NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We use it for medical systems.

NetApp has always been very reliable. We have never had any data losses. They are a work horse.

I found the reliability of it to be the most valuable feature because it supports all the patient critical systems in our hospital. We have had the NetApp system for 18 years with no downtime.

I would like to see if they could move the virtual storage machines. They have integrated a DR, so you can back to your DR, but there's no automated way to failover and failback. It's all manual. I'd like to see it all automated.

We have never had a failure.

Over the past 18 years, it has been extremely easy to upgrade to newer products and technology. We can upgrade as we move along. So, we have been able to keep up with the newest technology with zero downtime.

The scalability is endless. There have been no limits that we have come across yet.

Technical support has been excellent. We have local technical support. If we give them a call and need somebody onsite, they could be there within ten to 15 minutes.

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

I never found it to be complicated, but I have a lot of experience with NetApp setups.

After upgrades, it's very intuitive and easy to pick up. 

A NetApp support person did all our installations, upgrades, etc. Our experience with them was excellent.

We have been able to utilize and leverage equipment which was purchased a decade ago up until this past year. So, we were running disk shells for 13 years and all we were doing was upgrading the filings and controllers, and using the same disk shells. Therefore, we were able to do something where we didn't have to invest that much. Recently, we had to upgrade all our disk shells, but it was a lot less because the technology had changed a lot since those times. It is faster now, and we have SSDs. We have larger drives that are 4TBs and 6TBs. Everything can condense so we are saving disk shell space and rack space. We are paying less now than we did at that time. So, we've gotten our money's worth out of it.

Look at the different options that NetApp offers. Look for a model and option which fits your needs correctly. Don't buy a low-end product for a high-end job.

NetApps offers a lot of different options. Just take your time and work with the consulting teams. Lay out what your needs are to ensure you are purchasing what will help you be successful.

We have put our trust in NetApp, and they have given us the customer support and a stable, reliable product.

Sometimes, I have to get rid of the equipment and upgrade because it is no longer supported. It's not like we are getting rid of the equipment or upgrading because there's something wrong with it. It will last forever. I have had disk shells that we've had to just let go, which are still working, because they aren't supported.

Flexibility in some of our big things. We're constantly doing new projects or new directions in IT, because it obviously changes all the time. NetApp has been great working with us, being flexible on having to do migrations, if we want new solutions without taking any of our applications in our current systems down. That has been a good benefit. And they've grown over the years to get better at that.

For us, it's probably along the lines of keeping everything up and running, critical, 24/7. DR's been a big push for us over the past couple of years with the environment. Different things happen and you need to keep all of your critical systems up and running. All the new technologies that NetApp has come up with, helping us do that, has probably been of the biggest benefit for us. The flexibility and being able to change on the move.

Some of the applications have changed over the years. Their complexity was there before, but moving forward we've seen a few features being taken away in some of those applications, that we had grown to love. But that happens in any type of software. You get stagnant, you like a feature, change comes along. It can be a little bit difficult to do.

Very good. I don't know if I could say anything bad about it for stability. I've never had any issues.

Very good.

Personally, I have not used tech support, but guys on my team have used them. They've always been great. We have a special account manager who has helped us elevate critical cases if need be, and our sales team and all the people we work with there have always been available for us all the time.

We use it for our high demand applications. Mainly email, our critical systems, that is what we're using our all-flash array for, tiered storage. We have some non-flash, where we store archival data and things of that nature, but the flash is performant for our tier-one applications. We use it for book storage and file storage.

We've been an NetApp customer for nine years now, so as they've grown, we've grown with them and implemented any of their new solutions, software or hardware based. We've been a great customer.

If you want an all-around company that can meet your needs, whether it be scalability, performance, the software application availability to interact with your applications, NetApp is a great place. We've looked at other storage vendors over time. They didn't seem to have all of the pieces that NetApp can bring. Some storage vendors might have something you like a little bit better, but NetApp can bring it all together much better than others, and that's why we have stuck with them.

With the AFF, we can run VMs with databases now. That was one of the big features with the AFF, we needed the speed for databases. By moving them over, we can put VMDKs housing databases on there and use them on the VMware infrastructure now.

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

The AFF we have, we use the in-line compression. The in-line dedupe, and the compaction saves us a lot of space because most of our AFFs house VMware VMDK files. We got a lot of compression, a lot of efficiency out of the dedupe because a lot of the VMware are similar with the OS, VMDKs, etc. It makes it really compact. You can put a lot of stuff in a little space.

That's a hard question to answer off the top of my head. I'd have to go through and evaluate everything. Right now, it fits our needs. I'd have to evaluate what else I'd like to see, I guess.

While not for AFF specifically, for clusters in general, it would be nice to be able to have volumes everywhere. For example, now you have volumes tied to a node tied to an HA pair. It would be much better if you had it more like the way they do Metro Clusters, where they have a switch, and the storage is all attached to a switch. Then, they have a volume owned by something and have it should be able to move around to anywhere based on ownership of a volume, as opposed to between HA pairs. That would be a good improvement in their infrastructure.

The NetApp AFF itself, the FAS's, they're stable. They're in a cluster mode, they're HA, so we fail them over, we have upgraded fail back. We've never had an outage due to NetApp in the 12 years that I've been there.

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

Scalability, it's like anything else. The ability now to take out and add shelves, pull out shelves from the middle of an array if you want, to upgrade them, to pull heads out, and put new heads in as a non-forklift upgrade. All that functionality and scalability is one of the things that makes NetApp really good for our environment.

We use tech support for everything. Since it's a cluster, something that's not specific AFF, it's just nodes in the cluster. But we use support all the time.

Tech support is like everything else. It's hit or miss. It depends on who you get and what the subject matter is. We had a Support Account Manager (SAM) at one point too and, when we had the SAM, it was a lot easier to work with their support through the SAM. We've dropped the SAM stuff.

Sometimes it's difficult to escalate correctly and get the right people involved. It's not been as bad as it was before we had the Support Account Manager (SAM) though. Our SE helps a lot as well. It's pretty good support. We just had a support call yesterday with him and the guy we got was knowledgeable about what our problem was, so it worked out pretty well.

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.

I was involved and it was seamless. We had a two-node star cluster with AFAs on them. NetApp did the install. A few years ago, we used to do our installs ourselves, as a company. Then we started using NetApp installation services to do them. They did the install. They inserted it seamlessly into our cluster. It came up, we had the arrays, and we could create aggregates on it, pretty much right after they got them installed.

We're using NetApp now as our hybrid storage. We have VMs on there. They wanted to put databases on the VMs. We said, "Well, we don't have the speed to put your databases on there. If you want to stay on the NFS structure with NetApp, the next logical solution is just to put you on All Flash, so we just throw some of those in the cluster and do a motion of your volumes over."

For All Flash, we have a SAN infrastructure and a NAS infrastructure. We use the EMC for the SAN infrastructure, for the block. NetApp is the only NAS we have. There's not much else we can look at besides Isilon. Isilon just isn't fast enough. It's slower than what we had them on at the beginning. NetApp was really the only logical choice for that particular environment if we wanted to use NAS.

The primary use case for our All Flash FAS (AFF) system is pretty much VMware and its servers. It's just for file storage right now, for NFS, for the VMware stuff. We're investigating using it for other things. It's also used as a Zerto, a web application depository for some of the Zerto replication for the VMware stuff.

We use it for our mission critical stuff right now, as our VM infrastructure.

The most important criteria, when selecting a vendor to work with is functionality. I look at the functionality of the systems, what they provide us, what the features are, and where they're going, and what we need. Then, after that, I'll look at support. Of course, my company wants to look at market share and similar thing to it, but I look at the those things last. I look at the functionality first.

I give it a nine out of 10 because nothing's perfect. It works really well for what we want to do with it. It may not work well for other people. But in my experience, nine is where I would put it. It's functional, it's expandable, no forklift upgrades, and no disruptive upgrades, even for the OS or for the hardware itself. The flexibility of moving things around. All of its features, including its SnapMirror functionalities, make it really good for our environment.

All the features and their flexibility is where I would give it the bigger rating. What would make it a 10 out 10 is better support.

Regarding advice, it's the same advice you give to everybody. Evaluate what your criteria are, then look at NetApp. If you're looking for NAS, even for block, NetApp to me is mid-to-high level block. If you're looking for certain things in block, something else might be better, as opposed to FAS. You can look at NetApp for their other products. Look at NetApp for their file system for; FAS, look at their block stuff. Look at their stuff because all their stuff is available for use, it's just that the FAS itself is not suitable for everything, but they have other stuff that is.

The most valuable features are its fast performance and that it runs on a native ONTAP operating system, which is the coolest thing.

If you are looking for high-performance, reliable, multi-tenancy supporting equipment, then this is a very valid, legitimate solution with a proven background and history.

If you have a system administrator doing workflow that you have defined, then it is not going to save you time or money. If you have some kind of automated system, even though you haven't paid for those services, then it is going to make a lot of difference. It will save time because this is a high-end, high performance solution.

See my comments regarding technical support.

The tool is stable. Over the past several years, ONTAP has proven to be very stable OS solution. People may have experienced latency issues, but my workflow and workload is significantly small, so latency happens on the fly and it is easy to fix quickly.

Based on what I've heard, this tool is highly scalable. Even though I am using it in our relatively small environment, the tool is highly scalable. Any medium to large size company can afford it and it will be a good fit.

We do have premium support or regular support, whatever they call it. Every time we have an issue, we call technical support, and they get online right away. I have found them very helpful. The NetApp technical teams are pretty excellent in offering services.

SolidFire is in the same boat as NetApp in terms of supporting this product. It is a fairly new technology for them as well. Comparatively, the level of support for this solution takes a little longer, but it’s all relative. It takes little longer to get support for this tool than it takes for any other FAS system.

I was partially involved in the setup. It followed the same setup process for any other FAS system. It is pretty slick. The setup is pretty decent.

I know it uses the same OS, so I don't see why it would be different than any other FAS system. It has a different flavor, but it is not completely different. It is not using an “out-of-the-blue” OS.

This is proven technology. You cannot question its reliability and its high scalability. It is a very solid solution. If you are looking for high performance storage gear, it is definitely a very strong solution.

We have been a long-time consumer of NetApp solutions. The reliability with NetApp is very valuable to us. We don’t want to put that at stake by trying another solution.

I currently use several other NetApp systems, such as cDOT. We are pretty much a NetApp house.

We are also using a number of systems in parallel with this tool. We have a EMC VNX unified converged solution, IBM DS, and IBM Storwize V7000.

If I were a decision maker, I wouldn't go with only one solution. I prefer to diversify. That gives me more flexibility to keep vendors competitive and then they can offer me more. I don’t want to get locked into only one solution provider. I prefer to work with multiple vendors so I have more flexibility with price.

For me, the most valuable feature is the simplicity of being able to have a pool of storage and not worry about: How many IOPS do I need? How many disks? Or carving up aggregates. Everything can just share. I can just go with the simple features of the GUI to allocate storage quickly and not worry about anything.

The management tools with NetApp really need improvement, in general; just giving good, simple tools for evaluating performance and performance headrooms, and seeing where you're about to run into things. ONTAP 9 seems to be taking steps in that direction, from what I've seen of it. This is my first ONTAP 9 system. I think they're making progress there. Until I have some more problems with the system and see how the tools serve me, I can't really give better insight on that.

I have been using it for about a month.

So far, it has been very stable; no downtime. We had some random error messages but no downtime issues; just getting used to the new ONTAP 9.

It looks like it will meet the company’s scaling needs moving forward. We don't have a high-performance need out there, so it's more about a simple solution than scalability, in this particular case. So far, it looks like it'll meet our needs.

We found NetApp support to be a mixed bag. Sometimes, it's real good; sometimes, it's real bad. It can take a while to get things escalated to the people you need it escalated to. I'm not terribly different from most of the industry, I'm sure.

We get our support through Datalink. We have to go through Datalink first and then get escalated to NetApp support. It adds another layer there, but costs a lot less.
For this project, the support has been pretty good. So far, I’m happy with how it's going.

It's a simple setup. What we spent our implementation time on was getting the fiber channel LUNs presented to the host; that went really well. The problem is, we need to configure it in Wisconsin and then we shipped it across an ocean and had some non-IT people install it into a rack and turn it on. That was the complexity. We all added it ourselves. With that said, because it was a simple, one-shelf system, they were able to get through it and get it done. There was one cable that wasn't connected right. Support helped me track that down, and then I had them go plug it in right. They turned the connector upside down and then it worked; what a shock...

For this install overall, for NetApp's part, it was simple; we have the complexity.

We looked at Hewlett Packard, EMC, a Nutanix solution, and probably a couple more I can't remember. Nutanix had been way out there; just a totally different way of doing it.

When selecting a vendor to work with, for whether or not we talk to them, I think we look at those things like reliability and reputation.

As far as who we choose, once we've got that process started, it tends to be the vendors that are willing to work with us in the sales process and give us lots of answers; give us lots of demos. We like to get a feel that they actually understand what we need; that the tech teams and the local teams that we're working with are capable of understanding what is going on technically; and they're not just fly by night: "They've been working here for three months and now they're going to move on." We try to figure out whether they have capable folks in the field. Does the sales team care enough about us to make a deal versus just saying, "Here's a price. You can take it or leave it."?

Unfortunately, we don't have budget, so a lot of our decisions do come down to dollars. We spend a lot of time looking for teams that can do both. Who's going to come in cheap, yet still give us all that personal attention and support, and feel like they're going to be partners with us in the process, rather than just a reseller that's going to kick us over to support? We want people who are invested in making us successful, and not everyone's willing to do that.

We needed something that could do multiple protocols. We had a need out there for CIFS and NFS and fiber channel storage. NetApp was one of the few vendors who has a solution that's capable of handling all that and is easy to use.

Performance is the number-one most valuable feature, for sure. Flexibility and the multi-tenancy are also valuable.

The compression we needed, the rates we get, are inline with the performance, which is the reason we bought it; we have a lot of applications that use it. The compression and the dedupe stays in storage but on our other products, we'd lose performance because of that. On the All Flash FAS, we don't have any performance issues at all, so it's a big differentiator for us.

It provides financial benefits, because we don't have to spend as much on storage, because of the dedup and the compression and the performance it gives us. We don't have to buy anything else because of it.

There’s one thing that would make it easier to work with. There are differences between using the OnCommand: the GUI vs command line. There are still differences. There are things you can do from the command line that you can't do from the GUI. If they could make the GUI do everything that the command line does, that would be the best. That would earn it a perfect rating, for sure.

There are certain configurations/settings on cDOT that you can only make by using the CLI. My point for room for improvement was that, if they could make all the configurations/settings available in the GUI, then you would be able to pick one or the other for managing the cluster. Today, you either have to only use CLI or a mix of GUI/CLI.

We've had no stability issues. We've never had a problem. We've only been using it for about six months, but we haven't had a single issue of any kind. We're happy with it.

We've added on shelves to it. That's one of the reasons we bought it too. We bought it for a certain set of applications and we've already expanded that now; used it for other things too. That's why I bought more storage on it. The flexibility we have, all the connections it has, it's helped us without having to buy either more storage systems or other products. We've just been able to grow what we have.

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.

It's definitely saved us in storage costs. It's saved us in reliability, in downtime. We’ve had downtime with our HNAS, a couple times. That was the factor that got rid of it in the end. We invested in that product, and it was a pretty important feature of some of the applications that used it. We kept going with it and staying with it because we invested in it. But we had too many outages, too many problems with it.

In the end, we decided that it was not worth it, financially, to keep it. We got rid of it, and invested in NetApp, and all those reliability and performance issues went away. It's been 100% since day one.

We've had other vendors, and we've used their solutions. The performance hasn't been what it is on NetApp or the compression dedup rate hasn't been what it is on NetApp; with those other vendors, we get one of the two. We get both of those with NetApp; better performance, better compression, all of those things without sacrificing performance.

Look at NetApp first. The flexibility they offer, the performance, and all the features they have. I can't think of anything that we can't do with that product. That's where we go to first now. We have a lot of other products. We have a lot of other storage vendors: Hitachi, IBM, EMC. We've had other NetApp FAS products, not just the All Flash one. We still have other NetApp FAS products.

Since we've had the All Flash FAS, because of its reliability and everything that goes with it, it’s the first thing that the application people ask for. When we talk to them about needing more storage, they always ask for NetApp first. It's kind of the standard now, which is fine by me because I like it.

It's reliable; it's fast; it does everything that we need it to do; it's relatively easy to work with.

The performance gains over traditional FAS systems and spinning media make it invaluable for an organization. We specifically have deployed it to troubleshoot storage performance. We don't really have a use case for it other than to troubleshoot at this point. It's allowed us to validate that there are no problems with the storage and to leverage the All Flash system to show that storage wasn't the issue.

It's reducing troubleshooting time to identify which major functional area the problem has been in. We're able to identify quickly now that, whether storage is or is not a contributor to any troubleshooting that we have going on.

At this point, I don't really have any comments on room for improvement because we don't have a lot of use case in our environment right now. We don't actually have a use case other than troubleshooting. Right now, we don't have any high-performance data that needs all flash at this time.

Obviously, keeping the scale and leveraging higher-capacity, solid-state drives is great to reduce power and cooling and space in the data center. That's not really a NetApp thing, that's more of a Samsung thing, who are our flash vendor. It’s absolutely something we’re looking forward to improving on. They're essentially getting rid of SAS in our environment as they grow. We purchased it with the 3.8 TB drives and they've done well to reduce a lot of space. All Flash FAS has been touted as something to get rid of SAS, and we like the fact that it's able to mask some of the issues that we have inside of applications just due to the performance gains that we get. I’m really just hoping that they keep on that, providing higher stability for applications that have had problems in the past.

Pricing can always be improved. We noticed that the pricing on it was very similar to the caching pricing, which is held at a premium even though this is storage that's not for caching only. It's not like a flash pool where you've added it to an aggregate to increase performance. This is your base disk. This is actually where you're storing data not just for caching. That's one thing that we saw in the pricing, but as solid state prices come down, the pricing is going to get better.

There isn’t anything that I wake up in the morning and think, "If only had just did this," or, "If only this was a little bit easier to use, that would make my day." We keep a very simple environment by design, and so we really try to eliminate any complexities that are out there. We're all file-system storage so we don't have any fiber in our environment. It just keeps everything simple. As far as the interfaces, our group has been using the NetApp interfaces for years and we’ve grown used to them.

So far we haven't had any major stability problems with the platform. There was no real trouble with installing it or migrating to it. We don't have any problems at this time, but we don't have a lot of performance data on it right now, either.

Scalability seems great. We purchased an AFF8080 with only one disk shelf, so we're able to scale much larger than we are right now.

As far as NetApp technical support, we've had one case open with them for the All Flash FAS. We haven't used any professional services, but we've used the support group for one small issue with deployments. They were great; they had a fix with us faster than anyone had expected.

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.

Initial setup was done through me in combination with professional services. We had them do the racking and cabling through a VAR that we use, but then we specifically had joined it to the cluster and configured it.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to leverage some of the documentation on the NetApp site and get through it in under a week so.

We weren't really considering any other vendors. We have a very good relationship with NetApp and we've been really happy with them.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is the support infrastructure; we have to have good support. For business-critical applications, if there's downtime – it happens – but we need a support organization and infrastructure that can help us. We'd leverage a support account manager to get the best out of support and we've had very good success with NetApp so far.

I can't really give any advice because I don't really have anything to compare it to. We've deployed and it's worked well for us, so I would definitely recommend it but I can't recommend it against anything else.

We haven't seen any issues, but it's software and hardware so there will be one at some point.

Going from mechanical disks to flash was a huge benefit, speed-wise. A lot of big BI reports that we were running that would take hours, we can do in 10 minutes now. That was really the biggest impact. The user saw it immediately, the benefit of it.

We're an electronics manufacturer. Shop floor people rely on these reports to make decisions throughout the day and we can, instead of having a once-a-day refresh, they can almost get it on demand.

I would just like to keep seeing improvements in performance and efficiency, which it seems to have been doing between 8.3 and 9; it's getting better with every release.

The user interface is a lot better. I think in 9, we do a lot of command line stuff, so I'm not into the GUI too much.

We’ve been using it for six months. It's fairly new.

We've had no issues stability-wise; we've been a NetApp customer for 20 years and just rarely have any issues.

Technical support is getting better. Historically, it's been painful. We had some challenges with support but over the last couple of years, I think it has gotten a lot better. We have a really good SE now that we leverage and our partner's really good as well.

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

Initial setup was easy. We had one small system. We have a lot of FAS systems; we have a single AFF right now. It's an 8080, with just one shelf. It was a very simple setup. We're familiar with cluster mode already.

Rack it and call it good.

We looked at several other options:Pure Storage, Nutanix, and Tintri.

We chose NetApp because all of our other storage systems are NetApp. We just liked being able to leverage the knowledge that we already had in house. We didn't see a lot of value in having another siloed storage system out there that we had to support. Price-wise, NetApp was very competitive, more competitive than we had expected.

Do it. You won't regret it.

I like the product, and am quite happy with it.

When I choose a vendor, some of the criteria I look for are support, the ability to execute and a mature product line.