NetApp AFF C-Series Reviews

I would recommend NetApp AFF C-Series for various types of companies depending on the use case. A small company, an enterprise, or any organization can benefit from it. The recommendation ultimately depends on what the specific use case is.

NetApp AFF C-Series is a good product for entry-level flash storage. The system is competitive in terms of pricing, and the value proposition is strong.

Their data reduction technology is impressive. Deduplication, compression, and compaction reduce the impact on different workloads on NetApp AFF C-Series and provide different reduction ratios. High ratios are achieved on VMware and file services, with very high reduction ratios in file services environments.

The systems encryption features on NetApp AFF C-Series are also excellent. The encryption features have helped safeguard sensitive data.

There is still some room for improvement when it comes to scalability, mainly in the interoperability and integration aspects. Every storage vendor has certain limitations, and this is not limited to NetApp; it applies to everyone in the industry.

I do not see any other significant areas for improvement with NetApp AFF C-Series at this time. NetApp is working on their roadmap, which is solid, and they are developing certain features that are yet to be released.

I would rate its scalability as an eight out of ten.

I recommend Dell PowerStore to some of my customers, but usually the differences are taken care of. I focus primarily on NetApp AFF C-Series and am dealing with all series of NetApp AFF.

Regarding the impact of NVMe protocol support on customer workload access, NVMe products are also good and NetApp has a higher focus on that as well.

The all-flash system performs well with large-scale analytics and delivers pretty good performance. However, you have to size it properly, as everything depends on how you size the solution.

I rate this review an eight out of ten.

We are using NetApp C series for our VMware environments mainly.

NetApp offers a cost-effective solution with very robust hardware. Frequent improvements are shared through bulletins so we can enhance hardware performance by upgrading the ONTAP version. 

Firmware upgrades are also widely distributed. Weekly calls with NetApp ensure we're staying on top of any potential issues. The transition from SAN-based to NetApp storage eliminated SAN switch costs and reduced CommVault dependency, lowering license costs significantly.

We faced one bug that impacted our NetApp last month, and it took some time to identify the underlying issue. Better proactiveness from support would help, as we faced a P2 incident for two days with off-color support. More proactive measures, especially during P1 or P2, could be beneficial.

We started with the C series about four to five months ago.

We previously used SAN-based arrays including Brocade switches. We also used CommVault for backups. We've started transitioning to NetApp to address these needs.

We have HPE, which is one of our competitors. We are moving from HPE to NetApp, increasing the NetApp footprint day by day while reducing HPE's footprint.

Overall, from one to ten, I would rate NetApp as an eight. As for additional advice, I suggest that NetApp provide more training opportunities. If customers are purchasing a significant volume of NetApp solutions, it would be beneficial to offer complimentary training, as it would aid in the overall development of the team.