NetApp AFF Scalability

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

NetApp AFF is scalable.

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

Scalability is fantastic because we work with new clinics all the time. Usually, I have to spin up some new volumes for those, and it's no problem at all. We're looking at Keystone right now, and that's going to help it quite a bit more.  

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EO
System Administrator at Haaretz

The scalability is limited. You need to really plan for what you need. If you have it for a long time, you can run into issues if you need to extend beyond your means. It can be very difficult to expand. 

Generally, if you size properly, you can buy more shells.

It is very expensive to grow. 

We have about 60 people using the solution. 

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Chuck Custard - PeerSpot reviewer
Exec Director - Global IT Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is phenomenal.

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MR
Sr. Technology Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

NetApp products in general are highly scalable. For scalability, I would rate AFF nine out of 10.

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SaneeshC - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. engineer at Sify Technologies

It is scalable.

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

Based on your current needs and based on your inter-cluster switches, you need more storage added in, and you are good to go. You can create new aggregates and SVMs, and you are good to go.

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

It is able to scale according to our needs. I can grow my storage capacity as much as I need, there is no limit.

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GM
Lead Infrastructure Architect at Fortune Brands Innovations (Moen)

We purchased NetApp AFF with scalability in mind. We ended up going with the A900, which is a switched design, so expanding nodes out will be trivial. For some of our smaller sites, we use the A150, and we don't expect that we will need more. If necessary, we can buy some more A150s and expand without much fuss.

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

The scalability is very good.

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

It is scalable.

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Mangalam Amriish - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant at Techwave.

It is easy to scale NetApp AFF.

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PN
Sr. Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Scaling is straightforward, and we are pleased with the process.

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

NetApp AFF is fairly scalable.

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

Scaling is easy enough. Users can just throw another shelf in. It's easy to add hardware. 

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

Scalability is great. It's just expensive. That's why we would go with StorageGRID. Due to supply chain issues, I already know that these flash drives are so expensive. We're paying through the roof for those drives even on a discount. Therefore, while scalability's great, we can't really afford it. I can't go and buy a $4 million system. 

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SG
Storage Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

Scalability is not a problem. When we got the new flash system, we were able to combine it with the old hybrid that included iSCSI, SATA, SAS, and flash, into a four-way cluster. It was all running before the end of the day, and we moved about four hundred terabytes worth of data between them.

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

It scales well, and we haven't had any problems. We also have site storage with AFF C190, and being able to integrate with our other sites has been great. We have about 16 clusters in two different data centers for AFF.

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

It is easy to deploy and it's scalable.

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

Scalability is commendable. You can easily expand the system by adding nodes or disks, and we've done this several times with successful results.

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RaffaeleBrescia - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and System Administration at Simac BE ICT

It is a fairly scalable solution, though some things are more easily scalable than others but the possibilities are endless. Presently, sixty customers are working on the solution.

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

For our uses, it's been fairly scalable.

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BC
Storage Manager at State of Nebraska

In both our traditional cluster and MetroCluster, we have been able to scale very easily. We just add additional shelves of solid-state disk. They expand the storage array so we can just increase the aggregate sizes and assign more space. It's been very simple to scale.

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

The scalability capabilities deserve a perfect score of ten out of ten.

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

The scalability is good. We can add extra controllers and create clusters. It's very doable. 

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ParthaBhattacharyya - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at Department of Defence, Australian Government

If it's a data center enterprise-fed product, it is scalable. Some of the base models are not scalable, but these products are generally scalable.

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

We're using one with between 30 and 35 virtual servers. However, we have those together with 14 other stacks of the same size. 

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

Scalability of the solution is great, but expensive.

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

We can extend the solution, per our wishes, which is also good. The environment for this solution is about eight to 10 petabytes. 

The solution has been widely accepted by our management. 

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

The solution is scalable. We are in a large enterprise, so that fits our requirements. There is about 30 to 35 petabytes of data and a block size of close to 25 to 30 petabytes of data.

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SA
Director of the Projects Department at ALPIX

We can very easily add volume with new disks and we can add more compute with more controllers. And we can refresh and upgrade hardware very easily. We do that very often and customers are very happy with this aspect.

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

The scalability is a non-disruptive add on so if we need to grow the system we are able to either add an additional shell to it.

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VinceVitro - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have plans to increase our usage of the solution in the future.

I rate the scalability of NetApp AFF a seven out of ten.

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JC
Senior Unix Storage Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability of the All Flash is the same as the other. We can increase the amount of storage needed as we need it. As we buy them we just add them up with no downtime required. We just go ahead and increase the size, that is it.

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SP
IT Manager at TELUS Corporation

Thanks to dedupe, our physical footprint is quite a lot. All the scalability that we have done, we have so far done it within our organization. We haven't expanded it physically yet.

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MV
Data Center Engineer at Belimed

We have 1500 solution users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

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BH
Cloud Storage Engineer at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

We've had to upgrade our available storage three times, and it was all seamless. There is a cost every time, but there hasn't been an outage. It's been quick and seamless, and we haven't had any issues with scalability.

We have 8,000 undergraduate students and 2,000 graduate students, and we facilitate another 5,000 university staff. We run all of our campus-wide phone systems and CIFS on it, along with our local VMware environment. We have about 10,000 to 15,000 people relying on NetApp AFF every day.

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SM
Systems Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

The scalability of AFF in our NetApp systems in general has been ewonderful. I have another enclosure full of flash drives sitting in our dock right now ready to go in. I can schedule it, put it in the rack, and have it in the system and utilized in maybe half an hour. It works just great.

Our AFF has freed us up greatly in terms of allocating storage. Our old system didn't expand at all. With the new system, we can add another shelf in, merge data into the aggregate, and grow volumes (all live), which is great in a hospital.

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

Because of the small footprint, the device allows for easier scalability in terms of rack space. Our previous solution used up almost an entire cabinet in our data center, which makes scaling a bit challenging because you need to find another cabinet, then cable across cabinets. This device is a lot easier because of its small footprint.

We have about four rack units in total. At this point, I don't anticipate any physical expansion. If we are going to expand, it will probably be to the cloud for a variety of reasons.

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JB
Manager at Pramerica

If we want to expand,  the option is there for us to do that. It's not a requirement at the minute, but I know that we want to do it. It should be really easy to do, just add another cluster and then just configure it. We know it's available to us. We know how easy it is to configure, so that's a great option that we have there if we need it.

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

Scalability has been great. There have been some things I would like to see them do differently, but overall, the scalability has been wonderful for us.

The solution’s thin provisioning has allowed us to add new applications without having to purchase additional storage. We use thin provisioning for everything. We use the deduplication compression functionality for all of our NetApps. If we weren't using thin provisioning, we'd probably have two to times more storage on our floor right now than we do today.

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MA
Chief Information Officer at Mt. San Rafael Hospital

Scalability, the improvements that we see with AFS, and the reliability has been such a critical element. I think the technology that NetApp has, especially when you look at a disaster recovery standpoint because you figure we're a health care organization and any type of outage is considered revenue loss, we really want to try to avoid those specific elements.

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KL
IT Operations Manager at Idaho State Insurance Fund

It is very scalable. Because of the cloning and snapshots that we do, we are getting a data efficiency ratio out of our production array of about 32:1, which is a high ratio. So, we took quite a bit of data and shrunk it down in size, letting it scale out better.

We are going to be adding another shelf to it, but storage to the NetApp application has always been easy to do. We usually do it ourselves without getting a third-party contractor involved.

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RA
Lead Technician at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

It is scalable. 

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

The scalability is good with NetApp. It's fine for most people. There would be some places where it would be difficult, whatever you do.

We tend to work with environments based on petabytes. 

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DR
Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

The scalability is great and super easy. We are able to just connect, go through the UI, and select to expand the cluster. It is super easy even if you want to scale it out by having a Mirror setup, not a cluster, or pairing them together. By being able to do this with just a couple of clicks of a mouse button, it is superb.

We have thousands of customers, but there is not much to do for daily operations because it just runs. We have alerts setup in it, but we seldom have to do anything.

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

Scalability seems to be something that is a non-issue anymore. If we need space, we can throw in a shelf. If we need more compute, we can add more nodes to it. That was part of going into the purchase of our all flashes, knowing that we can scale both down and up. We haven't had to yet, but we know that it's there.

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

The scalability is seamless. Without any downtime, we can upgrade and scale-up.

As of now, we have a 40TB SSD front-end fabric pool capacity. At the back end, we have a two-petabyte storage grid. We are not experiencing any performance-related issues, although we have encountered a few time sync-related problems.

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

Scalability is pretty easy. We've done multiple head swaps in our environment to swap out the old with the new. It's awesome for that purpose.

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

The scalability of the product is wonderful. It is just a simple matter of adding more shelves and provisioning more disk storage. 

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BT
Director of Infrastructure Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We haven't had to scale it yet. We literally reduced 18 racks worth of equipment into two and still have room in those two racks to do additional shelves, expanding into that footprint. So, it's expandable and dense, which is great.

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

One of the scalability problems that we've had is the amount of storage per node, as it is 600 terabytes. This still seems a little low. However, there is a compute issue with large capacity, so it's just smarter to add additional nodes into a cluster. So, the scalability is there.

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

We've never had an issue with scalability. We could scale as large as we want. We can go out and up, anytime we want to. I'm really impressed with their scalability.

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MD
AWS Solutions Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability of NetApp AFF is pretty straightforward. We can expand clusters and that's not a pain point. I'm happy with the scalability.

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VK
Storage Architect and Engineer at United Airlines

Scaling this solution is easy. You can start small with one HA pair and add them as you go. You can make new clusters and add new nodes to clusters. 

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

We haven't needed to scale yet, but I can imagine that it would be seamless.

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FK
System Administrator at Bell Canada

Scalability is the most effective way that we have seen so far from NetApp to be able to add additional disks. The ability to leverage the efficiency has also given us the flexibility to integrate it as one solution. Scalability is working for us. As demand grows, NetApp has been supporting it.

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

It seems to be almost infinitely scalable. Being an organization as large as we are, it definitely meets our needs.

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

We have not needed to scale it.

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it_user351162 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Butchers Pet Care

It scales to our needs.

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PS
Service manager at VST ECS

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

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it_user527370 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Colorado Judicial Branch

We're not a huge shop. Our previous NetApps have always been a two-node setup. Right now, I don't really necessarily see us scaling out any more. We were pretty much a 7-mode shop previously; now, we're a cDOT for these 8080 AFFs. With cDOT, it's very nice how you can scale it out and add more nodes to it. I don't necessarily see us taking advantage of that anytime soon. It's nice to have the option there.

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

It works pretty good. When we need more storage, we just add another shelf or just add additional controllers to the cluster if additional performance is required.

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MD
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The scalability is good because it can scale out a cluster of up to 24 nodes. Usually, our customers only have a two-node cluster, so scalability is not so much of an issue with us.

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

We are working on scaling this solution right now. It is a big part of what we want to do, including moving to the cloud.

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

Scalability is something that we are spending time on, but it is an internal issue related to seeking financial approval. The scalability of the solution is not a technical issue.

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RC
Head of IT at Inacap

I am very impressed with the scalability.

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

We have not had to scale it. We have a two-node cluster.

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

It scales out very well. We have not had any issues trying to move anything around or when it comes to expansion. We haven't had to expand the AFF yet, but other ONTAP systems are very easy to expand.

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it_user750723 - PeerSpot reviewer
It Manager at HSBC

Good. We've not really had much scalability, so far, to grow that much on the AFF, but what we have had to do has been good.

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

We have not had any scalability issues so far. It's scalable, depending on what your network switch is; we're running ten-node clusters right now.

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SJ
AIX and Storage Specialist at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is scalable. I can grow my data. When it comes to NVMe, it is also scalable in terms of capacity and scaling horizontally. For example, we can add multiple nodes in a cluster as well as multiple expansions. I feel the box is very capable in terms of scalability.

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

The scalability is very good and we have had no issues.

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

Scalability is good. Compared to the different vendors, the scalability is very flexible, in the sense that you can scale up to whatever you want, expand your storage, expand your clusters, expand your nodes. NetApp makes it possible. Some vendors have come up with models that won't expand their nodes, which creates the need to buy different clusters. For example, let's say I have four nodes. My four nodes have the capability of taking one million IOPS, but my storage backend isn't complete, so I can't expand that. So the nodes are of no use. NetApp is not only thinking from the customer's point of view, but they are also thinking about every other prospective use and they include a lot in all-flash drives.

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

About 90% of our data center is sitting on NetApp, either All Flash, 8080 or something else. VMware is also sitting on NetApp. That’s also good; no scalability issues.

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

It scales very well. I'd give it about a 9 out of 10 on scalability.

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BM
Head of Infrastructure, Network & Security Management at Vos Logistics N.V.

It's a scalable solution. If we need more storage, we purchase an extra desk cabinet.

We have approximately 700 users in our organization. We have an additional 100 people joining our company.

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

We have expanded a lot. We had an eight-node cluster and now we have a twelve-node cluster. Scalability is really easy when it comes to NetApp.

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PH
Technical Lead at USAF

Scalability is expensive. 

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

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.

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DS
Systems Administrator at Anthc

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?"

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it_user750651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Leads Systems Engineer at Tuscon Medical Center

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.

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it_user527289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Data Storage Administrator at Denver Health

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.

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

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.

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LN
Solutions Consultant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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

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.

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

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

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it_user750657 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Enterprise Services at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
it_user748323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user527298 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user527175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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TA
Chief Enterprise Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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PH
Executive director IT Systems at MemorialCare Health System

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

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

The scalability is amazing. It is like an entry level box which scales up to almost a 144 drives. It is more than what an entry customer usually needs. It is suitable for expandability needs and can grow with the customer.

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

It's an all-flash so you just add more clusters, nodes, and you're done. Scalability isn't an issue. That was one of the evaluation criteria, we needed something that would scale out.

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

We haven't really scaled it yet. We expect it to be scalable.

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

So far, we have about 40 TB of raw space. On top of that, comes all of the inline compression, the dedupe and all of those features and functionalities. It's not a huge system but it's IO intensive. It's on the order between 40,000 and 80,000 IOPS.

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

You can keep adding shelves and it works.

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AS
Solution Architect at Prow

NetApp AFF is scalable. 

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it_user527175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Scalability on AFF is an interesting thing. We use CIFS and that doesn't scale well as a protocol. AFF does its darndest to get us up there. We've found that once we got into the right lineup of array, like the AFF A700 series, or thereabouts, that was when we had what we needed for our workloads at our site. But I would say that the mid-range stuff was not really doing it for us, and our partners were hesitant to push us to the enterprise tier when they should have. So for a while, we thought NetApp just couldn't do it, but it was really just that our partners were scared of sticker-shock with us. Right now we've been finding AFF for CIFS is doing everything we need. If we start leveraging it for SAN I could have something to say on that, but we don't.

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SS
Data Delivery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We started with a cluster of two nodes, then we reached a six node cluster. We have scaled this up, as needed, whenever we saw a requirement coming up from the client. 

It's pretty scalable. It can scale up to 24 nodes.

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

We have not had to scale it. We bought it at about 128 terabytes and, right now, we are probably at about 80 or 90. Because of the upgrade, next year we are going to grow 30 percent. We will probably upgrade in 2020 or increase the space.

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SP
Technical manager at Macrovention

At this point in time, a few customers are looking at scaling it. Since NetApp provides vast scalability, whether they scale up or scale out, it gives them better flexibility.

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TG
Systems Engineer at a individual & family service with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have scaled so far to another unit and have a FAS2620 that we recently added. We were able to get that up and running without disrupting the environment.

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

It's extremely scalable. With the cDOT, you have the ability to add many, many nodes, and that gives you that capability of also being able to upgrade portions of it without taking the entire thing out.

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

As I mentioned, scalability with respect to the space is very nice. cDOT gives us the scalability to expand the cluster. So we have a two-node hybrid. We added two more, making it a four-node cluster. We can expand it to eight nodes in a pure SAN cluster.

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

I don’t think we’ve had any scalability issues with it. I think it's great because every time they want more storage or a bigger size, it's easy enough to give them. Growing disk space is great with flash.

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it_user527415 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I haven't had to scale the AFF, in particular, so I would assume it would be the same as the spinning disk solutions, where we've been able to scale to multi-node clusters.

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CW
Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

AFF is scalable. The ability to add shelves makes things easier.

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

The scalability is okay. You can scale it if you need to. 

Currently, we have 70 users on it. 

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PB
Storage Team Lead at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

It's a fast product. It is exactly the same as other fast products; it is scalable.

We have more than 100 users utilizing the product concurrently. Concurrence is one parameter that we looked for, and AFF is satisfying that problem.

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DM
IT Director at a legal firm

As for scalability, we've added shelves in with very little effort. We're probably not what NetApp wants to see, but we've been purchasing some large six-terabyte SATA drives to expand out colder storage and just get those racked and plugged in. It's very easy to take it up and scale. We are looking very slowly at moving towards the cloud and the NetApp approach to cloud storage is way ahead of what we need, which is very reassuring.

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it_user750543 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I think we've got an eight-node cluster right now, so it's meeting our needs.

It's been easy to tag nodes and scale out.

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

Scalability has not come up yet. Obviously, we haven't been able to scale anywhere.

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

Scalability has been good so far. We have several data centers. We have no problems scaling it out.

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it_user527271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Exchange Administrator at Albuquerque Public Schools

If one can afford the drives, then they're scalable. That's the caveat. Of course, there are some issues with scalability that come from the ability to crush your controller with so many drives behind it. If you have too many disk shelves, you can overwhelm a controller, one of the lower-end controllers. That’s a potential problem. It's not a problem we actually have, but it's something we have to be careful with because we have a mid-range AFF, and now we have an enterprise AFF as well. Now that we have the enterprise AFF, this isn’t an issue.

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it_user346323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Manager at OUTSCALE

The 8080 is the biggest product at NetApp so you can scale very wide. With this kind of product we have no problems at all.

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AH
Storage Architect

The solution is scalable. 

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

Scalability is excellent. If we need more space it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself.

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

Scalability is great. In the cluster, being able to add nodes as needed, and to be able to move data around within the cluster to balance the workload on the nodes is just crazy easy.

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

We haven't had to scale yet. However, we built it so if we do, it's very simple to do. We could probably do it with an onsite staff and not need professional services.

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it_user750576 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We haven't had to scale it yet.

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it_user527109 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Systems Admin at Greater Harris County

It's definitely scalable, especially with cluster mode. You can just hook in another set of controllers, add disk shelves. It's definitely scalable.

I feel like it's going to meet the organization's needs moving forward. As I've needed to add storage to it, I just grab another shelf and hook it up. It pulls in all the disks; you create your aggregates and everything. As far as if we ever need to add more controllers, you just connect them into the fabric, they come up and you can start sharing files, LUNs and all that stuff. It's definitely scalable.

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

Scalability in regards to capacity hasn't been an issue. The product really scales well.

With regard to performance, storage pools/aggregates are tied to a single node, so a storage device/LUN can only use CPU/memory of that particular node.

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

Scalability hasn't come up yet. It's pretty nice because we're planning to expand on to an offsite location, as well, to have redundancy. Scalability seems pretty good.

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it_user527412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Unix Administrator at Synopsys

Three years back, we deployed many customer systems; we have a big 24-node cluster. So scalability is very good.

For this particular deployment, we have only one HA pair. Currently, there is no requirement to grow from a scalability point of view. Our requirement is very small.  In the future, we may think of adding additional HA pairs and we can grow that scalability; we can distribute it in the future.

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

There haven’t been that many issues. We do not have a lot of performance issues or demands, so we haven’t had many issues, in terms of scalability or performance.

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

So far, I don't know the exact size that we have. I know we can add more storage. We just procured some more disk shelves to add. I don't know the limits. I probably need to go check out how large we can be.

Also, we're trying to keep our environment separated. That way, there's no contamination. There are also regulations and other things we have to worry about. If we're putting everything in one box, putting all the eggs in one basket, we need to be really careful about stability, performance, and making changes.

If we want to scale out in the future, I think the system is capable. We should not have problems; I hope that will happen.

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

It scales out well. It’s a new All Flash FAS and we looked at the overall capacities that we needed before. It's only been in place for about six months. From a scalability perspective, we know that it will scale out if we need it to, but it's a new implementation, so no issues or anything like that.

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

The cluster mode is really, really scalable. Before that, we used to have 7-mode. We are migrating everything from 7-mode to cluster mode, and we are seeing huge benefits in our company.

Before, we had a 7-mode cluster, and we were having CPU issues. We could not migrate a volume to another node without an outage. Now, we have something like six nodes. When we have a performance issue, we can just migrate the volume to a different node.

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it_user331992 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We haven’t yet needed to scale. We only have two nodes, but I have plans to present to management for growth. I know it will be seamless in adding nodes in clusters. I’m not afraid to take it on because I know it’ll be easy.

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it_user732744 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Dhaka Bank Limited
it_user750711 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Outfront Media

We have a smaller environment, just a two-node cluster, one our primary side and one on our secondary side. One of the benefits that NetApp brings to the table is being able to add nodes to it if you want to, if you need more storage or you need more power, more processing speed - and boom! You can just add nodes and that's it.

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it_user750630 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Age Of Learning

Scalability is great. Before we had the AFF A300, originally we started off with a 2552. We outgrew that, obviously, and we went to 8040. We were easily able to upgrade to an 8040, and then grow our cluster to add an AFF A300. Now, we have AFF A300, an 8040 in our cluster and it's just easy to scale up. It's a big feature and bonus for NetApp on that.

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it_user750759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ceo at Enterprise Computing

It's extremely scalable with minimum downtime when one has to do the scalable solution.

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

It's very scalable. Right now, at our primary site, we have four FAS8060 nodes. We have two node-pairs of 8080, and we're adding an additional node-pair of 8080 along with a node-pair of A700. At an alternate data site, we've got a node-pair of 8060 and a node-pair of 8080. We're adding a node-pair of 80200. For the upgrade at the primary site, the only portion of that would be considered risky is it has to go through change control when replacing the intercluster switch. Because we're expanding beyond the capacity of the original switch that we purchased, and it's very scalable, and we like the product.

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

We haven't had to scale it yet, because we just put it in six months ago. Nonetheless, we did add it to an existing cluster and we’re able to move data over to it pretty seamlessly.

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

It’s met our scaling needs.

Data is growing everywhere, so we’ll work with the data we’ve picked up and it will help us for the next calendar year. I fully expect we'll need to add more more shelves within a year.

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

We haven't really scaled it yet. From what I've seen, it looks like it won't be a problem if we need to go down that road.

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

It scales as we can just plug in more devices.

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it_user351144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Grand Consult

It scales to our needs.

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

Overall, I like the scalability. It can do NAS, CIFS, and fiber channel all in one box and it's easy to manage.

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

We are running in cluster mode, which is known for its scalability. I would say that it is good.

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

The scalability is good.

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

It should scale far beyond our needs. I don't think we will ever hit the edge of it.

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it_user750645 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It's scalable. As far as NetApp products go, in general, they're very scalable.

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

It's really good. There are some that things that could be done better there, like NetApp is doing; it's other products like Webscale and SolidFire. As long as you're aware of the design considerations, it's very, very easy. Shelves go in like a snap. As long as you make sure you have the proper compute to go with it, you're good to go.

We're not really having scalability issues, it's just you have to make sure that you're not exceeding the capacity of your heads when you're expanding your logical storage out, that's all.

It has caused problems for my company in the past, but I think that was the result of not having storage administrators with a high level of proficiency and knowledge of NetApp. They made some very poor sizing decisions, but you can't blame the vendor for that. It's more of the admins' fault for not specking them out properly.

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it_user652587 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Since we are talking 24 nodes for NAS, that is really good. I forgot what the scale number is for block on clustered data ONTAP, but I have not run into any opportunities where we had to go beyond what we had.

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

On a scale from one to five, I would say four.

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

Scalability is not determined at this point in time. We've installed what we bought; we're using it. We haven't tried scaling it beyond what it's done so far; haven't needed to.

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it_user527214 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at College board

I like the scalability, too, because the footprint is small. You just add shelves, add to it, swap it out.

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it_user527334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at American Health Network

NetApp All Flash FAS:

We're looking to scale it up because our FAS 3220 is coming up for maintenance renewal. We're thinking we'd probably be better off chucking a couple more shelves at the AFF, and running our vSphere environment off those shelves because we're not touching the controllers on that AFF. I hate to say they're running ideal with 2,000 SQL users on it, but it's running very well.

Pure Storage M20:

Scalability is pretty much the same as on NetApp, depending on what controller you buy, how many shelves you can attach to it.

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

All-Flash FAS:

I only have the one, so I haven't really scaled that all that much. It looks like from the specs and everything else, you can scale it incredibly easily.

EMC VMAX 10K:

We only have that one, so I can't really comment on its scalability. It looks like it could be scalable, but we're not thinking of going in that direction.

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

The scalability is excellent. We still can grow a lot into it and add more databases.

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

It is scaling to our needs.

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

From what I can't tell, this solution is very scalable.

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

It's pretty scalable. When you add more to the environment it helps things, overall.

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

It is scalable. On the NFS side, we have around 24 nodes, so that is pretty scalable. Also, the scale up is very high.

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it_user527064 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at Intalock Technologies

Most of the companies we do solutions for acquire other companies, so it's important to them at the beginning to know that, even though they don't know what their sizing is going to be like for the next three to four years, if they do purchase companies and a lot of data comes on board, the solution is easily scalable.

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

We haven't had to deal with scaling yet.

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it_user750705 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at George Fox University

We'll see. We're only running about 27 terabytes in production right now. We're keeping everything else on our secondary FAS in our DR location. So we think it would scale well. But we'll see. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

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

Regarding scalability, on a scale of one to 10, I'd say about a five.

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

We did encounter scalability issues, the solution is not delivering the requested performance (I/O response time for the requested IOPS).

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it_user527340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Technical Lead at Mercadolibre.com

We scale one or two controllers every year by adding an extra part to each cluster if we need it. Last year, we just bought a shelf, but in the previous years, we were increasing by one or two HA pairs per cluster; that's a lot for us. But, it's easy to scale. The most interesting thing we did is we moved volumes across the cluster without downtime and with a minimal performance impact. That's something that we couldn't do in the past with 7-Mode. So that's really good for the company. For a commerce company like ours, we can't support these functions with downtime; it must be while online.

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

It's met our expectations, and we still have room to grow and scale out.

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

It scales to our needs.

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

It's very scalable.

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AB
Consultor and Co-founder at OS4IT

It is scalable. There is scalability for processing. We have small and large organizations as clients.

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

I would rate the scalability an eight or nine out of ten.

We can grow this solution very easily, just by adding storage. All we need to do is buy a shelf and expand the storage side of it.

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

For capacity of storage, we manage about three petabytes of data. It is exactly what we need in terms of scalability.

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it_user522096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at LDS church

With their clustered ONTAP we can scale as big as we need to.

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

Scalability wise, it is also good, although we have not had to scale yet.

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it_user750582 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineering Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

I think it's excellent. We haven't scaled it up yet because it was a new system, so we haven't added to it. Actually, we did add a shelf to it, but it's awesome. You just plug things in and they go.

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it_user750639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Engineer at Providance Health Services

It is certainly scalable.

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

We don't scale it too much because we don't want a lot of workload in the same cluster. I'm sure we can scale it if we want to.

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it_user527103 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at Desire 2 Learn Inc

With the ability to move data as soon as needed, we can expand and contract as we need to. It works out pretty nicely. We’ve had no issues in terms of scalability.

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it_user527337 - PeerSpot reviewer
Datacenter, NOC & IT Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

As far as I know, it will scale with us. With our databases, we're not going to need that large of a footprint. However, we have some other projects that we're testing out at this time. I believe scalability will be an issue. As far as I know, we’ll just pop more shelves in and we’ll get the scalability.

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it_user527181 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Now with the CDOT solution, they definitely have made it scalable.

We use it in a lot of other venues, engineering or non-engineering. Earlier there was an issue where you were limited but after introducing CDOT, I don’t think scalability is an issue now.

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it_user527394 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP IT at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give it a 10 for scalability.

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

We haven't done a whole lot of scaling yet in our AFF solution. However, it appears to be quite scalable and now, with ONTAP 9, you can go up to 12 SAN nodes; it's been quite dramatically increased.

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

That’s not a problem. It scales enormously well. We have more than six petabytes today. We have a lot of 8000’s in different guides with MetroCluster, and then because we’re already clustered from 2000’s, there’s 7-Mode systems that we now are migrating to the cluster.

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

It is expandable as you can mix it with normal High-Availability pairs, so it's very scalable.

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

It scales to our needs.

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it_user331812 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Systems Integrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

As we continue forward, we can add additional heads with same IOPS.

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SS
System Administrator at a government with 201-500 employees

It is scalable.

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JS
Senior in technology and engineer at a marketing services firm

The reason we have it is that it's very scalable.

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it_user527397 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at University of Iowa

Scalability on NetApp is unforeseen. I'm sure we're going to buy more. I'm sure the fact that we are using clustered NetApp, we can take that stuff and move the next heads into the next cluster and then just migrate things, and nobody notices in the background. That's probably the best thing about the scalability.

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

It is pretty scalable.

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it_user750561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at Bay View Financial Trading

We haven't had to buy any new flash for a while because of the compression. So far, being able to compress the data has been able to help us save money on buying more disks.

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

It's excellent. We added a shelf three weeks ago and it took less than 10 minutes.

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it_user351189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Architect at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

It has problems with deduplication when done globally.

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

It scales to our needs.

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it_user351150 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Specialist at Fujitsu Sweden AB

It scales to our needs.

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

We are scaling up to the new solution. We haven't had a lot of scalability yet. We are looking forward to what it can do.

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BT
CTO at Pronet Security

No issues with scalability.

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it_user527295 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Storage Administrator at Mentor Graphics

We haven't had to scale it out.

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it_user550299 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

We bought small and hoped that the efficiencies would bring in what we need, and it did. But with everything going on in our environment, we actually increased it so that we can have a little more capacity. Right now, it's probably 2% utilized, which is completely different than a spinning disk, which is 70% utilized. So, the scalability's just easy to do; it's incredible.

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

Scalability is not something that we're going to be concerned with right now, as far as adding; we can always add a tray. It's non-disruptive. That's great.

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

We don't have that big of one yet. We originally quoted out a system of eight nodes, and it was going to be something like 12 GBps. That seemed like substantial amounts, considering what everyone else quoted. However, it actually was going to come in at about the same price for the AFF compared to everyone else's quotes for disks. The reason they went with it is because of the trust with the vendor they were currently using and they just didn't want to leave.

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

We have not scaled it yet, but we are thinking about it.

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it_user353979 - PeerSpot reviewer
First ICT manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is difficult. The number of shelves is limited to 2 or 4, and the number of terrabytes we potentially have doesn't match to this limit.

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TC
Data Center Engineer at a non-profit

We haven't needed to scale it yet. We probably won't. But obviously, because we are in a multi-node cluster environment, with the switches we can scale out very easily if we need to.

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it_user750699 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Storage Admin at General Dynamics

It does not matter much in our environment. We have not thought of scaling out.

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

We have not yet encountered any scalability issues.

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it_user522096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at LDS church

The scalability meets our needs.

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

Scalability was another reason why I attended a recent NetApp Insight conference. That's what I wanted to find out: where we're moving ahead, from here.

We have enough capacity for what we do. I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems. Everything works; no problem.

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

It scales both horizontally and vertically with clustered Data ONTAP.

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

We haven't had to scale it yet, so right now it's a relatively new install.

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CW
Sys Admin at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

I know it scales but we are not looking to scale it out at this point.

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

We scale up to 64 nodes in a cluster and then we just keep scaling clusters. We've had no issues with scalability.

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it_user750633 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin

It is very easy to scale.

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

The scalability is good.

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

Scalability is quite good in an NAS environment, and in a SAN it's good enough.

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it_user1013601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at ICTeam
it_user527193 - PeerSpot reviewer
R&D Executive Supervisor at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For what we do, I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems; and everything works, no problem. I am currently trying to find out where we’re moving ahead from here.

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

Since we've added the All Flash FAS, we have scaled up. We've added additional disk shelves; it seems to be growing just fine with us.

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it_user527106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at Equifax

Scalability has been OK. We've been scaling them vertically instead of more horizontally because you can only scale the FAS horizontally so far, so we've scaled out vertically.

I would like to see them improve its ability to scale vertically. With flash, you can only drive so many IOPS, the controllers can only handle so many IOPS. There's a limit; there's physics, a mathematical limit that they can do.

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it_user527403 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

As with stability, it's been really scalable as long as you have it configured correctly.

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it_user346356 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It will scale to our needs.

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it_user332643 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Data Storage Engineer III at University of Kentucky

So far, it looks like it's going to be incredibly scalable as I just install additional nodes as needed.

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MD
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The scalability is great. The cluster scalability can be scaled out. The cluster can be scale out to up to 24 nodes. You can also scale them up if you add disks. So, scalability is not a problem. You can even scale it down if you need to, and we've also done this with a few customers. We can scale down the clusters later if the workload or requirements change. That is definitely one of the big plus points.

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

Scalability is very good. 

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

We've put in several requests for some different scalable options because we provide one type of hardware. I would say that scalability went in the wrong direction when we went to NetApp Select. We had a meeting set up with the CTO at a recent conference and we were hoping to discuss different options going forward.

They actually decreased the ability to scale with the new Select platform.

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

I did not encounter any scalability issues. How we're seeing it right now is that it's going to be very scalable in terms of architecture. It's going to be scalable within the data center because it's actually a smaller footprint for us. I think overall durability of this infrastructure will be really good as well. I think overall, it's going to reduce our operations because we're going to spend a lot less time troubleshooting performance; we’ll have a lot more time to be more forward looking in the design and implementation.

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it_user750678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin

The scalability is good. We scaled out three to four months ago. There were no problems.

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

Yes, it is scalable.

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it_user472458 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have not had any issues with scalability.

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

It scales to our needs.

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it_user550308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Analyst at Ativas Data Center

Today, we have two pairs of controllers which form a cluster where I can have various types of workloads between the two devices. And, it has great flexibility in order to alter a client that is using a slow disk to a faster disk.

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

NetApp’s very scalable.

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

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

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

The solution can scale-in and scale-out.

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it_user521703 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Director Division of IT at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is good. It's going to meet our needs going forward. We are in the process of adding drawers to it right now.

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

It's scaled just fine.

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MO
Consulting Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nowadays, AFF is very scalable — ever since they implemented the ClusterMode. I think it's very easy to scale, both up and out. It's also very stable.

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

It scales to our leads.

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

It scales to our needs.

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

It scales to our 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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.