NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Our customers use the solution for its MetroCluster feature.

It would be helpful if they set up local warehouses for the solution.

We have been using the solution for five years.

I rate the solution's stability as a nine.

We have an enterprise company as our customer for the solution. I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.

I work as a support engineer and authorized distributor for the solution. Its technical support could be better as receiving the solution's spare parts takes a long time. When hardware failure occurs, we need to wait for its components to reach us from the metro city warehouse. It is a time-consuming process.

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.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward.

Our customers deploy the solution with the help of an integrator. I provide consultancy and integration services as well.

The solution is moderately priced. I rate its pricing as a seven.

The solution is quite good. I recommend it to others and rate it as a nine.

We are using it for storage.

Before, retrieving data or searching for something on the application would take some time. But since we migrated to NetApp, retrieving of the data happens quickly. It's fast.

In addition, we can easily manage the volumes on the NetApp application. We are getting very good, high performance and it has simplified our data management jobs, such as creating volumes. If our hard drive fails, we can reinitialize the process, and do many other things. It's very helpful.

NetApp has helped to reduce support issues due to performance or troubleshooting as we do not have such issues. We have not faced any performance issues since installing this device.

In addition, the ONTAP data management software has simplified our operations. We use it for high-availability of our file system. If any hard drive goes down, it will automatically be recovered.

We use NetApp AFF to support cloud integration and SAP Oracle. It has made the Oracle WebLogic site very fast and we can deploy the machines very easily. We can assign storage to the server visually, and use it to manage the storage.

The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive.

Also, NetApp AFF helps simplify data management with unified data services across SAN and NAS environments.

I have been using the NetApp AFF A400 system for the last three months.

We have had no issues with its stability. It has been up 100 percent of the time since we installed it.

We can increase the storage if needed.

Currently, 60 percent of our storage is in NetApp. Another 20 percent is in HPE, and we use Synology storage for the NAS.

Their support is very good. Whenever I have contacted them, whoever has dealt with me has been good.

But the cost of support is quite high.

Positive

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

The deployment was not complex, but it was done by our vendor team. Still, it was easy. It was not a big deal.

Our experience with our vendor team was good. They are quite a good technical team with good knowledge.

We only installed it three months ago so it's too soon to talk about ROI.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost. The cost is very high compared to other devices. The HPE storage we used before was less expensive. NetApp is also more expensive than Dell EMC.

We evaluated Dell EMC and HPE storage.

The NetApp interface was very easy, as was managing things. Our experience with HPE, which we used before, was that it was quite a complex system to manage when it comes to the storage and volumes.

The primary use case of this solution is for our production storage array.

We have not used this solution for artificial intelligence or machine learning applications as of yet. This product has reduced our total latency from a spinning disc going into flash discs. We rarely see any latency and if we do it is not the discs, it's the network. The overall latency right now is about two milliseconds or less.

AFF hasn't enabled us to relocate resources, or employees that we were previously using for storage operations.

It has improved application response time. With latency, we had applications that had thirty to forty milliseconds latency, now they have dropped to approximately one to three, a maximum of five milliseconds. It's a huge improvement.

We use both technologies and we have simplified it. We are trying to shift away from the SAN because it is not as easy to failover to an opposite data center.

We are trying to switch over to have everything one hundred percent NFS. Once the switch to NFS is complete our cutover time will be one hour versus six.

The most valuable features are the FlexClone and SnapMirror. The ease of use, the SnapMirror capabilities, the cloning, and the efficiencies are all good features.

The simplicity of this solution around data protection and data management is extremely easy.

With Data protection there is nothing easier than setting up SnapMirror and getting it across and protecting our data. Currently, we have a five minute RPO, so every five minutes we're snapping across the other side without any issues.

This solution simplifies IT operations by unifying data services across SAN and NAS environments.

There are little things that need improvement. For example, if you are setting up a SnapMirror through the GUI, you are forced to change the destination name of the volume, and we like to keep the volume names the same.

When you have SVM VR and you have multiple aggregates that you're writing the data to on the source array, and it does its SVM DR, it will put it on whatever aggregate it wants, instead of keeping it synced to stay on both sides.

This solution doesn't help leverage the data in ways that I didn't think were possible before.

We are not using it any differently than we were using it from many years ago. We were getting the benefits. What we are seeing right now is the speed, lower latency, and performance, all of the great things that we haven't had in years.

This solution hasn't freed us from worrying about usage, we are already reaching the eighty percent mark, so we are worried about usage, which is why we are looking toward the cloud to move to fabric pools with cloud volumes to tier off our snapshots into the cloud.

I wish that being forced to change the volume name would change or not exist, then I wouldn't have to go to the command line to do it at all.

This solution is stable, it's the best. I can't complain.

We move large amounts of data from one data center to another every day without any interruptions. In terms of IT operations, it has cut our ticket count down significantly, approximately a seventy percent reduction in tickets submitted to us.

This solution is scalable, it's phenomenal.

This solution's thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. The thin provisioning has helped us with deduplication, maintaining compaction, and efficiency levels. Without the provisioning, we wouldn't be able to take advantage of all of the great features.

We are running approximately a petabyte of storage physically, and logically approximately ten petabytes.

The technical support is one of the best.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We filled out a spreadsheet ahead of time that contained everything necessary to get us going. When it came time for the deployment we went with the information on the spreadsheet and deployed it successfully.

We used an integrator to help us with this solution, we used Sigma Solutions, and our experience was excellent. We worked hand in hand with them.

It's expensive. It's in the hundreds of thousands.

It's beneficial, but at times, I feel compared to other vendors, we are paying a premium for the licensing that other vendors include.

You're locked in with NetApp, and you already have everything setup.

We have not evaluated other solutions, it's not worth it.

We are not at the point where we are allowed to automatically tier data to the cloud, but we are looking forward to it.

I can't see that this solution needs any other features other than what it already has. Everything that I need is already there, except for the cloud and it's there but we haven't taken advantage of it yet.

I would advise that you compare everything and put money aside, really take a look at the features and how they will or can benefit you.

It's a total win for your firm.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is enterprise storage for our email database system.

We have just been using on-premise. We are looking to move the workloads to the cloud, but right now it's just on-premise.

From an operations standpoint, we pretty much set it and forget it. We don't have to manage anything because of the AFF speed and low latencies. Because a big requirement in the healthcare industry are the low latency type response times, It has been perfect.

With the thin provisioning, we can overprovision our boxes, but there are still applications which are storage capacity hogs. So, we still have to report.

It simplifies our IT operations and makes them more efficient.

The most valuable feature is it's fast. We do not use the solution for artificial intelligence or machine learning applications, but our overall latency is low. With our SQL Servers and Oracle servers, compared to the older meta filers, like 7-mode, the 8000 custom mode, or performance on Pure flash systems, you can't compare. We are seeing submillisecond, which is pretty nice.

The solution has enabled us to move large amounts of data from one data center to another (on-premise) without interruption to the business using SnapMirror.

The solution has improved application response time. Compared to the 3250s and 8000s, it has been night and day.

We would like to have NVMe on FabricPool working because it broke our backups. We enabled FabricPool to do the tiering from our AFFs to our Webscale but it sort of broke our Cobalt backups. I think they're going to fix it in v9.7. 

The SnapDrive is just another piece of software which is used to manage the storage on the filers. They could use some updates.

We are still a lot of things that we have to think about, like storage and attributes, to be able to go ahead with it.

We haven't gone to their standard Snaps product yet, but that's supposed to centralize everything. Right now, we have to manage individual hosts that connect to the stores. That's sort of a pain.

We've been using NetApp for the last 15 years.

So far, the stability is good. It's great.

For the AFFs, I haven't had any problems with the scalability. We went from two to six nodes without a problem.

It helped us easily move about 10 petabytes of data from San Diego to Phoenix.

The technical support has been awesome. Whenever we have a problem, we just give NetApp's support a call, and they fix our issue. 

With the newer versions, we have needed less support. The solution has just been working.

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.

The initial setup was straightforward. We've been deploying NetApps for the last 15 years. We are pretty familiar with the boxes.

I've been using the technology for years. For every model and version, the deployment is basically the same.

My team did the deployment.

We use a private cloud, which is Wesco, and it definitely saves us a lot of space.

The pricing is good.

We did go through the whole vetting out process of scoring different vendors and NetApp won, when we went through a Greenfield environment.

Check out the AFF. It is super fast and reliable. We've been using it for a long time. It's the perfect system for us.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10 because there's always room for improvement. To make it a 10, it would have to have super submillisecond performance at a cheaper price. It is about latency in our environment. We want submillisecond for everything across the board. If something can guarantee that performance all the time without increasing costs, that would be cool.

Our primary use case for AFF is for all of the filers. We're also doing a lot of workloads for virtualization. All of our virtualization workloads are currently running on All Flash FAS.

We use almost all of our virtualization workloads on All Flash. Before we migrated to All Flash we used to use a different vendor for NAS solution. Some were NAS and some were Block storage. Now, logging ETLs are maybe ten times faster currently than what they used to be. We are getting amazing speeds off of FAS that we never had before.

We also use a lot of the AFF for end user storage. All the shared file systems, all the file systems that a particular user has, as a G drive, E drive, F drive or shared drives between various customers and various departments are all running off of the All Flash File system. So now, the rendering of FAS is so much faster than what it used to be. On top of that, we used to do Block. We would take Block, we would do NFS or do Samba to share those file systems for the users. Now, because they are coming straight off of NFS 3 and 4, the speed is marvelous. They are almost five to seven times faster rending all their files, saving all their files, retrieving all their files. It's amazing.

I don't know how much IT support has any bearing on All Flash File system. Now the only thing that we have provided that is better now is the speed and stability. Now if you can add that to capabilities, then, of course, IT has provided additional capabilities of having faster rendering and just getting their work done a little quicker.

The biggest workload that we have is maybe 95 to 97% of all virtual workloads are now running on All Flash. It has dramatically changed the way all of our VMs work. Now, not only they are faster but a couple of things that are in addition is that we do snaps off of our flash storage. Not only are the workloads faster but if the virtual machine goes down, the restore is 20 times faster now than it ever used to be. We don't have to go to a spin disc, we can just flash off of our flash back onto a no spin disc and the restore takes almost seconds to come back.

Total costs of ownership have two different values to them. One value is just strictly the capital cost of it. Number two is the operational cost. You've got to look at the CapEx and how much it cost. That is currently a little higher than it would be in two or three years. Now, Apex is where things are getting really nice. The maintenance is less. The discs failure are really low. Data issues or corruption is really low. The CapEx is currently high and Apex is getting to almost insignificant numbers.

The most valuable features for AFF are the speed, durability, back up, the time, the workloads that we are using currently are much faster than what they used to be. We're getting a lot of different things out of All Flash.

We have not connected our AFF to public cloud yet. We are not sure if we are going to do it because of PHI. For any healthcare, it's extremely important to safeguard the security of your patients. We are looking very deeply into how we are going to either go to public or keep some for private. Also, because data analytics is coming our way we want to make sure that the data that we are going to do analytics on is not on public cloud. Because of ingress and egress, we don't want to pay a lot of money to pull it back. We are not there yet but maybe in the next year and a half we will think about it publicly.

Two things have happened with stability. Number one, the platform that renders the file system is so much better. It's ONTAP and NFS, they're much more superior. The stability of the file system is much better. Behind the scenes, the cache is better, the CPUs are better and of course, there are no spin discs, so it's all flash. That is way more stable than what it used to be. Coupled together, the stability is maybe six to seven hundred times better now than it used to be ten years ago. That's just the way it works now.

Scalability is almost a catch 22. It's excellent because you can quickly scale, it's ONTAP, you can keep adding clusters without a problem, both the nodes, the controllers and of course the disc or the flash itself. The bad part about having scalability is the expense. It is currently extremely expensive, to be able to scale so fast on flash. What a lot of people are doing is that they make part of it all flash but as the data gets bigger, the archival, the older, the colder, migrate onto a slower, less expensive disc. That's what we are doing as well.

So far NetApp is amazing. It depends on what type of team you have. What type of sales team that you are working with. Our sales team is phenomenal. Our support goes through them and they know all the right people to call and we get great support. Now, that is not true all across. There's great support, and there's some mediocre support. For us it's phenomenal.

The initial setup for AFF was very quick and almost painless. We had professional services come in, they put it together and before we knew, we were carving all our discs, all our LUNs, and migrating data. Of course, the data migration was also really fast for us. We used to have older infrastructure. A little less than a year ago, we got brand new infrastructure that's all flash and we migrated it less than a year ago. It was no pain whatsoever.

I don't think anybody is doing a NAS solution or a filer solution better than NetApp. If you only talk about NetApp's filer, All Flash, I would give you it a nine and ten out of ten. It's one of the best of the breed currently in the market.

The primary use case that we have for NetApp's All Flash FAS is for on-premise storage that we've used for presenting LANs, NFS, and SIF shares for servers for analytics and ESX data storage.

NetApp AFF has improved our organization through the use of clusters. Previously we had migrated from Dell EMC and we had a lot of difficulties moving data around. Now, if we need to move it to any slower storage, we can move it with just a vault move within the cluster. Even moving data between clusters is extremely simple using SnapMirror. The mobility options for data in All Flash FAS have been awesome. 

AFF has given us the ability to explore different technology initiatives because of the flexibility that it has, being able to fit it in like a puzzle piece to different products. For example, any other solutions that we've looked at, a lot of times those vendors have integration directly into NetApp, which we haven't found with other storage providers and so it's extremely helpful to have that tie-in.

This solution has also helped us to improve performance. We have hybrid arrays as well so that we can have things that are on slower storage. For the times that we need extremely fast storage, we can put it on AFF and we can use V-vaults if we need to to have different tiers and automatically put things where they need to be. It's really helped us to nail down performance problems when we need it to put them in places to fix them by just having the extreme performance.

Total cost to ownership has definitely dropped because with deduplication compression and compaction always on, we're able to fit a whole lot more in a smaller amount of space and still provide more performance than we had before. Our total cost per gigabyte ends up being less by going to All Flash.

Some of the most valuable features of All Flash are the speed, integration with vCenter, being able to clone VMs instantly, and the ability to move data around quickly.

The user experience with AFF is much like others of NetApp's products: fantastic. It's extremely familiar. It's very intuitive. We can find all of the features that we're looking for through the GUI. The CLI is tap complete so that if we aren't exactly sure what the syntax is for a command, we can just tap-complete it which makes it a lot easier than having to look up every single thing that we're trying to do and the way to do it.

Our use case for AFF with the public cloud is that it allows us burst ability so that when we need additional capacity and speed instantly, especially if we need more and we haven't bought new nodes yet, it allows us to burst into the cloud quickly. 

The setup and provisioning of enterprise apps depend a lot on the automation, which has had really fantastic integration, just for being able to use things like WFA for provisioning. It has sped things up with the extra software that NetApp provides to be able to speed things along.

NetApp's always got their eye on new features and new use cases for things before we even get to them. It's been pretty amazing that they'll come out with new features, and we haven't even been thinking that this is a way that we might be able to use this in the future. I've been really excited about some of their other products, like SnapCenter, which is fantastic. We are also interested in the single pane of glass to be able to do snapshots and backups for anything in our environment, as long as it involves NetApp.

As for AFF itself, I don't have any suggestions of what I would be excited to see. I think that adding the support for the rest of APIs to AFF would be super handy. I think it's something that we've been waiting for for a while which would be fantastic.

Stability's fantastic. In the past, I've seen problems with ONTAP where we'd hit bugs and things. Since NetApp has changed their development schedule to every six months with a lot more scrutiny on their code, and a lot more checking of their code before they include it, we've hit far fewer bugs. We've also had extremely stable systems with solid performance.

The scalability's fantastic. Many times we have had to add capacity which included the compute power and the storage. We've just added HA pairs to the cluster and it's extremely easy to migrate over to those. You can just do vault moves to get over to the new nodes and then evict the old nodes from the cluster. The fact that you can scale up to 24 nodes gives you a great deal of scalability possibility.

Their tech support is fantastic. NetApp is amazing with getting you through difficult problems. When you call into global support there's somebody that answers the phone quickly and they're extremely helpful. We have other NetApp resources like our sales SEs and people that help us out. There's always somebody there to point you in the right direction and help you to get the solutions to the problems you need.

There has been an amazing improvement on ROI due to racks base and power usage going to AFFs, like A700S's being so small and so efficient, take up way less space per terabyte which is a great improvement there. 

I give AFF a ten out of ten because there are amazing features on it. It's extremely fast, it's extremely usable, and the support's fantastic. 

I would advise someone considering AFF as a possibility for storage, I would tell them to look at all the features, positives and negatives of all the other storage vendors. In the past year, I've done an evaluation of a lot of different storage vendors and their features. The cost-effectiveness of their products and NetApp have come far ahead of all the others and so don't just buy into somebody from NetApp telling you these are all the great things about it. If you research all of the other companies and all of their offerings, I have no doubt that you'll decide that NetApp is the top provider. From the speed of their product to their flexibility to move into the cloud to their awesome support.

We use it for high performance, block storage, and file storage. 

The highest performance need apps are usually deployed on AFF. We're using adaptive QoS to identify what applications require higher performance and moving those volumes over to the AFF.

We are able to offer higher performance to meet the business needs. We see far less issues with applications complaining about not getting the throughput they need, the IOPS, or that they are getting to high of a latency. We put it on AFF and the issues go away.

The user experience with AFF is fast and secure, with continuous access to data. Our users typically don't know where we're putting their data unless we have some benefit in telling them. If they say, "It's not fast enough," we put it over here, and they say, "It's good now. We're happy." Though, we have to be judicious in how we move it, because storage is a bit expensive. Although, the higher storage efficiencies somewhat compensate for it.

The solution is providing IT more headroom so we can give higher performance to more applications. Like every business, our data footprint is growing. Our applications account is growing, and we're just able to keep up with it now somewhat better than we were before.

We are spending less time putting out fires, so there's a tangible benefit right there.

• It has extremely high performance. 
• The storage efficiency is far superior to a typical FAS.
• The administration is ONTAP, so it's not like you have a new platform to learn. Everything is consistent with what we have been doing for years.

On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release.

Like every NetApp platform, it's very stable. Occasionally, we hit a bug, but you encounter that everywhere. We've never had any problems specific to AFF. Overall, our problems with NetApp products have been minimal. It is a solid platform.

It scales well, probably more so than the FAS. Because of the storage density with the SSDs, we can't buy enough SSDs to max one out.

As with all NetApp tech support, it's outstanding. It is the best in the industry. It is very easy to escalate.

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.

The initial setup was not complex. Even though it's a higher performing platform, you run it, manage it, and administer it the same as you do any FAS.

We have a VAR, Tego Data Systems, whom we work with closely. They know our environment as well as we do. So, when we come to them with a need, we don't have to spend a lot of time feeding them background. They're ready to hit the ground running.

Our TCO has probably stayed about the same per terabyte of user data.

We looked at other vendors (Kaminario, Pure Storage, Dell EMC, and IBM), but decided that it made the most sense to stay with NetApp. 

I would look at the performance of AFF, its reliability, and its outstanding tech support. 

AFF is the wave of the future. Spinning disk will be going away and it just makes sense to go where the industry is going.

AFF helps us improve performance for our enterprise applications, data analytics and VMs. We have moved our primary data stores for production over to AFF, and a lot of the problems that might happened have gone away.

To set up and provision enterprise applications using this solution is quick. We're integrating it with ServiceNow, so it is a hands-off storage allocation. A user submits a request and can have storage in five to ten minutes.

We are not yet connected to any public clouds.

We use it for electronic medical record storage.

Because we use the production environment and copy down to test environments, we've taken it from days to hours.

• Speed
• Reliability

The next solution needs to simplify the day-to-day operations.

The stability is excellent. It's highly stable. We've just never really had a failure since we put it in. It's been two years.

There have been no issues of scalability, for our use.

Technical support has been very good. We use scripting called WFA, and we've had a little bit of an issue with that, going from the first generation to the second generation. But the actual hardware, product, and support itself have been excellent.

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

The initial setup was complex. The fact that it has to interact with both IBMs - AIX - and with the Epic application, means there are three vendors in the mix.

We used an integrator, Sirius. Our experience with them was excellent. Sirius already knew the environment it was coming from, the reseller was an IBM flash storage environment. They brought it over to a NetApp flash environment.

There were really only two on the shortlist: IBM and NetApp. We chose NetApp because we had an opportunity to make all of our environment NetApp.

I definitely recommend it. It's very complex to set up. Everything is. Even though it's complex, NetApp, out of the other two options, would probably be the least complex.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had any failures in the production environment. The only issue, as I said, is that we've had some trouble with the scripting. Otherwise, we'd give it a ten.