NetApp AFF A-Series Reviews

We are a storage service provider, and our main business case is to implement different types of customer workloads on NetApp AFF A-Series in a hotel setup. Our primary users of A-Series tend to be latency-sensitive web applications.

NetApp's inline deduplication and compression are unmatched compared to other vendors. With both deduplication and compression inline, we experience no cost in terms of performance on the systems, however, we have huge savings on the storage side. We can turn it on for everyone and save storage space, allowing us to sell more to customers. NetApp also provides us with an interface for VLAN separation that no other vendor can provide, allowing our customers distinct, separated network layers in between.

Pricing could always be lower. That said, when calculating it all together, they are competitively priced. There are no specific improvements needed in A-Series, as we are very happy with it.

I have been working with NetApp AFF A-Series since 2016.

NetApp A-Series is very stable and reliable.

You can start small and grow with modules in both size and capability. NetApp A-Series scales both vertically and horizontally. Limitations are high, and we are unlikely to encounter them.

NetApp support is fantastic. Their knowledge libraries, technical documentation, and knowledge-based articles are excellent. Based on other vendors, I would rate their support ten out of ten.

Positive

With NetApp's inline deduplication and compression, we achieve approximately 30% savings on general workloads and up to 85% in specific use cases like VDI.

Pricing is different among competitors, however, we use NetApp primarily due to the cost savings on compression and deduplication. NetApp provides VLAN separation, which other vendors do not offer.

Overall, I rate NetApp A-Series an eight out of ten. 

The main issue is the price. Technically, there is no concern with A-Series. It provides return on investment through significant storage savings.

Positive

It has given us a stable, consistent, high-performance platform to run our enterprise software, including file shares and just about anything else. We're a VMware vSphere shop and run this solution for that entire system. It's really given us a leg up for general production purposes. 

We also own a disaster recovery site. We use SnapMirror to get all of our important volumes moved over there. It's been a very good fit.

The amazing aspect is that whenever we have come up with an issue where we need to get something done, and it wasn't necessarily available, they could add it within the next revision of the software. We've had several iterations of the solution's hardware. We're on our second generation of FlexPod. 

Ten years ago, we had to update our SQL servers. Moving LUNs from an old version to a new one was quite a process. However, recently, we just did something similar. We moved from AFF a 200 to a 250. Since they've updated the ONTAP software, this time around, it was non-disruptive, and it took less than a weekend.

We're a manufacturer. All of our ERP software is dependent upon fast performance and connection to this hardware. So when there was an issue years ago when something was wrong or slow, that prompted us to say, "Can we check storage? Can we check the network?" Ever since we've gone up to all-flash FAS systems, there's never any questions about performance when it comes to storage. There's been a huge leap from spinning disks to SSDs. I'm hoping with the next update, we'll go to NVMe and we'll have similar experiences.

Last year, we refreshed the SAN at our headquarters. We signed a Keystone agreement with the ability to pay for storage as a service at an excellent price point yet still have the hardware on-prem. I manage the hardware, and, for me, it's the best of both worlds. We've just come up with a situation where, finally, after some time, we're going to need to buy some additional storage. In previous situations like this, it usually meant the purchase of an additional shelf at a large price. Now we have Keystone, and we're locked in at that price per tebibyte. We just have to say that we want to add 25 tebibytes and they take care of it. It's worked out really well.

We work ISO 27001 certified. Since I manage the enterprise storage, we use SnapMirror, and we're currently using Veeam for backups. Thanks to what this tool provides, we are able to get through that portion of our certification without a problem. No changes, no rectifying. It's very slick.

Our company's goals include maintaining a level of consistency. We're never going to be on the bleeding edge. We're never going to have the super fastest abilities. We want something that works, is easier for us to manage, and has a better growth path. For us, in the past, in the need for additional disk space, if we didn't do the sizing right in the first place, buying additional disks was incredibly expensive. Now, with Keystone, that's no longer an issue, and that's what we like.

I really don't have a lot of complaints. In the past, there were issues. However, they've really done a great job of reaching out. We have never wanted super high performance. We want something that's going to be up and working all the time, and this solution has done a tremendous job with that.

We have been a customer for more than 15 years.

Things have gotten so that the performance of the solution's systems has gotten so good. Our SQL or Microsoft SQL shop is running that on physical hardware. We're an AFF FlexPod shop, so it's Cisco UCS Blades. Now we're talking about the next server and SQL OS upgrade. We're talking about going virtual all the way. The information I've gotten has pushed me forward that, yes, virtual is the way that we need to do it. We don't have the internal resources, so we're going to engage a third party to help us do that. I don't have any hesitancy now to recommend that virtualizing SQL is going to be a good move.

We do most of our growth through acquisition. If we buy additional manufacturing companies, and they're large enough that they require a SAN, it'll be a NetApp SAN, almost certainly. The other thing is that we are on the verge of refreshing. We have a bunch of more 2620s out there, which have gone end of life. I have them under third-party support, but I want to get newer controllers, and I want to get the ability to run a newer version of ONTAP. There are so many great features in the newer versions of ONTAP. We're at 9.11.13 right now which is stable, and has high performance. There's so much great stuff in the newer versions that I want to get to.

We've only had to reach out a few times to support, and most of it is for issues like a failed hard disk or things like that. We've only had one situation where we had a failed controller, and they really went the extra mile to make sure that we got up and in production as soon as possible.

I've been lucky in that one of the original storage engineers I worked with is now an employee. I can always just reach out, send an email to him, and he will either say "Yes, that's something you should look into," or he'll say, "No, you're going down a blind alley there." To have a technical resource like that is phenomenal.

We were originally an EMC Shop 15 or 16 years ago. They weren't looking to the future. They were set in their ways, and they didn't want to do things that were a little adventurous. This solution has always been willing to take risks. 

We were able to get pricing that was very similar to what Pure has. And for a lot of situations, the only thing Pure had was that they were cheaper. They wanted to keep us as a customer, and they were flexible. End-of-quarter pricing discounts help. We're we're comfortable with this product. They're bringing us an entire new storage system in what would have been a lot of work on our end.

Every time we've done a refresh, it's been my fiduciary responsibility to look for options. We looked at Pure last time. We are heavily leveraged into NFS for hosting our VMs. Pure doesn't, despite its low price, have any NFS offerings. That was one of the many reasons we continue to stick with NetApp.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Since we're a privately held manufacturing company, we tend to buy the lowest level hardware. For example, we bought a manufacturing company, and we needed to buy a SAN. So we got a 2750, which is near the absolute lowest end. However, that fits our purpose. The fact that no matter what SAN we're running, they're all running ONTAP is a boom for management. That said, I hope that they will continue to not ignore the low end and continue to offer products, like the FAS line that will fit a purpose for a location that's just looking to put up a couple of VMware ESXi hosts and to have NetApp SAN for shared storage and for things like SnapMirror. That would make us happy. We're never going to be buying petabytes worth of storage. 

We have not stepped into AI at all yet. That said, NetApp does security additions built in ONTAP which is a good barrier against malware and ransomware. We're definitely leveraging that.

We're going to leverage their anti-ransomware and anti-malware since cybersecurity insurance is important. Every company needs to have it. We manufacture parts for the car industry. Some have said if you're not ISO 27001 certified and if you don't have cyber insurance, they're not going to do business with us. A lot of our decisions are driven by customer requirements. I have a very good reseller that I work with. 

Future goals include cybersecurity. I'm going to try and push for an additional set of controllers to have another set of places to store SnapMirrors locally. Then we have an existing 200 that I would like to use as a repository for backups and snapshots and things like that.

We have to be flexible enough to be able to grow as needs arise. This product gives us the foundation to have that growth efficiently, whether it's the purchase of a new filer or the additional purchase of an additional disk.

NetApp delivers higher performance for our applications, which do a lot of database calls. All our database volumes run on NetApp. Adopting the solution reduces latency, and high throughput enables our applications to respond to customers faster.

It's hard to say how much faster because we've gone through generations of NetApp hardware, from spinning disk to SSD and flash. This may have reduced our response times by 2-5 seconds during peak times. The AFF is loaded, so perceived latency makes a huge difference.

We've reduced downtime. Without all of NetApp's benefits, we would have had to reconfigure parts of storage that would have required downtime. We have dramatically reduced our downtime through successive generations of NetApp, allowing us to get Five 9s availability. 

I don't know that AI has affected our business in particular so far. We have various cybersecurity controls in place, and we're using some of NetApp's built-in ransomware attack prevention measures. We're currently keeping up pace with the applications and forthcoming AI. We haven't delved too much into AI yet, but it's coming. I'm trying to keep up with the performance demand for those technologies. We'll stay with NetApp to accomplish those goals.

We have 400 Series, providing AFF. The clustering of all those nodes and the flexibility to move volumes around within a cluster have given us an opportunity to respond to growth and fix the latency problems we've received.

The solution's ransomware protection could be improved. 

We looked at Pure Storage and EMC before the Dell merger. We had issues with Pure's maturity. NetApp was considerably more mature in AFF storage. It was also simpler regarding the ONTAP interface and things that simplified it for us. Some of it was cost. Dell EMC continues to be more expensive than NetApp. It helped that NetApp was simple to use and implement. 

I would rate NetApp a ten out of ten.

The NetApp solution has made our business more efficient. NetApp is much faster, and management is more effective than with the previous vendor. Infrastructure is a technical department where data must be available to our applications and customers quickly and smoothly with high availability. The NetApp solution provides that.

The cost factor is an important challenge, and NetApp provides us with a positive business case because of the implementation and setup of their solutions. 

NetApp offers a complete environment, but we need to automate more processes. We have Ansible and VMware vSphere to automate certain aspects

NetApp's hot and cold storage are its most valuable features. We currently use the A series. Immutable snapshots are another advanced security feature that is positive.

It would be helpful if our partner organized a yearly session with my team to discuss the new feature sets on our current solutions and other ways NetApp can help us. Perhaps we are missing some information to help us make the right decision. 

We previously used HP. The biggest difference is that maintenance is much easier with NetApp. The solution has high performance and does what was promised.

We looked at the market and the different vendors, and we engaged in a discussion with each of them.  NetApp came out best of class, so we decided to go with it. Price was a significant deciding factor. 

I rate NetApp eight out of 10. I seldom give out 10 ratings. 

Our primary use case is for media infrastructure. NetApp is our backbone. It's the primary storage we use. 

NetApp helps us get the fastest output. It's a work in progress. We plan to use NetApp for primary storage and as a global file system. 

We had a 200 series, and now we have a 400. We plan to upgrade to a 90. I hope a 90 will provide a better, faster solution. 

NetApp is shifting to the cloud and adopting AI, but it is not improving its core technology to deliver faster storage. We're still waiting to see if it improves speed with solutions like the 90 series. 

Another challenge is that NetApp uses a cluster switch for Cisco. The partnership with Cisco is challenging for us as customers. If something goes wrong on the switch side, NetApp and Cisco pass the ball back and forth. That needs to be streamlined between NetApp and Cisco for any issues, especially for deployment and the rules that are running.

We had Pure Storage. I'm not the decision-maker at my company, so I wasn't involved in the decision and don't know why they switched solutions. I believe NetApp was faster. Now, NetApp is catching up in the game, and they're trying to get a faster NVMe drive solution.

I rate NetApp storage solutions eight out of 10. 

Our use case revolves around performance, as we mainly use NetApp AFF A-Series wherever performance-related workload is present.

When we are working with any DB-related servers or when users want to build their own databases, we prefer NetApp AFF A-Series for such applications.

It is easy to scale up with NetApp AFF A-Series.

We do integration with StorageGRID mainly to move low-performance or cold storage into NetApp AFF A-Series.

We have integrated ONTAP with NetApp AFF A-Series.

The deduplication and compression options from NetApp AFF A-Series are good to use for efficient storage capacity.

NetApp is doing great with cloud integration; however, there may be room for improvement in integrating with existing VMware devices for better support, especially since many companies are looking for alternatives to VMware due to its escalating costs. Management is considering options such as Hyper-V or Proxmox, although Proxmox does not seem to support LUN-based storage.

Additionally, some users want to avoid the expense of virtualization tools and are interested in open-source technologies, which if NetApp could support better, that would be beneficial.

It would be great if NetApp could add some AI functionality for automation, as we can currently use tools such as Ansible or Chef, but having NetApp's own automated tool would be advantageous.

I have been working with NetApp AFF A-Series since 2016.

I would rate the stability of NetApp AFF A-Series as a strong nine, although there are still some cases where improvement can be seen.

Regarding tech support for NetApp, once the engineer understands our problem, they provide solutions that suit our environment; however, it is essential for the engineer to understand that our environment may differ from standard setups, which can sometimes cause discrepancies in recommendations.

Positive

The initial setup for NetApp AFF A-Series is simple.

It would be great to see some automation from NetApp. I rate NetApp AFF A-Series a nine out of ten.

NetApp's MetroClusters are a critical technology that helps us achieve high performance and a high-availability system. It has a huge impact on our customers and our company. NetApp systems are always on. 

It's a smooth system. Governance, compliance, and high availability are critical. FabricPool reduces the cost of taking so many snapshots, which are expensive to store. We can store them on the flash, storage grid, or FabricPool. It has brought our costs down by 30 percent. 

We are thinking about expanding to other NetApp systems. We currently only use NetApp for Sys, NFS, and then S Query. We will maybe use AFF. We need to upgrade our network to address latency issues. Our future technological investments will prioritize data storage and optimization. 

MetroCluster is the best product on the market. It synchronizes the storage. NetApp's update packages are a huge advantage because the firmware and server updates are in one package. 

StorageKit is a critical technology introduced in the last four years. We use NetApp's all-flash storage, but we still use disk storage for some systems. NetApp's AFF systems really work. We bring them to the customer and let them try them. NetApp is excellent. 

We have several problems with the limitations of NetApp systems in terms of volume shares. We have a brick in a 700 or a controller, and we sometimes make small volumes, but Kubernetes container volumes don't allow us.

We have worked with NetApp for nine or 10 years. 

I rate NetApp solutions eight out of 10.