NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for SAN block storage. 

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

It has improved the way my organization functions because it has enabled us to host a very fast, multi-tenant private cloud solution.

AFF has improved application response time by a lot. 

This solution has helped us to stop worrying about storage as a limiting factor. We know we've got enough storage left and it's easy to manage, so we can tell how much real storage we do have left.

We use SapMirror a lot but the speed of the AFF is also very valuable. 

The overall latency in our environment is very low because it's All Flash and we've got 10 Giga dedicated to the storage network

AFF's simplicity around data protection and data management is pretty good. With the NetApp volume encryption, we're getting data at rest encryption right now. It was very easy to turn on and very easy to manage with the onboard key manager.

It has enabled us to add new applications, without having to purchase additional storage. We've over-provisioned our storage quite a bit, simply because we know we've got time before people will grow into it.

It has not reduced our data center costs. NetApp charges a pretty penny for their stuff. 

The next release desperately needs NFS4, extended attributes.

In terms of what needs improvement, the NAS areas are a little behind on technologies. For example, SMB 3 is not quite up to speed with a lot of the storage spaces stuff. NFS4 doesn't support some of the features that we need.

It's rock solid. 

Scalability is expensive. 

Their technical support is very good. We use them quite a bit and we have had good experiences with them.

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

I've set up a NetApp network previously. The setup was pretty straightforward.

We used an integrator and we had a very good experience with them.

We've looked at EMC and Microsoft storage spaces. Neither one of them really compares.

My advice to someone considering this solution is that if you can afford it and you will be using it a lot, go for it. 

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

My primary use case for All Flash FAS that we have is pretty much everything. It is the go-to storage device that we use for block fiber channel devices on our heavy SAP workloads as well as user base files and file shares for databases. 

AFF improves how our organization functions because of its speed. Reduction in batch times means that we're able to get better information out of SAP and into BW faster. Those kinds of things are a bit hard to put my finger on. Generally, when we start shrinking the times we need to do things, and we're doing them on a regular basis, it has a flow on impact that the rest of the business can enjoy. We also have more capacity to call on for things like stock take.

AFF is supporting new business because we've got the capacity to do more. In the past, with a spinning disc and our older FAS units, we had plenty of disc capacity but not enough CPU horsepower and the controllers to drive it and it was beginning to really hurt. With the All Flash FAS, we could see that there are oodles of power, not only from disc utilization figures on the actual storage backend but also from the CPU consumption of the storage controllers. When somebody says "we want to do this" it's not a problem. The job gets done and we don't have to do a thing. It's all good.

All Flash FAS has improved performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics, and VMs which are enterprise applications. It powers the VM fleet as well. It does provide some of our BW capabilities but that's more of an SAP HANA thing now. Everything runs off it, all of our critical databases also consume storage off of the All Flash FAS for VMs.

For us TCO has definitely decreased, we pay less in data center fees. We also have the ability with the fabric pool to actually save on our storage costs. 

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 user experience from my point of view, as the person who drives it most of the time, is a really good one. The toolsets are really easy to use and from the service offered we're able to offer non-disruptive upgrades. It just works and keeps going. It's hard to explain good things when we have so few bad things that actually occur within the environment. From a user's point of view, the file shares work, everyone's happy, and I'm happy because it's usually not storage that's causing the problem.

I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once we've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to.

One to three years.

Stability with AFF has been really great. We blew an SSD drive which we thought may never actually happen and it just kept on going. We've not had any issues with it even though we actually went to a fairly recent release of data on tap as well that just works.

Scalability is a really cool part of the product in terms of growing. We don't see that we'll actually need to do much of that. We'll take more advantage of fabric pool and actually push that data out to a lower tier of storage at AWS and our initial projections on that suggest that we've got a lot of very cold data we're actually storing today.

AFF tech support we've had a couple of calls open and it's always been brilliant. I really like the chat feature because one of the things that annoys me is the conference calls that usually come when you have to contact the hardware vendor. You get stuck on a webex or a conference call for hours on end where it's just easier to chat to the techo at NetApp in real time and if he isn't able to help you he'll just pass you on to the next one and you end up staying in the chat which means that I continue working while dealing with a problem.

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.

We implemented in-house. It was dead easy. All you have to do is throw it in the rack, plug in the network and fiber cables, give it a name, and away you go. There is very little that actually needs to happen to make it all work. I think we managed to get one of them up in two or three hours.

We also considered Dell EMC and Pure Storage. The biggest reason we picked NetApp was the ease of actually getting the data to the next iteration but also the other vendors don't have a product that supports everything we needed which is file services and block services. It's a one stop shop and I didn't really want to have to manage another box and a storage device at the same time.

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

It is the flexibility of configuration. It is optimized for flash, so we do not have to manage the configuration of what optimizes flash, but we do have the flexibility to configure what optimizes our environment.

It has improved our applications' overall performance, and it has simplified our management of it.

We use it for all of our VMware infrastructure as well as for our X-ray data storage, for the short-term storage. We use both block and file storage.

Now, we can manage failed disks in our SAN before we replace them or manage how quickly they are replaced. All these kind of decisions, we can make. This flexibility is critical to having a comfort level with our environment.

Being able to move SVMs from one cluster to another.

We have had two issues:

1. There was a server and one of the heads rebooted because there was a system failure. We were unaffected, because the system stayed up and running. So, that was awesome.
2. We had an issue, which was a self inflicted outage. Unfortunately, that one actually took our entire environment down. This was our own fault.

Overall, the stability has been pretty amazing.

Scalability is excellent. There has never been a question as to whether it could scale out. It has been more a question of, "Do we have the finances to be able to do it?"

They have always been good about being responsive. I love the auto support. The people that we get on the phone are usually pretty knowledgeable, and if they are not and they don't know what to do, then they hand it off to somebody who does.

We also have Pure Storage.

It was pretty straightforward.

We did have a rep on site as well that helped us with the installation. We have used it as part of a cluster to connect with other methods.

NetApp does a good job of being able to provide a lot of options for its customers and supporting those options with information. Even before AFF, we always used NetApp for mission critical stuff.

It offers everything we need.

If you are considering this solution, ensure you do the research and know what you are actually getting. Also, make sure you know what your needs are before you start doing that research.

We're a hospital and we store all of our patient records on it. Everything that we do in the hospital is done on there. It does it for VMware as well as databases and Oracle, we do everything on it. It allows us to do our job.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

The capabilities of ONTAP is what drives me towards NetApp.

Their ability to put more storage on smaller spaces through their deduplication compaction. Routines and thin storage are very valuable to us. 

An additional feature that I would like to see better support for is block level storage, where they understand what's inside the LUNs as well as the LUNs themselves.

Though with 9.2 coming out, there is very little else that I want. I think anything they add at this point is going to be just icing, because it's already meeting my needs.

It's very stable.

I like the scalability, the clusters, being able to add new nodes and such. It also makes for easy upgrades; you just add new nodes, move stuff off, and take the old nodes off.

They are very good, knowledgeable, and responsive. Though every once in awhile, you get a knucklehead.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

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

How was the initial setup?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

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

I was involved in the setup.

They preconfigured it at the factory and that is a pain in the neck. This should stop.

We evaluated EMC, Hitachi and NetApp.

When choosing a storage, it's a matter of management. Once you've bought the storage, all your time is spent in management. So, look at the software as well as the hardware.

We use it for block storage almost exclusively.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems because they have been excellent to work with and their product has been stable.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support and performance.

The valuable features of All Flash FAS, as well as the ONTAP, are the ability to have the storage efficiency of compaction, compression and in-line dedupe; being able to maximize the original investment for additional components to our Epic environment; also being able to SnapMirror and FlexClone to refresh our Epic instances in a streamlined manner that prevents us from having to do a lot of file copy.

We have consolidated on to UCS and Nexus on NetApp. The FlexPod model has made it very easy for our support staff. We don't have to support a large number of other types of vendors and such. Support from the two partners, including VMware, makes it easier for us to be able to manage it and get to the root cause of problems that we have encountered.

The way that we're using All Flash and FlexPod with All Flash is for an Epic environment. Because Epic dictates how they want things done, all the features that we're getting from ONTAP, for all the things that I’ve mentioned, really meet our needs.

One of the areas in which we are going to be looking at All Flash is for our MetroCluster environment. There is one feature that I would really want at this point: They are only talking about an eight-node MetroCluster for NAS, so I would want that also for SAN. We're very interested in moving towards All Flash for that over the next couple of years and we would definitely want to make sure that we can scale the MetroCluster beyond just four nodes; two nodes per site.

We've been up and running for over a year in production with Epic and we've had zero down time. We have been able to upgrade without impact to the application.

It's very scalable. The cluster will go up to eight nodes currently, and more. We can easily scale it, as well as being able to replicate it to our other data center.

We looked at VCE or the EMC equivalent. That was really the main consideration. HP was also considered, for 3PAR. Epic's recommendations for storage played a key role in the decision. Their comfortability with ONTAP and their flash. At the time, they were not very comfortable with the XtremeIO that was being offered up, what has happened with that product and the instability with that product. We're very glad that we did go with NetApp.

There were other factors too. Cost seemed to be lower with NetApp, but in the grand scheme of things the hardware component was a much smaller amount in the budget when you look at the entire cost of implementing Epic. Definitely cost plays into it. The elegance of the solution is another big key. The manpower required to administrate VCE and to patch it really requires someone to hand hold the entire upgrade process, whereas with NetApp it's a lot more flexible, it's intuitive and doesn't quite require that same level of administrative work.

I don’t recommend looking at any one specific vendor, but one of my biggest concerns is having a lot of different components that are brought together. I like having things simple, lowering the number of interdependencies for the storage platform; whatever makes that less likely and less prone to have failure. The other vendors out there that we have looked at have always been bringing different solutions together and having it be a construct of many parts. That played a big role; the most important thing for this hardware to do was to stay up and running, and required the least amount of manpower that we would have to hire and administrate. Ultimately, that's why we chose NetApp. It's an elegant solution.

Our primary use case for AFF is for databases.

The most valuable features of AFF are its speed and the responsive support from NetApp.

The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price.

I have been using NetApp AFF for eight years.

In terms of performance and stability, AFF is good for our current needs. However, if we require higher performance, we may need to invest in new hardware.

NetApp AFF scales well for our needs. We can continuously add more storage and capacity to expand the system, which has been a viable approach for us.

The support is great. When issues arise, the support team quickly addresses our questions and resolves problems efficiently. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

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

The initial setup of NetApp availability can be considered medium difficulty. If you have experience with NetApp systems, it is relatively easy to medium in complexity. However, if you have never installed such a system before, it can be quite challenging.

NetApp can be expensive. It is worth noting that the cost isn't just in the hardware but also in the support, which can be a significant portion of the overall expense.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF as a ten out of ten.

I think NetApps improved our organization in customer experience and system management. It gives the customer options when they move their system to the cloud. I think the cloud solution from NetApp is very good for customers when they have a plan to use cloud services.

I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product.

It would be better if they just improved the performance of the system.

I have been using NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) for more than three years.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very stable.

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) is very scalable. I think the scalability of NetApp is the best because they have a custom solution, and it can scale well.

NetApp technical support is very professional and good.

The initial setup isn't really completed. It's easy.

NetApp is a good choice because it's not only for a normal application, but it can also integrate with Nvidia for AI solutions.

I would tell potential users that NetApp is one of the best primary storage systems with many good features. I think it's a good choice for storage services.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) a nine.

The primary use case is availability, performance, bandwidth, and throughput with respect to our applications.

We are currently using an on-premise solution.

The user experience is fantastic. I'm looking forward to the AFF 800 storage box, which is all-flash with NVMe technologies. This will certainly give a boost to our applications, and make for a better user experience.

The most valuables features is the response time that we are receiving from the AFF storage box. We are looking for performance and delivery times of the response from the host, which we are happy with.

We are looking forward to the all-flash NVMe which is coming out.

Going forward, I would like improvement in the response latencies, capacity size, cache, and controller size. It also needs more fine tuning in regards to all-flash and AML workloads.

Even though the complete workload will fill out the AFF storage box, it will give us sustained stability.

One of the key features of the AFF storage box is its horizontal scalability.

Our new business initiatives, which are coming, demand more IOPS and performance. Our applications are scaling, which demand more performance in a very short span of time. This solution will improve technology driven things.

The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them.

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.

The initial setup was easy for us. The consultant was always there to support us. They have always been helpful in understanding the technical points, how it will help us going forward in terms of implementation, future scalability, and possible upgrade of storage components.

We used a NetApp consultant for the deployment, who we have also used for the sizing. Our experience with them was very good.

It does have good ROI.

We are able to set up and provision enterprise applications using AFF quickly. We have seen tremendous performance, stability and growth in it. 

NetApp met our requirements.

It is the first company who introduced NVMe protocols, which is end-to-end. It also has very good response times.

The NVMe technology that we're evaluating will certainly help us with artificial intelligence going forward.