NetApp AFF Valuable Features

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

I like NetApp AFF's deduplication. The solution's AutoSupport feature is efficient and effective because customers are notified of potential issues before they experience problems with NetApp. The support is sold based on metro clusters, so they guarantee the client's business continuity. NetApp has an Active IQ app that allows you to get information on your smartphone. 

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Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers

All of NetApp's all-flash series storage arrays come with the NetApp all-flash software bundle by default.

NetApp also offers both "SAN-only" and "unified" options to make more flexible choices for customers. 

There is a very long list of features that come by default in the NetApp all-flash software bundle; however, what I like the most are in-line deduplication, compression, and compaction, which saves up to 90% of expensive disk space, especially in a virtualized server environment. 

The "autonomous ransomware protection" secures customer data from intruders.

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

ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day.

NetApp AFF has absolutely helped to simplify our infrastructure. One hundred percent. It's still getting us very high performance for our business-critical applications.

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

The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively.

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EO
System Administrator at Haaretz

I like the FlexClone feature.

The CLI, the Power Shell, for NetApp is very good. You can do everything from the Command Line.

Storage is very reliable. You don't have to do much maintenance. 

It is stable.

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

The benefits of being on AFF are the

  • phenomenal speed at which we're able to ingest data and index it
  • the IOPS.
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MR
Sr. Technology Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

AFF is user-friendly. A person who has no experience with NetApp can handle it comfortably. Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens.

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SaneeshC - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. engineer at Sify Technologies

We have snapshots, and we have even configured storage-based replication with this product. The majority of our virtual workloads are provisioned from this product as well. Our workload VMs are provisioned in this storage.

For replication and snapshots, it is more user-friendly and easy to use as compared to some of the other OEM products, such as HPE 3PAR and Dell Unity. 

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

The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares. 

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

From an IT perspective, there's not a lot of babysitting. It maintains itself. It is a very dependable tool.

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

We wanted the replication and SnapMirror and those types of features in case an event occurs. That way, we have a proper system so that we can recover the data properly. One of the main features that we love about the system is the ability to create snapshots. NetApp makes a lot of snapshots in a short space of time.

Also, the speed of data recovery with NetApp, at the time we need it, is an important feature that we love.

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

Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good.

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Mangalam Amriish - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant at Techwave.

The most valuable aspect of NetApp AFF is the money it saves our organization.

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

One of the most valuable aspects is its robust data management features, such as compression, deduplication, and in-line data optimization. These features provide immediate storage efficiency gains without requiring additional post-processing. 

Furthermore, the ONTAP feature intelligently monitors volume efficiency and can automatically adjust or pause in-line efficiency processes when suboptimal performance is detected. This automation prevents resource wastage and ensures a more efficient and streamlined process, although manual adjustments remain an option.

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

The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF for us is its ability to manage multiple IP spaces for our customers in a shared environment. This is important because we offer VPN services, and this feature helps keep customer data separate and secure while ensuring our services work smoothly over the long term.

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

The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate.

The throughput is excellent.

It's useful for running production databases on.

NetApp AFF has reduced our operational latency. It has close to doubled it.

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

The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more.

We have found the ease of use to be excellent. Everybody's got expertise in it.

AFF helped reduce our operational latency. Since we started using it, we've improved by 20%.

AFF has helped us optimize our costs. We partnered with StorageGRID on that, and so we tier our data with StorageGRID and use AFF for the hot data, and then we tier it off to StorageGRID, which is really helping with that.

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SG
Storage Engineer at Missile Defense Agency

The most valuable feature of this solution is its simplicity. It is easy to use.

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

Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well.

Our latency is fine, and NetApp AFF provides us the best speed for our applications.

In terms of optimization of costs, NetApp AFF is a little expensive, but I don't mind paying for it.

The ability to connect to CVO and ANF is great, and as a result, it has a lot of flexibility.

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

Multi-protocol is the most valuable feature for us. It does everything in one system: CIFS, ISCSI, and fiber channel. Other systems don't do all that.

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

Its top-tier performance ranks as the most valuable aspect. 

Secondly, the reduced frequency of drive failures leads to less time and resources spent on maintenance and replacements. I am highly satisfied with its exceptional, consistent performance, ensuring that applications run smoothly and reliably. It has proven to be highly effective, with the added benefit of utilizing a range of additional features, whether we're dealing with flash or lower-end disk storage solutions. 

It has greatly contributed to efficiency and improved performance in our operations, indirectly impacting cost management.

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

NetApp is like a one-point central management. For example, one can put everything on the right version and control the whole environment from one software solution. It's easy to have an insight into monitoring and stuff. The solution is easy to manage.

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

The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great.

Using AFF helped reduce our cost of licensing.

AFF has helped us with saving or optimizing our costs.

We have been able to optimize overall storage.

So far, we have not been affected by ransomware attacks since implementing AFF.

Being based on ONTAP makes migrating to the cloud much easier to take advantage of. We can figure out the cloud SVMs in a very similar fashion. That's been a big help. It's a technology we already know, so we can pretty much apply anything from ONFREM to FSx.

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BC
Storage Manager at State of Nebraska

We like AFF because it has a very high reliability rate with very high performance. We are using it for top tier performance on application and virtual machine storage, as well as just being able to separate out SVMs for different security and network needs for all of our different customers across the state. 

We use the Snapshot feature to simplify backups for data protection. We set different policies that let let our agencies choose what backup policy they want to have for their Snapshots. It's very simple. Users can be given the opportunity to look at previous versions directly from the Windows interface or they can call/put in a ticket seeking support from our IT group if they need a larger system restore, because their data is protected with NetApp and replicated as well.

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

There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system. This is crucial because it enables organizations to avoid the need to invest in additional costly storage. 

Given the high cost of storage, having these compression technologies in place ensures efficient data deduplication and other storage optimization techniques, allowing for the retention of a substantial amount of data on the system.

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

We use the NFS and SIP protocols a lot. The NFS is the most valuable feature.

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

I like that you can switch protocols and features on and off, depending on how I architect my domain. From the business side of things, it supports file formatting, the main protocols, and the hot swapping of disks and features. 

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

Scalability is the most valuable feature. The ones that I use are hot spot-able. If we need more, we can just throw in another drive. 

I like the fact that if my drive goes bad it doesn't crash automatically and the system will try to auto-save that data by moving it to one of the hot spots. Then we can just pull out that drive and throw our brand new one in and we'll remove it from the 2020 or 2040s. We went from 600 GBs to 1.2 TBs. We have plenty of storage. 

I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution. 

We've reduced operational latency. We use the 40 GB connection. In terms of latency between our storage and the VMs that we use, latency is almost nonexistent since we have the server and FAS so close together. We use a 40 GB fiber-optic connection on the back. We don't see any latency at all. We've reduced it to less than 5%. While you can never reduce it to zero, it's barely noticeable at this point. 

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

The typical snapshots are one of the benefits. Also, in addition to the NetApp MetroCluster, we also have two eight-node HA clusters. And the solution makes our work easier.

NetApp AFF has also helped to reduce support issues such as performance tuning and troubleshooting, and that's true even though we are quite self-sufficient in our knowledge of our clusters and of NetApp in general.

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

Performance-wise, NetApp is very good. 

The NetApp FlexVol feature is helpful because we can copy large amounts of data in minutes as well as include data quickly. That is definitely one of its plus points as well as it being all-flash. 

It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio.

We are using ONTAP 9, which has simplified our operations.

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

The ONTAP cluster, the scale-out, and the architecture are great.

We are a large-scale company, and our growth has been pretty significant over the last five or six years. We like the scale, and the way NetApp grows, so that's why we use it. It's mostly for block storage.

NetApp data helped to reduce our operational latency to some extent. We've saved maybe 20%.

We have not been affected by ransomware since using the solution. 

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SA
Director of the Projects Department at ALPIX

The most valuable features are 

  • performance
  • storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication.

We use StorageGrid in two ways. The first usage is stand-alone to provide S3 object storage. And the second use case is to use FabricPool, the NetApp technology that moves a snapshot from the AFF to AWS. It's a very good solution because AFF is SSD technology, meaning the storage is expensive. It's very helpful to have the ability to move cold data, like a snapshot, out of the SSD.

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

We stay away from what is called a silo architecture. NetApp cluster enables us to do a volume move to different nodes and share the entire cluster with the various sub setups as well as using the most storage we have on ONTAP. We are able to tailor and cut out at a file level, block-level or power level, to our various clients.

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EK
Principal Storage Architect at Marvell Technology Group

NetApp AFF's flash technology offers great performance. This feature has been my go-to for managing data and ensuring speed and reliability.

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

The most valuable feature of NetApp AFF is the reputation of the company.

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

The most valuable feature for us is the speed of the read of the information. We can get the information as fast as possible. 

The user experience we are getting from All Flash is excellent. The performance is great. The administration is exactly the same as all the other storage in NetApp which is great. It is very good, we are so pleased.

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SP
IT Manager at TELUS Corporation
  • Deduplication
  • Compression
  • Speed
  • The user experience is fast.
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MV
Data Center Engineer at Belimed

The solution's most valuable features are pricing and speed.

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

I like the ability to snapshot, and the cloning features are valuable to us as well. I like that I can quickly and efficiently snapshot the data and move it to wherever I need to locally or in the cloud. Also, I know that when I take the snapshot that all of the data will be there and that it will be usable when I need to use it.

The reliability of NetAPP AFF is another valuable feature.

Blue XP has made it a single pane of glass so that we can see both on-premises and the cloud. We don't have to worry about going back and forth. It has made everything seamless in terms of the look and feel for the admins.

We use other NetApp Cloud Services solutions such as FSx, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, BlueXP, and Cloud Manager. We're just starting to dip our toes into FSxN. We run all of our student services, our general ledger, and all of our classroom-related items off of CVOs. It has been very reliable for us.

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SM
Systems Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

The simplicity of the data management in our current system is really easy, especially with the setting up of redundant volumes and SnapMirror. We have it mirrored over to an 8200 non-flash system. We use that for our DR SVMs, so if our SQL Cluster goes down, the other volumes take over, and we have no downtime because it drives patient treatment. It gets complicated fast. 

The data protection that we currently use is SnapMirrors and SnapVaults. We have our SnapVault off on an offsite with a FAS2552 system.

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

We found its Snapshots to be quite valuable. They allow us to restore data, in a timely fashion, that has accidentally been overwritten, modified, or deleted. That is the biggest feature. 

In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things.

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JB
Manager at Pramerica

The data protection and data management are very user-friendly. We use a software-based, disk-encryption and it comes with ONTAP and it's just very easy to implement and very easy to manage. In fact, you don't even have to manage it once it's working. 

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DB
Consulting Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
  • Simplicity
  • Their storage efficiency
  • Compression
  • Deduplication
  • Compaction
  • The ease of being able to move data around.
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MA
Chief Information Officer at Mt. San Rafael Hospital

The user experience has been absolutely amazing. We're about 80% virtualized on the desktop standpoint, so we do utilize VDI very highly. Using the All-Flash FAS solution, we had to basically determine that there was going to be some efficiencies and some speed as well, too, because you figure we're giving all of these health care users a virtual desktop, plus the utilization of All-Flash FAS, we need to make sure that their specific process is really rolling and moving in an efficient way, because the health care industry is a fast-paced organization. We're basically taking care of patients' lives. The technology that we bring has to be very efficient to provide the best patient care that we can have, and NetApp All-Flash FAS has really proven that point.

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KL
IT Operations Manager at Idaho State Insurance Fund

We enjoy the native built-in replication and the snapshot functionality (to take snapshots).

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

All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable.

Moreover, the simplified infrastructure has become easier to manage. We have a small team, so it's made it less difficult to keep things going. 

It's very intuitive to work with, and all the seamless tools and applications come together. Our team isn't big, so it's more manageable.

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

Since I know NetApp's systems, staying with NetApp was one of the best features. For example, Flash is the solution for latency. It reduces latency. The SQL server benefits from all-flash storage, and NetApp is among the most responsive.

I actually did major projects where we used NetApp storage for some government agencies, and we were able to keep the storage where the government or the customer is able to own the storage while using AWS as their computing. That part was helpful to the customer.

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DR
Storage Administrator at Sensa ehf.

NetApp Snapshots are one of its best features. 

Its multi-tenant purpose: You can have one method for many customers with no interaction to one another. 

The simplicity of making it work correctly is the most loved feature of it all.

AFF definitely helps simplify data management with unified data services across NAS environments.

The ONTAP system, when you know how it works, is really simple and intuitive. 

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

One of the biggest features, that we've been able to use the most, is spreading out across multiple environments using multiple protocols. Getting all flash in place for us has been really helpful in consolidating a lot of those environments down to a single network structure, as opposed to spreading way out, across fiber and copper. That's probably been the biggest thing.

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

The most valuable feature is its ability to handle high-intensity read and write operations. It works very well in terms of this.

We recently started using the volume encryption feature, which is helpful because there are some federal projects that require data at rest to be encrypted.

SnapMirror is another feature that we use, but we don't have MetroCluster set up. SnapMirror is used for replication across multiple geographical data centers. In these locations, we have products and we are exploring how to minimize the bandwidth while improving DR capabilities. With respect to the DR, we don't use the AFF in secondary nodes.

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

The most valuable features of this solution are SnapMirror and SnapVault. We are using SnapMirror in both of our data centers, and we're protecting our data with that. It is very easy to do. We are just beginning to utilize SnapVault.

We are using the AQuoS operating system, which allows us to get a lot more out of our AFF systems. It allows us to do storage tiering, which we love. You can also use the storage efficiencies to get a lot more data on the same platform.

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

The most valuable features of the solution are speed, performance, and reliability.

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

Solid-state drives are the most valuable feature. It has the speed now to do workloads. We're not bound by I/O from the drives. Also, we are just starting to hit the sweet point of the capacity of the solid-state drives versus spinning disk.

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BP
Storage Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
  • SnapMirror
  • SnapVault
  • FlexClone capabilities
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JM
Network Storage Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get.

And everything that we use on NetApp that can back up with the NetApp tools—SnapCenter, SnapDrive, and SnapManager—makes our local and our offsite backup very simple and very easy to do.

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

I have found the following features of NetApp AFF most valuable: Snapshot, snap clone, deduplication, and compaction. 

These features help with data protection. We host an exchange, so protecting our data and workloads is of prime importance.

This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud.

Initiating Snapshot is not time consuming, and it is not tedious. That's the reason why FlexClone and FlexCache help us with our protection care strategy.

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JG
Vice President Data Protection Strategy at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We like the fact that we also use it and therefore can tell our clients about it from an actual user perspective, not just a sales perspective. 

No one has a price-to-earnings ratio that NetApp has, everyone's is inflated. NetApp's is below market, NetApp pays a two and a half percent dividend, NetApp stock has doubled in the past 12 months. NetApp's largest customer is probably the federal government, which uses more than 50% of NetApp, from my understanding, if you subtract cloud, although I'm not privy to understand how much cloud the federal government uses that is actually NetApp under the covers.

The fact of the matter is, if you need the top-selling, performing, file serving appliance to deliver your files to your end-users, NetApp pretty much invented the technology. While no one really can take credit for serving files, NetApp has been doing it for more than 25 years. They do it better than anyone. They have utilities around that. They can do three things that their competition can do with multiple different solutions. I'm sure there are some obscure things that they do in vertical markets that their competition does better, however, I'm not going to comment on radiology or genetics or things of that. They do a lot of things, yet, not like a Swiss army knife. They do a lot of things and are the best of breed of products put together.

Other manufacturers claim simplicity. In fact, frankly, they do have an advantage in that regard, however, they don't have the functionality. If you were to compare one of those products to NetApp, head to head from a feature perspective, NetApp would wind up in the top 10.

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VK
Storage Architect and Engineer at United Airlines

The most valuable features are the ease of administration and configuration, as well as the speed of deployment.

Using snapshots at each stage of the configuration for applications means that administration is easier because you don't have to worry about messing it up. It makes things a lot smoother.

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

The most valuable feature is speed.

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FK
System Administrator at Bell Canada

The most valuable features are dedupe, compression, compaction, and the flexibility to offload your cold data to StorageGRID. This is the biggest key point, which drove our whole move to the NetApp AFF solution.

AFF has opened our eyes in a different light of how storage value works. In the past, we looked at it more as just a container where we could just dump our customer dBms and let the customers use it in terms of efficiency. Today, to be able to replicate that data to a different location, use that data to recover your environment or be able to have the flexibility with the solution and data. These are things which piqued our interest. It's something that we're willing to provide as a solution to our customers.

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

The most valuable features of this solution are snapshotting and cloning. For example, we make use of FlexClone. We're making more use of fabric pools, which is basically tiering of the storage. That way, instead of having just ONTAP with this expensive cost, if we want to roll off to something cheaper, like object storage, we can do that as well.

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

The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, so we get more out of our storage. The replication is also important.

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it_user351162 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Butchers Pet Care

It's great that software monitoring is all in one place instead of in different modules. It also provides us with real-time metrics.

We went from a FAS 2040 to an AFF 8040, and the evolution has blown us away. The deduplication technology that it gives us means that we are getting more storage for our money. It's a better value than disc drives.

Also, clustered Data ONTAP is valuable to us.

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Justin Mardis - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

The biggest benefit of NetApp AFF is the performance. 

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it_user527370 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Colorado Judicial Branch

I'd say the biggest one for us, other than just being SSDs, was the compression; inline compression, inline dedupe. Previously, we used dedupe but compression in dedupe has helped a lot, just to be able to maximize our storage, not having to buy more disk and items such as that. That is the biggest one we've seen so far.

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

The most valuable features are the low latency, high IOPS, and the ability to have a very small footprint with a large amount of data. The free controller upgrade program is a plus.

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

I'm from Germany, so we have lots of metro clusters. The ability to have two sides that are redundant across hundreds or thousands of kilometers is critical for our customers. We have several hundred customers with metro cluster systems, so that is one of the best features.

Our customers need reliability for the data. They don't want the data to go down if something happens to the data center. They need synchronous replication to another location, and the metro cluster is the only solution that works in these scenarios involving distances of 100 or 200 kilometers. 

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

The most valuable features for us are controlling the snapshots, the ease of reverting back, and scheduling.

NetApp AFF is very good at cleaning up your storage.

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

The most valuable features of this solution are the deduplication and the ability to move data to different clouds. We have been using Cloud Sync and Cloud Volumes, and we have moved four petabytes using Cloud Sync.

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it_user1035522 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator with 1,001-5,000 employees

Having separate storage virtual machines with completely different setups for NFS and Windows solves problems the FAS has when the domain controllers are unreachable.

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

We like the high security, self-encrypting drives, and the NVMe.

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RC
Head of IT at Inacap
  • The most valuable feature is the backup, which is fast.
  • The data analytics are an incredible tool.
  • The equipment is superior quality.
  • If you need a replacement part, they will provide it.
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AM
Senior storage engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are high performance and encryption. It also provides aggregate level dedupe.

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it_user750609 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Information Systems Engineer at Varian Medical Systems
  • The compression
  • Dedupe
  • The speed

With the ONTAP, the flexibility is also a nice feature.

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it_user750723 - PeerSpot reviewer
It Manager at HSBC
  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Scalability

They're important because it's critical user data. As a global bank we need to make sure that users' data is accessible at all times; that there's no outage window or things like that. Performance is key.

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

I like the speed and that it's easy to set up. We are now using the compression and the dedupe, which is very useful in saving a lot of data space.

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

The deduplication is the most valuable feature. When you have multiple systems with almost the same data, the deduplication helps save on capacity. It is why the box can be overprovisioned. This is very useful in the case where immediate space is required for an application or teams. It also provides good efficiency when provisioning deduplication compression. These efficiencies are very useful compared to other products.

AFF has helped simplify data management with unified data infrastructure (UDI) across SAN and NAS environments. This is very important. Nowadays, UDI is gaining market share for NetApp. 

Its virtualization knowledge is very useful. Also, the Active IQ technology of NetApp is very useful, which uses AI to give suggestions to customers.

The ONTAP data management software has simplified our clients' operations to an extent. The auto support feature gives unique notifications, which simplifies the management. Plus, there have been enhancements in the GUI compared to previous versions, which has simplified things. 

We use synchronous replication with SnapMirror. We can failover and failback very easily. We can failover the site to another, which is good.

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

The most valuable features are the ease of use and performance.

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

They have come up with good back-end architecture. The features are the same as NetApp ONTAP. The only change is all-flash. There are no 7k, 10k, or 15k drives, only flash drives.

My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance.

We are very happy with the user experience from the all-flash array. Because their usual latency for the application depends on the critical application - they used to see four-millisecond latency with the non-all-flash array - with the all-flash array, they don't even see microseconds of latency. They might see microseconds, but that is not impactful.

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

The most valuable features are the performance, speed, and that it is easy to manage. The most important one is performance. We use it for SQL, Oracle and SAP.

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

Multi-platform support is one of the most valuable features. It has lots of data protection solutions and cool new features, such as vol moves and FlexCloning. That's very useful for database refreshes.

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it_user352176 - PeerSpot reviewer
Core Infrastructure Manager at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Snapshot, SnapMirror, FlexClone, and deduplication are features we use a lot of and which are valuable to us. We're also using light compression, which is a new thing on the AFF.

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

Every storage platform is a good product.

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

It is easy to manage data through the GUI by using Active IQ and the unified manager.

Being a non-storage guy, I think that it was quite easy for me to pick things up and learn this solution. They way they are built is really good when it comes to people who want to start fresh. cDOT is a really good OS.

The most valuable feature is the performance.

This solution is getting cheaper over time.

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PH
Technical Lead at USAF

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

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

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

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

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

The valuable features are the fabric pool. We are taking our cold data and pumping it straight into an estuary bucket. Also, efficiency. We're getting about two and a half times upwards of data efficiency through compaction, compression, deduplication, and it's size. When we refreshed from two or three racks of spinning discs down into 5U of rack space, it not only saved us a whole heap of costs in our data center environment but also it's nice to be green. The power savings alone equated to be about 50 tons of CO2 a year that we no longer emit. It's a big game changer.

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

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DS
Systems Administrator at Anthc

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

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it_user750651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Leads Systems Engineer at Tuscon Medical Center

The capabilities of ONTAP is what drives me towards NetApp.

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

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it_user527289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Data Storage Administrator at Denver Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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it_user750657 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Enterprise Services at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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EA
Senior Systems Administrator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.
View full review »
PH
Executive director IT Systems at MemorialCare Health System
  • Speed
  • Reliability
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ST
Consulting Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  1. The OS running on top of it is ONTAP. The user experience is a breeze at the fingertips with ONTAP.
  2. The efficiency ratio.
  3. The Active IQ feature is a productive mechanism that automatically collects reports and users' statuses.
  4. The initial deployment is completely GUI-based.
View full review »
AB
Senior Manager of Product and Services at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the efficiencies that all-flash brings. It helps us reduce costs and be competitive in the market. It's quite easy to operate and monitor, to do business as usual.

Whatever they talk about it delivers. It's fast, it's efficient, it's agile.

With the new version, they have the FabricPool which works for me. I can extend the hyperscaler storage. The features we require today are present in ONTAP.

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

We have some specific workloads that are pretty demanding that struggle on spinning media. We're looking to leverage All Flash FAS to meet the workload demands of some of our real high IO clients. That's primarily why we're looking at it.

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

We use it for our high-performance requirement, low-latency requirement databases. That's at the core of the retail application; what we've connected are non-virtualized AIX databases running Oracle and DB2.

The valuable features are the high performance and low latency that the retail application requires.

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

For me, the most valuable feature it has been the capability to provide fast VDI services for our call center. In North Carolina, we get some harsh winters, a lot of ice; not really snow, but some ice. Call center workers can't come in to work. We still need to field the calls when they come in. With the VDI platform, we're allowed to let them use their home computers to call in and use the services like they were in the office. The low latency that the all-flash provides, allows for the actual call center software to work flawlessly. It's like they are in the office and it's been working out great.

It's been a great product in my quiver.

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AS
Solution Architect at Prow

The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup. 

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

The most valuable feature on AFF, for me as a user, is one of the most basic NetApp features, which just:

A user comes to you and says, "I need more space." 

"Okay, here, you have more space." 

I don't have to move things around. I don't have to deal with other systems. It's just so nice. 

Other things that have been really useful, of course, are the clustering features and being able to stay online during failovers and code upgrades; and just being able to seamlessly do all sorts of movement of data without having to disrupt end-users' ability to get to those files. And we can take advantage of new shelves, new hardware, upgrade in place. It's kind of magic when it comes to doing those sorts of things.

The simplicity of AFF with regards to data management and data protection — I actually split those two up. It's really easy to protect your data with AFF. You can set up SnapMirror in a matter of seconds and have all your data just shoot over to another data center super quickly.

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SS
Data Delivery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Inline deduplication
  • Compaction
  • I've seen them compress it a lot, which provides efficiency.

These features are missing from other products in market.

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

It would primarily be speed. That's why we got it. Storage is costly but it's very, very fast. Very efficient, very fast.

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SP
Technical manager at Macrovention

The most valuable features are the low latency and high-performance. Some of our customers are dealing with seismic data from the oil & gas industry, so they need data extracted and transported to the application faster. That's one reason we bring in All Flash.

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

It has to be the ONTAP System Manager. It is really easy to use and the interface is really clean. We are running 9.2 at the moment, and I have been able to configure it without a lot of assistance from the NetApp technical team.

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

The fact that we can move forward, increase capacity, update hardware, without having to take an outage.

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

With All Flash, the benefit we have seen is the real estate in the data center has really shrunk by leaps and bounds. We went from having a huge rack full to provide about 10 TBs of storage to using just two shelves to provide 72 TBs of storage with solid state. It saves a lot of power and adds to the IOPS that can be serviced.

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

All-flash performance and density are two important things for us. In terms of performance, we have a humongous database. Before this solution, we had a lot of performance issues. With this tool, we were able to nail them down to at least 20-30% performance gain. In terms of density, I don't have the numbers, but it is definitely better than the older disk-based solutions.

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

The best feature is just for databases; the speed that we can use for all of our database, Oracle and SQL. For example, testing with our programmers, testing the systems; as far as the speed of getting to the database, getting their data back to their applications.

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it_user527154 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Network Operations at Vornado

One of the things that we like is the sub-millisecond latency that we find, especially with SQL and Exchange. Everything's working faster than it did on our previous unit.

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

I liked the performance; it's fast. We use it for Citrix XenApp profiles and we would always have issues in the past from spinning disk with lagging profiles. They'd be slow to log in, which impacted end users. Since we've been using the FAS solution, it's been zero down time, very good response, no issues whatsoever.

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

AFF works well for VMware storage.

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

The product suffices and works.

The product is scalable.

The stability has been very good over the years. 

Technical support has been okay.

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

AFF gives us a number of really valuable features. It ranges from a full flash to all-flash product. So, the speed and resources that we get from AFFs is just unparalleled in storage environments. Also, we utilize all the OCR features that AFF gives and has built into its ONTAP environment, like dedupe, snapshotting, data compression, and the number of the other things. 

Using System Manager for green management or command line interface, we have a single point for managing the cluster. It is much easier to manage. It is very seamless. The product is robust and solid.

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

Speed is the most valuable feature. It is all-flash, so it is fast.

It simplifies since it is integrated with the other platforms as well. It's maintainable; it does not take too much to maintain the stuff. Creating users and sessions is easy on it.

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DM
IT Director at a legal firm

The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options.

The solution's data protection and management are as simple as you can hope for. On the data protection side, we have a gigabit connection to our disaster recovery center and we replicate snapshots with SnapMirror hourly. This gives us a really good way to roll things back if we need to but have everything offsite at the same time.

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it_user750564 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Admin 3 at Grant Ham University

The most valuable feature is the support. If we have any issues, we can call into NetApp and their support is really good.

Speed and reliability of the data's access is the main reason why we went with All Flash. We mainly use All Flash for file storage.

With the new all solid state, it has really good performance.

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

I would say the consistency with the ONTAP versions and the speed and performance from the flash.

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

It promises to deliver lower-latency throughput to our database servers. We're pretty confident that we can take advantage because we've built out a new, lower-latency network. To date, we've migrated one SQL server workload, a fairly large one, on to it. We haven't really put it through its paces yet, but we like what we see so far.

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

Performance; that's the whole reason we use it. We have both FAS and AFF. Everything on our production site's running on AFF. That's the pure and simple reason: we need the flash, we need the IOPS. That's what it gives us.

I've had no issues with it. As a storage admin, it makes my job easy.

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it_user527271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Exchange Administrator at Albuquerque Public Schools

Speed is obviously one of the most valuable features, with IOPS being the most important for certain applications: database applications and so on; performance with certain applications that has blown away the benchmarks set by the providers.

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it_user346323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Manager at OUTSCALE

Right now, it’s the ability to have full flash based solution with NFS that's most valuable for us. Because Pure Storage does not offer that, only block storage, we need NFS for our services to work.

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PS
Storage Administrator

The tool's most valuable feature is SVM. I also like the speed and response of the filers. 

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AH
Storage Architect

The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency. 

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

Besides for the speed, one of the most valuable features that the AFF gives me is the robust hardware that it has. It's simplistic. It deploys very easily. It's already built from the factory to take advantage of the all-flash array.

I would describe the user experience of the solution as very simplistic. There's a very easy GUI to use, and then when you need to get very, very detailed, you have a robust command line that you could do anything you want with to enhance performance for your solutions. Really what we're using the AFF for is solely for speed. We really need the power of the backbone and the speed of the disks because we have to move so much data.

Setting up and provisioning enterprise applications take minutes. It's just not difficult. We only have to use the GUI, curate the spaces, and go. I've set up entire NetApp systems in a morning.

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

Being able to keep the system up - five nines are better - so I have that system online and have that data available to our customers. And the new flash stuff is really fast.

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

The performance is the most valuable feature.

The primary use cases for our All Flash storage system are primarily server virtualization and data storage for unstructured storage. We use it for both block storage and file storage.

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it_user750576 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Lower latency
  • Easier to manage with the clustered system and everything with the newest ONTAP 9.
  • Also it has the WAN acceleration between locations, which sped up our replication as well.
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it_user527109 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Systems Admin at Greater Harris County

Support's good. The product seems reliable. The uptime is good. We haven't had any major failures or anything like that. It runs all of our SAN VMware infrastructure with no problems, really.

The tools that it has, such as OnCommand Manager and so on, they're helpful if you're not a CLI type of person. I actually like the CLI as well. They're both pretty easy to navigate, especially with the cluster mode. You can do the tab completions and everything in CLI now. That helps you to navigate through otherwise long commands.

SnapMirror, all the Snap technology, is pretty cool. You can do SnapMirror, the vault and everything like that.

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

The most valuable features are the deduplication and compression, along with NetApp's Snapshot technology.

I'm looking forward to the compaction feature after the code upgrade in a few months.

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

The most valuable features are that it's all flash and it's super fast. The only problem is, it's a little too fast in some situations. It's actually causing problems with our applications because it's too fast.

Other than that, it's great because it gives us enough IOPS to manage our whole system. Except for that one, it works great.

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it_user527412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Unix Administrator at Synopsys

The important features are space savings, deduplication, compression and compaction. By enabling the deduplication, we save a lot of space, because we use it for VDA. We also see some performance improvement compared to the SAS spinning disks.

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

It's an all-flash array and it integrates with the NAS solutions we use; that's a key part. We were looking at the different arrays. For example, SolidFire doesn't integrate with the NAS. Our solution mainly focuses on the NAS part of it, so we we're looking for a high-performance array. AFF basically is geared to those needs, apart from the base services which come with the NetApp product.

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

The most valuable features are the speed and the predictable performance. Compared to the spinning disk, I don't have to worry about IOPS anymore. I can rely on the IOPS being there. I can worry about CPU now. It's one less thing I have to worry about as far as performance.

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

We decided to use the All-Flash because of speed. Most of the time, when we looked at the SAP database, what we found was, by using the All-Flash, we got almost 100% improvement on our jobs.

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

Backups are the most valuable feature, because our company has very intensive backups; we need it forever. They have to be fast, so we cannot keep them on tapes.

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

ONTAP A3 was huge for me because it introduced non-disruptive upgrades, which is imperative in the retail business.

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RS
System Administrator at ON Semiconductor Phils. Inc.

The features that I found most valuable are SnapMirror and SnapVault; these provide DR and backup for data redundancy. The High Availability and Cluster-mode Setup are also very useful.

View full review »
DB
Technical Director at CUSTOMERTIMES CORP
  • SAN/NAS scale out
  • Online data migration
  • Data compaction
  • Application integration
  • Cloning
  • Snapshots
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it_user732744 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Dhaka Bank Limited
  1. The Snap: including the Snapshot and SnapMirror. They are good for taking a copy of production, which can be used for reporting, contingency, backup, etc.
  2. Scripting: NetApp is actually more ONTAP. It has a very good command-line interface, which is user-friendly to system administrators when implementing automation using scripting. 
View full review »
it_user750711 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Outfront Media

Ease of use. To integrate it into our virtual environment is very easy, the integration with VMware is very nice. I think it's better than other vendors have. It makes it easy, even for people who aren't familiar with NetApp, to use. For example, a virtual administrator or Windows administrators who just come to it and need to provision a virtual machine that could use the VSE easily, as opposed to having to know how to connect this and that, specifically.

Also, for disaster recovery, the SnapMirror; FlexClone for being able to do testing on the fly is pretty awesome. Being able to do tests very quickly, and within seconds have a clone up that you can attach to your virtual environment; and you can even have it automated, so you don't even have to do too much of the work.

To be able to have that flexibility, do testing, do failover, disaster recovery testing, and restores with snaps that are super easy.

View full review »
it_user750630 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Age Of Learning

For us, it'd have to be the inline compression that it does and the deduplication. We're able to run lots of copies of different instances, because we not only use it for databases, but we use it to copy other VMs that we run as well. The fact that we can make duplicate copies and save a lot of space is very valuable.

Some of the new features that are coming out with FabricPool are really exciting for us. The ability to be able to move cold data off to S3 bucket and do the tiering and the back-end, versus trying to do it with the customers or with our different departments. We have to tell them, "Hey, you need to archive this stuff. It's been over a year." We're really excited to see the FabricPool feature on AFF A300.

It's fast, all the other features that it come with it, with the snapshots and all that, it's just great.

View full review »
it_user750759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ceo at Enterprise Computing
  • The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities.
  • It is very easy to manage.
View full review »
it_user750669 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Admin at Commonwealth Of Kentucky :Cot
  • Performance
  • Integration into the ONTAP
  • The cost of the product itself

With the compression and dedupe, it's not necessarily a one-to-one gigabyte for gigabyte, where the compression and the dedupe allow you to buy a lot less, but to obtain a lot more storage capacity at the same time, hence getting the performance of SSD but they are not impacted by the two components of dedupe and compression. In summary, they don't get in the way of the performance of the product.

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

The most valuable feature is the performance; the latency with our high-IO database systems.

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it_user527091 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Sinclair Oil

We're changing over all of our older models to the new FAS stuff, the AFF especially, because we want high performance, high availability for VDI environments. We're having some pretty severe bottlenecks on spinning disk with VDI, of course. We're changing over almost all of our sites to the AFF to get the performance that we need for the VDI environment.

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

When I’m looking at a vendor to work with, I'll be blunt: I don't want to worry about it. I don't have to deal with it. I don't want to work with it a whole lot. I'd like it to be, "I have a use for it and I want it to do that". I don't want to have to do a lot of configuration, tweaking or perpetual updates and patches. NetApp, specifically, was very, very good about one-time patches, no-downtime patches. They work well from a it-just-works standpoint. I can't always say that about all my vendors.

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

The speed and stability are the two most valuable features. I've definitely have seen a huge increase in speed and bandwidth from when we've put it in production; it's been great.

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

It uses multiple protocols and has all the implementation protocols that other products do not. We use CIFS.

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it_user351144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Grand Consult
  • Clustered Data ONTAP
  • Snapshot implementation for SAP
View full review »
PY
Storage Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the ease of management. You just set it and you don't have to worry about it.

View full review »
AD
Senior Storage Engineer at HYUNDAI AUTOEVER AMERICA

One of the main features that differentiate AFF from the FAS products, or some other technologies used, is the footprint of these arrays are significantly smaller than the traditional ones. Also, the performance that you get to these new arrays is really significant. You can see a huge difference there. By switching to it, we can achieve more storage performance and efficiency as well as in the long run lower down some of the TCOs due to reducing the footprint.

The one thing about NetApp products is they've been using the same operating system among all of their products, e.g., FAS or AFF. That feature makes it easier to manage and operate those environments because you don't really need to learn the whole new things or train all your engineers on new technology. Overall, it helps with the operations. It's not that complicated. It's easy to manage and operate.

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

I think that the DR applications are the most valuable, including Snapshots and SnapMirror. They are one of the market leaders in this regard. It is a very solid platform that has been in the market for a while.

View full review »
RC
Head of IT at Inacap
  • Its incredible performance
  • Stability
  • Proactiveness for possible errors
  • Powerful tools for management.
View full review »
ZM
Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • NetApp AFF is based on Unix, which makes it secure.
  • The file-based protocol supports NFS and CIFS.
  • Capacity and latency with the AFF are good. We haven't seen a delay of latency nor performance issues. No issues have been recorded from the client so far.
View full review »
MW
Storage Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
  • Space savings
  • Performance
  • Deduplication
  • Compression
View full review »
it_user750645 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast.

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

Some of the best things about AFF are that it integrates seamlessly with what we're used to for FAS as well. We can use the same ecosystem, OnCommand Unified Manager, but get the performance, the raw performance of flash. It's great that way.

I think that's the most important thing, the integration with the existing features that we already have and existing management systems. Among those features are the ability to do SnapMirror or SnapVault for data resiliency and backup. The other features are the data efficiencies, compaction and inline dedup compression, that let us use it more efficiently too. Those are huge on the list.

View full review »
it_user652587 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Performance
  • Density per rack unit from the capacity perspective with some of the other drives.
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it_user750534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it.

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

The most valuable feature is not having to worry about whether I assign the right platform to a workload. I can basically put it on there, knowing that I gave it all that it can get. If I gave it too much, I can move it off.

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it_user527214 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at College board

For sure, the most valuable features are the compression and dedupe on there. We gain so much more back than we thought we were going to get; that was one of the biggest things. I don't have to worry about any kind of disk utilization problems because of the spindles or anything; that's what we've always experienced.

View full review »
it_user527334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at American Health Network

NetApp All Flash FAS:

The speed and low latency are the most valuable features. My customers or users noticed an improvement in our EMR application, once we moved our SQL environment over to the AFF.

I think the OnCommand System Manager has been excellent. I like the newer version myself. We're not on ONTAP 9 yet, but I do love 8.3.

Pure Storage M20:

It's just simple. There's no clustering. You take that complexity away from NetApp, you get rid of the clustering. It’s a dual-node controller system. You can have dual or single aggregates, whatever, the same thing. But they don't do clustering. If you wanted to mirror that data off, you have to purchase another Pure, plug it into the expansion port and basically mirror between platforms. Whereas in the ONTAP, your data is clustered, you've got HA failover. You still have HA failover in Pure, but it is just on the controller only.

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

All Flash FAS:

One of the most valuable features is the very low latency, especially when it comes to the databases, very demanding applications. Also I like the very small form factor, compared with the older models; what used to take seven or eight racks now use four. It's just amazing. The savings in power, cooling, and everything else is just incredible.

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

The GUI that does the daily maintenance and system manager with SnapMirror and deduplication are very useful for us.

We used the system manager for developed distribution.

Also, the latencies are extremely low, below 0.5 milliseconds.

View full review »
it_user351210 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
  • Clustered Data ONTAP 8.3.1
  • Great storage device
  • It can handle higher workloads and has faster response times.

The function I like best on the NetApp cluster is the ability to move from a switchless cluster setup to a switched cluster setup without any impact on performance or availability. We did this recently during a normal workday with zero impact -- quite impressive, I must say.

View full review »
SB
Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most important features are the IOPS and the ease of the ONTAP manageability.

The deduplicate process is performed in the cache before it goes to storage, which means that we don't use as much storage.

The versatility of NetApp is what makes it really nice.

View full review »
CO
IT Manager at Universo Online

It has a really useful, friendly console.

The dedupe gives us more IOPS for more reliance equipment and better performance.

View full review »
RA
Storage Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's fast and reliable.

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

Data efficiency is the most valuable feature of NetApp.

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it_user527064 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at Intalock Technologies

Scalability, really, for us. We have a lot of customers who purchase other companies and they need scalability; the NetApp solutions really lend themselves to that. 

I think for us the pricing point was pretty important too. In Australia, we find that selling solutions now, the features and functions are one thing, but the price point is pretty important as well, and NetApp provides a good price point.

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

Its integration with SnapManager products, really, is the main reason that we've stuck with it. Without having that integration it wouldn't allow our Exchange team to operate without us.

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it_user750705 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at George Fox University

Usability, in general. Currently, just basic functionality and consistency is all we really aim for.

View full review »
it_user748317 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Architect at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Deduplication
  • Compressions
  • Simpler management
  • The performance is great.
View full review »
EM
Systems Mgr at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Two functions are valuable for us:

  • Snapshot: We are able to replicate/clone production environments to test the SW version up (e.g. the Oracle Financials upgrades).
  • MetroCluster: Our disaster recovery is based on two active-active sites. The MetroCluster feature allowed us to continue our operations (without business interruption) when we stopped one of the sites.

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

View full review »
it_user527340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Technical Lead at Mercadolibre.com

What we like is the performance of the equipment. It's really much better than hybrid aggregate or machines with flash cache. We have been using the FAS series for a long time and it's still performing well. First we started with 7-Mode. Then we moved our databases to clustered data ONTAP. Today we have more than 24 nodes; we have a lot of machines working in cluster mode with all activities on site. It works perfectly.

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

The input/output is the most valuable feature. When you have high-availability applications that need high IOPS, it's kind of a no-brainer to have an AFF. We're using it for some SQL databases now, and a VDI solution.

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

The most valuable feature is the performance that we got out of it. With a previous solution, we had some latency issues and performance issues. When we got the FAS All Flash Array, that technology took care of those issues that we had, those bottlenecks.

View full review »
it_user352293 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Coordinator Storage/Backup at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • SnapMirror
  • Migration abilities
  • Easy backup solution
  • Snapshot ability
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it_user352155 - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT Infrastructure Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For us in the health care sector, the most valuable feature is quality of service because we're able to stop the workloads from taking over other workloads that are more important.

We have storage virtual machines at work, so we're able to segregate and distinguish between different workloads. I think local HFL might as well form the natural process side of things, which is an improvement from 7-Mode.

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

Clustered Data ONTAP 8.3b3 is valuable. Also, valuable is the easy migration between our old NetApp solution and this one. It was painless, as there was no downtime and we saw immediate results.

View full review »
AB
Consultor and Co-founder at OS4IT

The cloning and snapshot features are the most valuable. With snapshot backup, we can clone a big database in minutes. We take a lot of snapshots for clients in different environments.

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

The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of technical support.

This is a very reliable solution in terms of keeping the system online.

View full review »
TF
Senior Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Compaction
  • Single-instance storage
  • Its compression features
View full review »
it_user522096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at LDS church

Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed.

I like what they're doing with their management tools. It makes it really easy to manage them. They're always improving and going with those. It's been really great, especially with the APIs. We can use them to make our calls and to manage it. It's been good for us.

View full review »
it_user750702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior It Solutions Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
  • High performance
  • Good improvement in IOPS
  • Less latency
  • Easy to manage
View full review »
it_user750582 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineering Engineer at Cleveland Clinic

Probably the biggest single thing would be the high availability options, because it's medical treatment, so it's got to be pretty much up - because we do treatment with it.

Performance is excellent. In fact, it's so fast that we're not really even taxing it all that much.

View full review »
it_user750639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Storage Engineer at Providance Health Services

While our VDI people are storing user profiles, we make good use of single name space. With application driven ride, VDI has driven us to use NetApp because they needed a single name space and there's just no vendor on the market that can do single name space with All Flash.

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

The most valuable features are speed, latency, and throughput. We have a few workloads where we need speed, high throughput, and fast response time. We have some OLTP applications. It is very useful for that environment.

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it_user527103 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at Desire 2 Learn Inc

For the All Flash FAS, performance is the number one feature, above the reliability and scalability. First of all, the All Flash FAS is extremely fast. We're serving something in the neighborhood of a trillion transactions per month in SQL. We are getting great performance, submillisecond. As far as scalability, we can extend to new nodes and move data around at will. It's been a really good solution.

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

The most valuable feature is the speed. Quite frankly, we got a smoking deal on it. We like the integration with UCS. With the number of transactions we use, using NFS mounts has not proved successful in the past. AFF definitely has some advantages for running database transactions.

SnapMirroring is also valuable. Previously, we’ve just had localized storage in the servers with RAID 5 and we’d just run backups. Having SnapMirrors is going to be awesome. It also gives us the opportunity to virtualize the database. We can just snapshot the things. When one dies, rather than try to do a restore, we can just pull out the latest snapshot and let replication catch up from there.

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

I would say the speed is the most valuable feature; the performance. It's a lot faster than any other drives out there.

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

It's the fastest that we can get through NetApp. We're deploying all these high-demanding applications and it's the best of the best, so of course we went with it, being a big NetApp customer.

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

The most valuable features are inline deduplication and compression.

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

For me it’s important that my flash system is a part of the NetApp storage system. It’s just an extension of it. My guys can use the same comments, the same tools, the same application integration as they did before. The VDI migration for example, my VDI guy doesn’t change anything. That’s a really good offer for us because then all the tools we can reuse all the integration. It’s just another disk wipe that’s there and that, for me, is the most important reason.

Flash is, for us, a default for databases, VDI, and VMware. We still have some other disks which we bought two years ago, so we migrate step by step. The VDI was the nicest to start with because their benefits were the highest as we got unpredicted workloads for the VDI’s and that is very well handled by the flash.

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

We find the flexibility of having the access protocols all in one box and clustered Data ONTAP to be the most valuable features.

It's quite simple to install and fast to integrate into existing ecosystems. Also, it's very easy to handle the monitoring on an enterprise grade.

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

The features most valuable to us are--

  • A-SIS deduplication
  • vServer DR, which is a new feature in v8.3.1
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it_user331812 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Systems Integrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The speed, we have multiple apps with high IO requirements (Hadoop, Mongo, and some monitoring tools), we’re using our monitoring tools to spin up and spin down our environment.

View full review »
SS
System Administrator at a government with 201-500 employees

It has a good interface. Its configuration and flexibility are also good.

View full review »
JS
Senior in technology and engineer at a marketing services firm
  • Ease of use
  • Availability
View full review »
it_user527397 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at University of Iowa

The valuable feature for us was, we started our VMware solution on a mid-tier NetApp solution. When we went to All Flash FAS our changes went form about a 5 or 10 millisecond response time to 1 millisecond. The systems actually started acting like real computers, not like a virtual system.

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it_user731157 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Business Partner at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The Flash component for performance
  • The management
  • ONTAP
  • The features that ONTAP now has with the availability to work with the cloud.
View full review »
it_user750561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin at Bay View Financial Trading
  • Easy to manage.
  • It's quick. It's very fast.
  • We've been getting something like 27-to-1 compression, so it's been really good.
View full review »
it_user750672 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Sys Admin at a tech services company
  • The speed
  • Performance
  • The storage efficiency is very good.
  • We use the SnapMirror for disaster recovery, though not for tiering.
View full review »
it_user351189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Architect at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Clustered Data ONTAP

Low latency

My company uses mostly NetApp products, so I have existing knowledge of using their products.

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it_user351153 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator for Storage and Virtualization at Eurofins
  • Clustered Data ONTAP
  • Data recovery
  • Protection
View full review »
it_user351150 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Specialist at Fujitsu Sweden AB

It’s really reliable and fast. My customers have several other NetApp systems, but here they really needed the low latency.

Also, clustered Data ONTAP is valuable.

View full review »
SL
Systems Engineer Manager at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
  • Uptime
  • Ease of use
View full review »
BT
CTO at Pronet Security
  • Price/performance
  • High availability
View full review »
it_user527295 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Storage Administrator at Mentor Graphics

At this point, performance is the most valuable feature. We're just putting it into production, on a pretty heavy performance-intensive workload. So far, its performed exactly how we wanted it to. Performance is the key on that particular device.

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

The most valuable thing I have seen since we've got it is that predictable performance has stayed below a millisecond, which was not the experience we've had with spinning disk. So, I was looking forward to that coming in and giving my customers predictable performance, and it’s proven to be doing that for us.

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

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

It is cost-effective flash for us. It's a platform that we've used for quite a few years. We've been NetApp customers for probably about eight years right now. You don't have to go in and re-learn any kind of new interface; it's using basically the same interface. Provisioning is ultra-fast and it just works.

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

For us, the most valuable features were the SnapMirroring, deduplication, and inline compression. Now with 9.0, the compaction system, that's actually the big thing that sold us on it besides just the price in general. It was a very well-priced system for what we got. The data dedupe and inline, we're getting substantial rates. I think it's about 60-65% in general. That's a massive savings over what you would get if you didn't have any of that stuff.

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it_user353850 - PeerSpot reviewer
System specialist UNIX/SAN with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Speed
  • Performance
  • Low latency
View full review »
it_user353979 - PeerSpot reviewer
First ICT manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature for us completely depends on the workload. We've run it on various environments, including VMware. We were able to migrate to VMware with clustered Data ONTAP. That was important for us.

View full review »
TC
Data Center Engineer at a non-profit

The most valuable features are

  • the IO performance that we get
  • the cluster part 
  • the increased workload and performance with the SSDs.

And the CLI portion of ONTAP, in general, is much easier to use.

View full review »
it_user750699 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Storage Admin at General Dynamics
  • Performance
  • Block storage
View full review »
it_user531243 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Dedupe (cost saving): We were able to achieve a lot more capacity than expected.

View full review »
it_user522096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at LDS church

I like that they keep the same operating system as they do for all of their stuff, so you learn all their platforms. It's easy to learn and user friendly.

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

The most valuable feature is how user friendly it is. For somebody in my position, I have to be able to bring the system up quickly, efficiently, and also shut it down, if there's a power outage, quickly and efficiently, without having troubles. It also supports VMware. That's what we use, but we use the NetApp as our filer; it’s our only filer.

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

The most valuable feature is the low-latency, high-performance utilizations of the system; being able to deliver a high-tier storage performance for high-impacting customer applications.

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

The most valuable feature is the IOPS speed, everything that comes with it. It's just a great platform to be on, for example, with VMDK files, data stores, and VMs in general. Users say things like, "What happened? How come it's so fast. What did you do different?"

All the features that we were sold and told about, they all work; it's been good.

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

It's fast. That's all it needs to be is fast.

We use it for virtualization of the Xen desktops and also our VMware systems. That's it.

View full review »
MT
Infrastructure and Services Presales Consultant at I.D. GRUP S.A.
  • Deduplication
  • SnapManager
  • Autosupport.
View full review »
CW
Sys Admin at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The replication would be one of the most valuable features. That's not just on the All Flash FAS, but that's a big one. The performance is also good.

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

The most valuable feature is the ability to do QoS and keep customers from harming other customers in that solution.

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it_user750633 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin
  • Performance
  • Contingency, failover, and data recovery
  • It's a good vendor.

They have always been really supportive, easy to get ahold of, and easy to work with.

The primary use case for All Flash is improved performance.

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

The scale up version of it is the most valuable feature. You can go to 24 nodes, which is very cool. We are primarily using VMware environment. We use it for VMware data source for our hosting customers. We have 32 petabytes of data on NetApp's storage, so we definitely use it for primary storage.

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

We have a vast NetApp experience, so the fact that it can be managed like the others is great. It has the most consistent performance for storage for VMware. We were also specifically looking for an all-flash system.

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it_user1013601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at ICTeam

Reliability. flexibility and multi tenant. we host 20 client virtual dc on our a200.

I scaled out our previous 2 node cdot cluster on the fly by adding cluster's switches and then the 2 node a200, after that data migration between fas 2554 and a200 was made non disruptively and on business time.

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

It is very user friendly. Someone in my position needs to be able to bring up and shut down the system quickly, efficiently, and shut it down if there's a power outage quickly and efficiently without having trouble. It also supports VMware, which is what we use; but we use the NetApp as our only filer.

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

The performance is probably the most valuable feature. It allows us to meet our customer's needs, being able to provide that level of performance that they need for their workloads.

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it_user527106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at Equifax

The most valuable features are cost, performance and usability. NetApp’s really good with usability; to get it up and running quickly and usable.

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

The ability to recover your data really fast is valuable, as is the availability and accessibility of the data.

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

The speed is really the most important feature for us. The SnapManager feature is also very important.

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

Hands down, the most valuable feature is the speed of flash.

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

The most valuable features are that it runs Data ONTAP, which is compatible with the whole Data Fabric, and its absolute performance.

Simplicity is a very key aspect of the system because you can configure everything with the System Manager. It does most of the complicated things behind your back, so you don't have to handle them. Since it integrates with the Data Fabric, it's very simple to set up a data protection scheme.

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

Speed, reliability, ease of use are the most valuable features. 

The overall latency in your environment is very good. 

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

The simplicity around data protection and data management is very good. We use SnapVault for data protection which works very well. SnapMirror is also good. We mainly use the command line a lot, so we don't tend to use many provisioning tools.

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it_user797502 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The speed is important; no more problems caused by high latency. 

MetroCluster provides business continuity and is a critical part of our contingency setup. 

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

With any new technology, it comes down to the user experience. Once the system is up and running, I feel that the user experience itself sets it above several of the other competitors.

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

The most valuable features are the speed and performance for our transactional workloads for our databases. We saw it in terms of our workloads for our customers for our products that demanded high-performance transactions for, specifically, our Microsoft SQL databases. 

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it_user750678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Admin
  1. Performance
  2. We need Snapshot.
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it_user750528 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
it_user472458 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • CIFS (stable solution)
  • Ability to support multiple protocols
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it_user352125 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix & Storage Manager at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature of AFF is that it has a very fast response time. This is a very crucial performance for us.

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it_user550308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Analyst at Ativas Data Center

Snapshot, de-duplication and the efficiency; the storage part and the efficiency.

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

The most valuable feature of the product is its performance; we haven't really put it to the test yet, but just overall performance and taking our existing workload and smashing it really.

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

IO Performance.

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

I have found three main features to be valuable:

Ease of use: Business continuity solutions are not typically so easy to manage from a storage admin prospective

Storage Efficiency: Inline compression, inline reduplication, and other inline features allow space-saving without losing performance

Performance: All flash disks allow extreme performance at low latency

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

With the FAS, the most valuable features are the snap capability and remote snap.

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

The most valuable features for us are the secure multi-tenancy to Data ONTAP and High Availability built into Data ONTAP that provides almost no downtime.

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

MetroCluster functions, SnapMirror functionality, and ease-of-use are the most valuable functions for us.

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

The flash pool and flash cache features are most valuable to us because they automate storage tiering combine HDDs and SSDs.

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RR
COO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Its efficiency and scalability are the most valuable features.

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

SnapMirror is definitely the most valuable feature for us. It allows us to have a snapshot in minutes and we can use it to restore quickly from a backup.

Also, the speed of AFF is great.

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it_user351201 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Clustered Data ONTAP for our VMs
  • Search efficiency
  • Unified storage multi-protocol 
  • We went from fiber channel to NFS and we had to buy a new controller.
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it_user489189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer (3rd level) at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

ADP (advanced drive partitioning), which eases capacity management on smaller capacity platforms. Great performance for OLTP systems.

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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.