NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

We're still in the process of the migration, so we're hoping that it will help with business and serving customers. We're hoping that it will be faster. We had previous file limitations with our old technology. We're hoping to better utilize the NetApp arrays to serve our expanding and growing business.

If the data is deduplicated, we'll hopefully begin to save space. We're also hoping it will allow our business clients to access their data faster, and we'll be able to read and write it faster as well using all-flash technology.

The C400 flash arrays have been very valuable so far.

We'll use it to secure data, back up that data, and replicate it to other data centers. We'll leverage it to take a holistic approach to data replication, backup, and accessibility.

We're assuming accessing and writing files will be a lot snappier with opening files will be faster. That's what we're looking at. We're hoping for a lot of speed.

We don't have it in production yet. We don't have areas for improvement right now. Once we put it into production and get client feedback, we'll have more visibility.

We did use a different solution. We made the change based on the price point and being able to open more files.

We looked into Dell and another big player in the space. We chose this solution based on the price point and the all-flash technology.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We just got it. We're expecting it will be faster and that we'll see some good compression and deep replication on our data.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI influenced our technology decisions. It's a factor in every decision that we make. The security is very important. I know other vendors provide similar types of types of security, and data tech and data security as well.

We're using it all just for NAS right now. We possibly might use it
for SAN in the future and then maybe archiving.

We're very new to AI and it will be a consideration in the future. Cybersecurity for sure will also be a priority and data optimization is the most important. 

NetApp has made data storage much easier.

I can get a NetApp and have it deployed within days instead of something else like we used to use Hitachi arrays. It required an actual team to come in and install. The ease and scalability are monumental.

The usability of actually being able to scale it out has been great.

ONTAP has delivered the most value to our organization. Also, the ease of ability to train other people to use ONTAP is great. It is very straightforward. I can take a brand new tech who is straight out of an internship, bring them in, show them how to do A, B, C, and D, and it doesn't deviate. It's the same no matter which cluster they touch.

I honestly don't have anything of note on how they can improve. They already exceed my expectations. 

We do constantly expand. We get new programs all the time. The fact that we can throw a C250 in and have it up and running in days makes life so much easier.

We actually recently got off of -two Gseries from Hitachi that were spinning disks, and we went to all flash arrays. All of the engineering issues that they had for all of their software programming, time delays, et cetera, are nonexistent anymore.

Money has been a serious constraint. The fact that they're making things more affordable is making our lives that much easier to keep up with our accreditations. We can show that we can save money by doing more with less, and we can do that with this solution.

We did evaluate other options. The speed on this solution is more. Cost was a big one in the decision making factor.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Security is always the top concern. We'll always prioritize cybersecurity. I like the fact that the solution encrypts everything, that it is a trusted brand, that we know that we have the support in the event that anything happens. They back their product 100%.

NetApp has always been one of the best storage solutions on the market.

We are an 85% NetApp shop, and it has been extremely helpful. We've been able to save a lot of money with the introduction of the use of the tiering aspect and the flex groups. We're able to move data around on the fly.

From a VMware perspective and from a high-performance computing perspective, it is able to churn data as fast as we will do it. It's been great. We're able to identify a lot of data thanks to Cloud Insights. Generally, about 80% of data is not in use. To be able to tier that data automatically has been key. Then, being able to move the data to a specific place or on the fly to a different aggregate with a different disk has been a big benefit.

The solution has helped streamline our internal operations. It helps a lot with the use of WFA - workflow analytics. It allows us to provision storage quickly. And with the use of BlueXP, we're able to monitor, manage, and do some other general things with ease and quickness in terms of provisioning. We're a cloud shop now, and we use Azure. So we use a lot of AFF and a lot of CDOs. And so we now have the ability to provision things a lot faster. The upgrades are a lot faster. The bills are a lot faster. It's definitely progressed yearly.

We're working with Cloud Volumes ONTAP and BlueXP. We have some on-premise stuff. That said, we're actually moving to the Keystone site next week. We're going to be replicating or migrating data from the on-premise site to Keystone. We're also collecting data from Delphi and SLB. They're moving 15 to 20 petabytes in. Everything we're doing, we're using NetApp's XCP solution. We're using Cloud Sync to do all these moves. We're using a lot of stuff.

The cloud service is a lot better. I've dealt with initial cloud providers from a hybrid solution that was not necessarily up to par. The level of administration or support with some of the other solutions just doesn't compare. Once we got this solution, everything just went smoothly.

To get the performance in Azure has been a challenge. We're moving everything to Azure.

I've personally been using the solution myself since maybe the year 2000.

We're currently introducing Cloud Insight to help us manage users better. We're implementing that now. In terms of expansion, we're opening pretty much everything.

We're in the middle of a large migration project involving 12 to 13 petabytes of data, which has been a big project lately.

One of the best things is the support Itself. I've never had an issue with anything. The support was a lot better than any others I had to deal with.

With other solutions, the level of management that's needed was a challenge. The management aspect of this solution is better. BlueXP, the storage manager, the CLI, all of that stuff, it just makes life a lot easier. I've worked with a lot of other solutions. I don't want to mention them.

We did look into EMC, Dell, Hitachi, and Microsoft. From a storage management perspective and a NAS perspective, this solution is better. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's the best in the industry.

The proliferation of AI and the evolving cybersecurity landscape hasn't influenced our technology decisions yet. We are in the process of moving towards AI. It's coming, and we're definitely looking at it.

We've been a NetApp shop for 12 years. We do periodically try other solutions, however, that's gone by the wayside. We're basically a NetApp and Microsoft shop.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around storage and security - and AI in the future. The key is to save money. We're moving things and disabling machines that are no longer needed. From a performance perspective, we're always trying to find different solutions that will help customers. We're working to get to data a lot faster.

I work in the defense industry. We have lots of data silos, more than there are colors of paint in the paint store. Trying to get people to agree on how and if they can combine those and how they can share them easily and securely is a big challenge. The solution has an architecture that emphasizes consistency above all else, and that's why they're successful. That's why, as an architect, I've been successful in convincing somebody to go ahead and buy it, consume it. They find not just performance or capacity improvements. They find operational improvements in ease of accessing the data, how consistently people can find what they're looking for quickly, and how they can integrate it with their applications. They provide not just storage. They provide a real solution.

In some cases, we design systems that have to go in strange places. They might have to go to space. They might have to go underwater. Having all manner of different data come into a system sometimes is not well understood. Is it block? Is it file? Is it something else? This solution has all of those services no matter what scale you buy. The result is that we don't have to wait until the customer knows what their data mix would be. We have a comprehensive solution that could accommodate anything. We can fly it earlier and get them in the air testing and prototyping much faster than they could have with other solutions. Customers have been very successful in places that probably no one else could have been thanks to the solution's consistency.

Keystone offers flexible consumption models that go beyond just how much capacity at such and such a speed, et cetera. We don't always know what the profile of that data will be. However, if we can quickly agree on terms that meet our needs and make NetApp still reasonably profitable, we can confidently deploy, see how things go and adjust. That kind of service delivery model, that customer service model has sped things up and made contract negotiations much easier. It frankly made the owners of the system more confident.

We've experienced faster time to market. It's hard for us to find and retain infrastructure staff. We're in a business where the firm fixed price contract reigns supreme, and so we can't always just offer someone more money. However, if they can dedicate their time to learning one company's portfolio and learning it really well, but be useful in a bunch of different places, they will do well. We've seen that in a lot of different places. We've been able to hire younger people and retain them, moving them from program to program based on their understanding of the solution its skill set, and its portability.

It's been useful for high-speed multi-protocol storage in places with ever-increasing density. We have limits on how much power and cooling and rack space we have, and yet they've delivered every time.

We needed a storage company that had mastery of multi-protocol, and this solution stands out. They especially stand out as a secure provider. We require solutions that we can run ourselves, that we can air gap since so much of what we do is either classified or very sensitive or cannot live in a public ecosystem. 

For us, the issue consuming AI has been the trust of the models given to us by third parties. We can't necessarily trust their provenance, what fed them, what originally trained them, or what gave them their worldview, for lack of a better term. We can't simply just trust that at face value since we know nothing about where it came from or what inferences it might make. We must assume that some AI inferences were made deliberately to damage or hurt national security systems. So the models that we start with tend to be very, very primitive, crude, and not well trained, so we have to train them much longer and not always with the availability of cloud that has inexhaustible capacity. A partner who understands this and provides consistency at all scales is very important.

We have to work with technology that we can deploy ourselves, run where we decide, and not necessarily anywhere, and that can survive for long periods of time disconnected from a cloud. For us, that's probably been one of the bigger cybersecurity challenges: how do we maintain security, maintain updates, patches, profiles, policies, and all that stuff without subscribing to a service from your friendly neighborhood cloud provider? This product does a better-than-average job of that. 

They are continuing to offer fanatically good support. That is what's always cemented in my mind why the solution is positioned as a leader. They support people in organizations and missions in ways that others don't or don't necessarily have to. 

We looked at companies like Hitachi, Dell, and EMC, to name just a few. The reason this solution was chosen was the software feature set. We needed flexibility in how things were stored, but with common operations and a common set of AFF, rather than segmented, siloed solutions. Some of those other companies are getting better and better at that. They've streamlined their product lines. They have one model for how they deploy everything. That said, it's obvious where that has meant the lowest common denominator is all that they can offer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. They are competitive. I wouldn't give anyone in this industry a ten out of ten.

NetApp is highly flexible. We can do things on the fly. Because the nodes are rock-solid, there is less downtime and maintenance. We don't have any downtime due to NetApp storage.

Our internal operations are rather static. We're a healthcare company, so we have the same product line. We don't have to fluctuate too much due to market pressure. The integration with VMware has streamlined the IT operations, where we can use vCenter to do half our BlueXP work.

One of the biggest challenges we had recently was SnapMirror. SnapMirror is rather old, but that shows how good it is. It hasn't been reinvented in so long. We're on-prem right now. I think hybrid integration with BlueXp to manage both storage types will greatly benefit us. We're not heavily involved in AI, but I am so happy that NetApp is with ARP and Cloud Insights. 

We plan to expand our NetApp usage to include more AI and ransomware protections. I want to strengthen our security posture with MFA and multi-admin approvals. We want to get off VMware and go right to Kubernetes. 

Our future investment will focus on cybersecurity. We've had partners who were attacked, infected, and went down. I won't give names. We weren't affected, but we were indirectly affected. We had to change how we communicated with them. It's coming from the top down that we all need to focus more on cybersecurity.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity throws a wrench into innovation. We only have so much money, tools, and people, but it's what you have to do. You can't just say that we're not going to do it, and we're going to develop a new product line.

We're not fully utilizing NetApp's Converge BlueXP, but it's a great help. It integrates on-prem and cold storage and provides disaster recovery. We'll see more benefits as it improves.

We implemented SnapCenter for SQL, which we provide to our customers for free. It provides hourly point-in-time recovery, which they weren't expecting, and we already had the license. They got it for free.

NetApp's price could be improved. All storage is expensive. NetApp is not cheap, but we can't return to anybody else now. We'd lose too much value. We'd be, reinventing ourselves.

We have used NetApp for 10 years.

We came from HPE and considered Dell EMC, but we're not in block storage anymore. We want the flexibility of NAS, and it wasn't hard to decide on NetApp.
It's come a long way, and we can train new employees that have never touched NetApp. They can get going in a week and start being administrators quickly using all the GUI tools. 

We've had instances before where we were on block storage with VMware. And if it fills up or anything happens, you have downtime. NetApp now gives us more alerts, so we expand it on the fly. It will auto-expand on the fly. So I think that's definitely a big outcome.

I only made the decision at the technology level about whether it would fit into our stack and provide for our needs. I never got involved in the cost, so I don't know if cost was a deciding factor. When we adopted it 10 years ago, NetApp was a different storage creature than everybody else. It was an easier decision. If we wanted to stay with block storage, we could go with anybody else, and they were almost identical at the time.

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10. 

It's a three-tier architecture and it's separated. It runs over the network instead of hyperconverged infrastructure. It sells itself since it's centralized management. Three-tier is completely separated away from it. With centralized management, you actually have pitfalls where speeds and read/write operations are all slower. Having it separate and having a dedicated storage area network or a dedicated network attached storage, for us, just worked better. It's been faster.  

In terms of improvements, they could have a couple more things that are usually done through the command line. 

I see that they're making more improvements by adding things like SnapMirror to ONTAP Systems Manager, so maybe some more features in that area would be helpful.

We do plan to expand. We're going to purchase a few 250s for some off-site backups in our secondary location, and that's kind of where we're at right now. With the next technology, we're actually getting Veeam. It integrates perfectly as a backup and replication system with NetApp. Being able to use an old NetApp as essentially a target for our backups is going to work perfectly. That's the next step for us.

We had Nutanix and VMware vSAN. We had sit downs and meet and greets with Pure Storage as well. A lot of them were very expensive, and we knew how Nutanix was operating. They give you everything upfront, and then you have to pay extra for the nodes. So the pricing models weren't as transparent. 

The scalability of this solution fit our needs and was better. Performance was the biggest factor in our decision-making.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Data storage and optimization are going to be our biggest focus next. We've had problems with it in the past, and we're able to fix those issues with the solutions that we're purchasing.

Our company is really into growth and innovation in general, and they're always looking for new ways to do something better. Previously, we have been doing things not to the best of our ability. Being able to purchase new hardware, new software, and have solutions architects come in and look at what we've got going on, it just makes sense to to go in that direction as well. 

The replication of data from on-premises to the cloud is very easy when we are using the SnapMirror technology. 

Being able to use FlexCache is the best part of this solution. It is something that on-premises users are using for their production. There are some users who want to use the same volume from the cloud. FlexCache helps us in providing that.

We have a unified storage to access the file and NAS. We can do all the things in the same solution. We do not need any other product or storage mix.

CVO and AFF technologies have delivered the most value to our company. I would rate AFF a ten out of ten, and I would rate CVO a nine out of ten. We are still exploring the cloud. AFF is completely packed, and with CVO, we have a few challenges that we are trying to solve. Taking a snapshot and cloning are some of the best things that we are doing with these technologies. CVO also offers cost-effectiveness.

Their customer support can be better. When we have an outage, we need to wait until the issue is escalated to L3 which takes a lot of time. If that can be improved, it will help a lot. If there is any issue, we should be able to resolve it immediately instead of waiting for so long to get a qualified resource from NetApp.

We have a NetApp partner and we also have a point of contact from NetApp with whom we have regular calls every week. We can see what the new products are and we try to adopt the new ones. 

If there are any issues, we can get NetApp support to get them resolved. Their customer support can be better.

We considered another solution that is used only for SAN and is server block storage. With this solution, we get both SAN and NAS within the same storage device. We chose this solution due to its flexibility.

We have had a few outages on the CVO where the host needed more performance but the CVO that we selected in terms of disk type and other things was not able to support that workload. To support that workload, we moved the host to ANF instead of CVO. 

We are moving towards AI, but we are not fully involved as of now.

We have plans to increase its usage both on-prem and on the cloud. Data is constantly growing. We need more capacity. New business needs require new storage. New projects require more storage.

Cost saving on the cloud is the goal we have. We do not know how much exactly it will come out to be because it is on a usage basis. It can grow constantly, and then for one month, it can come down. We need to make sure that the cost is constant.

Our upcoming investments would be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. Data storage is the main thing that we cannot avoid. Cybersecurity is something that we need to make our environment secure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We're a hospital, and we do a lot of imaging tasks. Specifically with our cardiology imaging, we had a lot of issues with the data transfers to the FASM. Once I moved all of that over to the AFF, all of that went away.

NetApp AFF has helped reduce operational latency. From going from our old FAS systems to AFF, I already see massive performance improvements.

For years, my company used EMC, and EMC really wasn't doing what we needed it to do. 

Some of our sales reps invited my boss and a previous administrator to NetApp INSIGHT. From there, they got to see everything work. The administrator got the certification and they actually bought it right there. AFF just fits the bill for the company. 

AFF has helped us simplify our infrastructure. 

The simplifications have improved our operations. Our operations used to be one to two hours, just trying to set up simple shared drives and things. Now, I do it in a couple of minutes. It's taking a lot of weight off of me.

NetApp helped to reduce support issues like performance tuning. It's the auto-support features and everything that just fires off to NetApp and they're back to me within minutes of those auto-supports firing off. It's things that would normally take days to resolve, now take minutes using NetApp.

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.

There are features that are available but we haven't purchased them. We haven't delved into the cloud environment too much. BlueXP offers a lot of options that I would like to see, but it's not available with what we currently have. 

They should make these features a little more affordable.

I've been using it for less than a year. We've had it at our company for years, but I've been working with it since March. 

I've never had any major issues out of it other than the drive or node failure. The way it's configured is not an issue. We never saw any dip in performance or anything. 

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

The customer service and support are fantastic. A couple of weeks ago, I had a drive go down, and they had one out to me the next morning.  

I had a control board go down on one of my nodes a few months ago, and they sent a guy out to me the next day.

Positive

We previously used different solutions. We opted for AFF because of its flash capacity. The all-flash capacity is fantastic.

I enjoy understanding how the setup works. I never have any issues with it. 

The previous guy set it up before me, and I've picked it up and run with it. I haven't really had any issues since then.

We saw an ROI in terms of turnaround times on our data. It provides patient care at a much faster speed than what we normally would be able to.

In future releases, I would like to see some nonprofit licensure tiers because it's a nonprofit hospital, so it's competing with more commercial licensing. It gets a little more expensive for the nonprofit.

My company evaluated different options, but AFF was definitely one of the front runners.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF a ten out of ten. 

The primary use case depends on business requirements and customer challenges.

NetApp offers two types of all-flash storage systems for different business requirements and challenges. They are also offering end-to-end NVMe-based storage systems within their all-flash product range.

NetApp AFF-A series and NetApp AFF-C series (recently introduced) are two different all-flash product verticals as per the following list:

• AFF-A Series: A150, A250, A400(Midrange), A800(High-end), and A900(High-end)
• AFF-C Series: AFF C190, AFF C250, AFF C400 and C800

The primary use case for AFF-A series models is where you need unified storage systems with extreme performance, end-to-end NVMe enterprise, or all-flash arrays, requiring the lowest latency and supporting twice as many workloads.

The NetApp AFF-C is the best fit where customers need a Unified(NAS+SAN) All-flash with capacity and affordable price. It is built on quad-level cell (QLC) flash technology to make it more affordable.

The organizations experiencing performance issues and looking to move from HDD to SSD flash and don’t want to pay an extra cost to get submillisecond performance for business-critical workloads, NetApp AFF-C is the best fit for them.

Organizations can reduce data storage footprint and lower power and cooling costs, helping to adopt "Green IT." Organizations can run more applications with fewer disks to maintain. They can also achieve a good ROI in making their product/services more fast in production.

The organizations can get extreme performance by using NetApp end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash arrays (like A150 and A250). The NVMe enterprise provides the lowest latency, supports twice as many workloads, and improves application response time.

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.

NetApp introduced the C-series all-flash storage with the capacity to make their product line even more flexible and cost-effective. There is no significant improvement required that I could find so far.

However, NetApp should have a local presence in Pakistan. This will obviously boost the product sales cycle in Pakistan.

Other storage vendors get business only due to their presence specifically in Pakistan even if they are offering fewer or limited features in their product line.

We have been selling NetApp Storage Systems for the last 10+ years as a partner/reseller.

NetApp has sped up delivery for our virtual environment. It's been a great solution. Our customers have been amazed and overjoyed with the performance of our virtual environment, which uses VDI for virtual desktops and VMware for our virtual host servers. Everything is working seamlessly. 

We plan to expand our use of NetApp solutions, and we're already in talks about this. We will be looking at the new ASA products they just released to see if they're more suitable for us than the C-series and what the cost is. We would love to have flash storage, but we'll see how much that costs.

A Flash environment would be great. We still have some spinning disk storage, and we hope to get rid of those completely and go all SSD. So we're looking for that to be within our budget

The NetApp C-Series storage soutions are the most valuable to us. I would rate them 8.5 out of 10. 

Customer support is a hot-button issue, so we definitely need better customer support. We get some support from our vendor that helps. If the C-Series had a more user-friendly GUI, that would help us get our LUNs built and data storage connected faster. 

We've been with NetApp for years. We considered switching to HPE Nimble Storage, but we decided to stay with NetApp and upgrade our environment to the C-Series. With NetApp, support has been a pain point, but the price and warranty costs are perfect for our budget. 

NetApp is offered at a reasonable price point, so it has saved us money. Our primary goal is to keep our costs low. We're hoping that the next line of products will include a more budget-friendly option. 

I rate NetApp solutions 8.5 out of 10. Improving support would increase the rating. They could also enhance and streamline the GUI to make management more efficient.