract to nobody, for a bad product.

Right now, I'm concentrating our collapse-down strategy, where we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I went to the NetApp conference. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer; if the filer's going to need to expand. If we're going to be migrating to a new filer, etc.

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it_user527310 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

We decided to invest in the All Flash FAS basically because of constant customer demand for a higher-tier, flash-based storage option. We didn't currently have anything with any other vendor available. It wasn't a storage offering that we had; not necessarily one that we thought we needed, because we use QoS and service levels within our environment, but customer demand mitigated purchasing an offering.

Previously, it was all hybrid NetApp FAS. We run NetApp throughout our entire environment, but we didn't have anything dedicated flash SSD. We would run flash pools in hybrid aggregate configurations, and then we would use QoS and service levels to guarantee SLOs. Customers, not really knowing what they want, hear the word "flash" and think they want flash storage for their application. Then, when they ask for it, and you don't have it as an offering, you're now an incomplete solution. Out of industry necessity, I would say, we've added it to our portfolio.

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it_user527325 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We were on a very old 7-mode system; that's what we migrated from. That was our next step, to stay with ONTAP because we liked the features of ONTAP, and we wanted the speed and performance of the All Flash FAS.

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it_user527097 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This was just a hardware replacement and the promotional deals that NetApp had to offer basically made buying an AFF solution comparable to buying an old spinning disk solution, so it was a combination. We have two nodes that have spinning disks and two nodes that are AFF. To have the whole thing spinning disk, the difference in price made it a no-brainer going with part of it being AFF.

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it_user874449 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For our use case, we were automating what we were doing so we chose to use the All Flash REST APIs.

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it_user750585 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

We decided, as a company, to not buy any more disk storage for our primary customers, and that's the reason we needed All Flash. NetApp was a perfect fit because we could grow as we needed and it scales out the architecture works for us. We were looking for a high-performance, small, low footprint block rate, and NetApp fits in right there.

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it_user351183 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We also have IBM products, but we chose NetApp instead because IBM does not have the necessary plugins for integration with vSphere.

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it_user1013601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at ICTeam

fas 2554, need to scle out with space and performances

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it_user527292 - PeerSpot reviewer
Computer Systems Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

I've contributed opinions regarding the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS.
We've been NetApp customers for quite a while, so we just kind of grew into it, from disk to flash cache, flash pool and then to all flash.

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it_user527106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at Equifax

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.

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it_user527115 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Systems Integration at Klas Telecom Government, Inc.

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.

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it_user522732 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Design Engineering at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I've been using this the whole time I’ve been with this company; this is basically everything we've run all along.

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it_user750528 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We did not have a previous solution. We chose NetApp because we have other NetApp systems.

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it_user352125 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix & Storage Manager at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were running on NFS.

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it_user550308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Analyst at Ativas Data Center

We used another solution from NetApp with 7-Mode and we are progressing to this new solution.

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it_user527400 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I was instrumental in saying, we need to go to the 8000 platform, full stop, because we'd been on the 3000s for quite some time. Over time, they kept growing, and the performance kept decreasing.

I used to work in the partner space. I'd see an environment with the 6000 series and we just threw everything at it; they didn't take a beat. So, I knew that by the time we were looking at upgrading to the 8000 series. I basically said, we need to forget about this smaller series and treat ourselves like a proper enterprise and go to the 8000s and get the right performance we need.

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it_user176532 - PeerSpot reviewer
Supercomputing Specialist at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user237408 - PeerSpot reviewer
TAM & Solution Architect with 51-200 employees

The customer previously had the NetApp solution based on hybrid disks.
They don't have a business continuity solution.

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it_user352320 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

We previously used EMC, but we switched to take advantage of clustered Data ONTAP.

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it_user352065 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We moved because of the latency.

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it_user352113 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Automation Developer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It's our first flash storage solution.

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it_user351201 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used a flash pool, and switched to improve performance.

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it_user489189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer (3rd level) at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Most of our current solutions are based on spinning media and hybrid solutions. Due to the greater performance improvement on flash systems, the higher number of IOPS and less latency on the storage back end, I would recommend deploying performance-dependent workloads on SSD platforms.

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Buyer's Guide
NetApp AFF
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp AFF. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.