NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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. 

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%.

We're using NetApp AFF primarily for file and block storage. We have deployments for remote sites and our data centers, and we also use it for NAS file storage, both NFS and CIFS. We're also using it as a cloud backup, so it is like our tertiary spot for cold data or snapshots. 

Our team is gaining experience with ONTAP, which works similarly in the cloud with Azure. As the business has more requests for spinning up new apps in Azure, we'll have the expertise to deploy that quickly in Azure natively with ONTAP stuff. 

Our architecture has historically relied on RDMs, so AFF has enabled us to easily migrate from our old EMC PowerMax to the new NetApp. It's been pretty smooth. We have a lot of SAP servers in our environment, so performance is critical for us. 

AFF is simplifying our operational model. We get a lot of requests from our DBAs for routine operations like quick snapshots, backups, or something related to storage. Those requests happen all the time. You could do that with PowerMax, but the process on NetApp is more straightforward and less prone to error. We're a small team supporting a global organization, and every minute we can shave off our routine operations does make a difference for us. It enables us to focus on major projects instead of everyday work.

I'm not in the weeds in terms of costs. One of my other colleagues handled that a little more than I did, but time is money, and we can respond faster to requests. That saves everybody's time, improving efficiency and productivity. You get angry when you're on the other side, making requests and waiting. You're like, "Why have they not finished it yet?" Your morale, effectiveness, and productivity can go down. That can spiral out of control. It's a ripple effect of the little things adding up to make a big difference, so that's where I would frame it in terms of cost-effectiveness. 

We have quite a few active-active processes in our data center. We have primary and backup data centers and high-performing databases that require active-active workloads over a 10 gigabit WAN connection. And we are usually at about 1 millisecond latency at all times. So we're hitting it with lots of stuff, and it doesn't bat an eye. It's been very high-performing and easy to use.

I've only been using AFF for about a year now, so I don't have many criticisms. I wrote a lot of the automation for our initial migrations from PowerMax to NetApp and as well as automation related to refreshing our production systems. We clone a lot of our production systems to the testing or QA environments so our developers could use real production data in a safe environment.  

I worked with the APIs quite a bit, including the REST API. We're working to move out from RDMs to do more VMDK-based disks in VMware, which will allow us to use SnapCenter for more efficiency. SnapCenter makes things even simpler than they already are. Additionally, once we are on VMDKs, we’ll be using the SnapCenter API, which I like even better than ONTAP's REST API. 

The ONTAP APIs are good, but little things here and there are slightly different. That adds a little work on my end, but it's ultimately been pretty easy to work with. It's just the consistency of the REST API. About 95 percent of the operations working with the REST API are great, but then you have about 5 percent of things that are slightly different. 

That 5 percent mostly come from response data being returned slightly differently than the ones you've already worked with. It's easy enough to work around but blows up in your face the first time you try it, so you inspect the response to see what changed. I would like it if they worked a little harder to get that a little more perfectly standardized. Thankfully the documentation is top notch, so if you aren’t sure of something specific you can just look it up.

NetApp AFF has been rock-solid. We've had it in production. We did have a node blip recently, but it auto-recovered. Support was automatically alerted, and they told us to check it out. Support had already identified the bug, and there was already a patch for it.

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

I rate NetApp support 10 out of 10. NetApp AFF reduces support issues like performance tuning and troubleshooting. EMC didn't fail regularly, but EMC support has decreased in quality over the years, and getting satisfactory problem resolution has been challenging. That was one of the factors that started getting us to look at other alternatives. We certainly have had our fair share of implementation issues and little bugs here and there. We ran into a panic bug the weekend before flying over here [to NetApp Insight 2023]. But that was an auto-support case from NetApp and quickly resolved.

They were aware of the problem before we were. It automatically recovered. They found the bug for us and gave us a patch to use when we were ready. In most cases, it was pretty simple. NetApp support has been top-notch.  I've not had any issues working with NetApp. They've been some of the best and brightest people I've worked with in my career.

Positive

We previously used EMC PowerMax. The biggest reason for the switch is that we needed a cloud-ready, cloud-first solution. PowerMax is still a fine platform if you are committed to on-prem and have high-performance on-prem workloads and use cases. It could still be a perfect product for you. However, PowerMax may be limiting if you know your business requirements will take you to the cloud. That's where we were at. Our business was pushing us into the cloud, and we needed more of our workloads to be replicated in the cloud or cloud-native. PowerMax wasn't the right solution for that. 

PowerMax is an aging platform so it doesn't have the flexibility to easily migrate into the cloud. We need our hot-tier data readily accessible on-prem and to be able to access cold storage in the cloud through Azure or whichever provider you want. But we use Azure. That was a key factor for us. We currently use cloud tiering to Azure for automated cold storage processes (mainly for file level data) and we are still exploring additional use cases for future and expanded operations.

We did a six-month proof of concept and put it through its paces. We had a cluster in our primary and backup data centers. We tested out SnapMirror Business Continuity quite thoroughly. That was a new technology for us, and it's still fairly new in its own right. We even did some automation in the proof of concept where we built out a process that explored what our refresh process would look like on NetApp. We were able to bang that out in about three days. It was easy. I was involved with that from day one.

We partnered with CDW during implementation. They've been a fantastic value add for us. We also worked with a rep from NetApp, but we met a lot of NetApp people and CDW people. Both companies brought deep knowledge and expertise. We had a long list of questions that they answered to our satisfaction.

I wouldn't be able to quantify the ROI in dollars and cents, but we've seen improvements in terms of saving time and increasing our effectiveness. My background is in virtualization and networking. I was new to storage when I started working with NetApp only a year ago. It has been easy to figure out. As we grew our infrastructure team, it has been easy to onboard them and get them up to speed, so it's much easier to realize the value we're looking for.

When we bought NetApp, it was very reasonably priced. When you factor in the time savings, it's highly cost-effective. 

I rate NetApp AFF 10 out of 10.  I would recommend AFF depending on your use case. PowerMax might be right for you if you're completely on-prem and have high-performance needs. You need to understand your business requirements and what your developers and DBAs need. It's crucial to figure out exactly what's driving the business. Plot out what the next year or five years will look like and ensure you're in a position to handle those needs. 

Once you know what those needs are, you'll be able to ask NetApp or whatever vendor the right questions. Those should be tough questions you ask your vendor and you should take them to task. If they don't give you good answers, they need to figure something out because you don't want something that doesn't solve your problems. That's pointless. 

If you have your list of requirements, and there's five things on the list, and storage solution A does two of the five. And you've got another one storage vendor B has five out of five. Are you really gonna buy two solutions if one has a specialty feature? Because maybe one does one better/is more performant? Or are you gonna buy the one that does five and handle everything. We had a very long list of complicated protocols and setups and NetApp checked every single box.

As a pharmaceutical company, our data is very sensitive. It's critical to recover in the event of any incident. NetApp played a major role in our backup and recovery services.

The RPOs and RTOs are excellent. When we had a ransomware attack, NetApp helped us recover. NetApp has streamlined operations by providing faster operating responses and making data more accessible to users. The equipment they offer helped increase our performance.

I administer the solution, so I'm not involved with the design and decision-making, so I can't speak about our future planning. However, most of our files are on NetApp, which we have 50 sites using. I don't know about AI or other emerging technologies we may adopt. We haven't used AI, but the company is looking at that and security-related features, like AI-based ransomware technologies. ONTAP is on the roadmap. 

We plan to expand. All our storage is on-prem, but we plan to shift to the cloud, depending on the application requirements. Our roadmap includes migrating to the cloud and implementing AI. 

NetApp's backup and recovery are the primary features we use. We also appreciate data protection. NetApp's technology and hardware support all our requirements. Snapshot technology is hugely beneficial for backing up our data. 

Our environment is NAS-based. I don't have much exposure to NetApp on the block storage side. At the file level, the protocols they support are easy to use. This improves resiliency and helps us run the environment.

Our block storage is primarily Dell EMC, and we use NetApp for our AFF at the file level. We've heard many things about NetApp's block solutions, so it may be an excellent opportunity to look at NetApp from the block side of things and migrate. Dell EMC is relatively expensive, whereas NetApp is more cost-effective. I would like to explore all the new technologies and move our block storage to NetApp.

We did many POCs with companies like IBM, EMC, and NetApp and how they handled the file-sharing structures. NetApp came out on top for how it handled the files. It also beats the competitors in cost-effectiveness, which is the first thing a company looks at. 

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. 

NetApp allowed us to refresh our old systems with the new NetApp platforms. It allowed us to increase our capacity, our performance all over, and we are looking forward to utilizing more products in the future.

The ATL process, or the authorized-to-operate process, has been beneficial to the organization.

The ONTAP management software gave us the most beneficial bang for our buck. It allows our operation teams to manage the systems more easily than our previous tech solution.

The mirroring of two different sites is great. We're huge on that. We were not able to easily get that done with our previous solution. Using ONTAP and their SnapMirror technology allowed us to easily utilize their advantages in that space.

We want to consolidate under one solution. It'll be easier if we just had all of one product. That's what we're looking forward to.

They should just keep building on what they currently have. If they can continue to make it easier and more efficient and listen to customer feedback or do anything to automate the process will help a lot.

We're just getting into the solution and building on it. I can't say what needs to be improved.

Once we fully flesh out all of its capabilities, we will probably be able to provide some proper feedback.

Maybe more integration with other tech vendors and products, such as hypervisors. I know they're working well with Microsoft and VMware. However, they could integrate with more. If they can integrate more, it would be better.

We do have plans to expand in the future. We plan to continue to spread the solution across our sites where we need it the most. Hopefully, we'll have an all-in-one solution rather than having multiple storage solutions across our enterprise.

There's no competing option for us. We are a little bit on the budget side. This solution was able to deliver what we needed as far as requirements within our budget. Previously, we had Dell, and we're moving on to NetApp across the whole enterprise. 

In the future, we might look at something else depending on our use cases and requirements. As of right now, this solution is the one.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have been influencing our technology decisions a lot recently. We just recently made a commitment to AI in the space.

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. 

We are using AFF for a few clients. It's a specific type of data we use for these arrays, not like a block kind of thing or regular data. A few clients have particular requirements about where we put all the data. We are primarily using FAS, and we have around four or five AFF boxes. We don't deal with AFF regularly. 

We're not currently using NetApp Cloud Backup, but we're planning on implementing it. I'm not sure because my architect is the one who manages the end-to-end services for NetApp. He makes all the decisions on the NetApp side whether we use AFF or FAS. AFF is a unified storage box, so we route certain data to AFF. 

AFF has simplified data management across SAN and NAS environments. As admins, we're always trying to reduce the complications on the technology end. We're looking at the product from a single perspective. It's more about how the team engages with it. If one person on a 10-person team isn't comfortable with the features, then that's where we have to improve our understanding and where the vendor can help us. With AFF, we haven't had this issue. The whole team is thrilled to work on the product.

NetApp's ONTAP data management software has also made tasks simpler for us. There's no question about that. It has helped us run operations very quickly, saving us a lot of time. Before ONTAP, we used to spend a long time doing regular operations, but with the latest version of the tool, our day-to-day operations are much quicker and easier.

If you asked me to rate AFF's effect on the flexibility of SAP and Oracle workloads, I would give it a seven out of 10. AFF is what we are using right now, but the team isn't fully utilizing it because our architect team is managing everything. We haven't had enough time to look into that. We were interested in that. It is easier to understand and manage. There isn't a need to dig into that. However, I'm on the backend side of things, and we are still looking for some relevant documents that can help us understand this aspect better.

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.

NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology. 

For example, my team is unaware of any product unless my architect tells us about it. Then the team starts digging. It would be helpful if they made all the documentation and training readily accessible to everyone on their portal.

We've been using NetApp since I joined the company six years back.

Stability-wise, AFF is fantastic. We haven't seen many complications, and before there is a possible outage, NetApp reaches out to us and lets us know what's going on. 

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

NetApp provides excellent support. We get valid and crucial advice from NetApp every time we interact with them weekly or monthly. I would rate their support nine out of 10 because I work with various products from multiple vendors. Compared to other vendors, I feel more comfortable reaching out to the NetApp team. 

For example, I tried to reach the NetApp support team for one of the issues over the weekend. My call got disconnected due to a network glitch, and immediately I got an email in my inbox as well as a call back from NetApp on my given number. That's how NetApp reaches its customers.

Positive

I do remote support, so I'm not working on the data center side. We have an on-site team that could better describe the installation and deployment. However, my impression is that deploying AFF is straightforward. 

The architect is the main person working with the NetApp products, and he does a deep dive before touching any product. Our team has minimal exposure to NetApp because our work involves a mix of vendors. We have people working on the NetApp side but not regularly. The architect spends a lot of time on NetApp in his day-to-day activities, and he makes the changes. He takes and gives recommendations about which product to use, whereas we provide remote support from a different region altogether. The implementation, changes, configuration, and decision-making are all done from the headquarters.

And once it is implemented, the remote team logs in and does the navigation part. We check the array and identify any problems. If we find anything, we immediately reach out to the architect. He's the one who engages with NetApp and relays information to the remote team. That's how we learn as an organization. We spend time on the products to gain knowledge and experience with vendors.

It's hard for me to speak to return on investment. We have a different team responsible for that. I support the technical side. A separate team procures new arrays. 

In addition to simplifying the management across a mix of solutions, AFF simplifies the cost. That was one of the main reasons we purchased AFF.

We are using two other vendor products as well. One is from Dell EMC, and the other is HP. I say the best competitor would be EMC. We get the same level of support from EMC as NetApp. But it's hard to compare the two. Each vendor has its own way of providing the service. AFF doesn't work the same way the other vendor's product does. They both are unique and work based on their own design. However, the navigation makes a lot of difference for the end-users, like admins.

It depends on if you prefer working with the CLI or the GUI. I'm more comfortable on the CLI in admin roles, but I like the GUI over the CLI if I compare the same thing with the other product. Each product meets the needs of the use case in its own way, but the navigation style is different. Depending on your preference, you might feel more comfortable with NetApp or other products.

I'd rate NetApp AFF nine out of 10. To customers who are considering AFF, I would say they can go for it without hesitation. If it's a choice between AFF, FAS, or something else, customers can choose NetApp AFF without a second thought. We are happy with NetApp. Out of all the solutions we've looked at, AFF is the best fit for our business requirements so far.

NetApp has enabled us to transition from legacy configurations and continue to do some of the same things we did before implementing NetApp storage. It helps us with simple things, like allowing us to grow a file system immediately. Customers can do their own self-restores. 

I've combined other NetApp systems into one of our newer platforms, taking other file-sharing solutions native to Windows or Mac and creating file shares, yielding a better return on our investment. At the same time, we are providing better resources and more efficient channels for files.

When we had another vendor, backups were not done efficiently, so we lost critical data. That's why we went with this solution. It has required us to think differently about how we will implement it. Anything we do needs some aspect of AI involved to help us because we don't have enough resources in terms of money or labor power. 

We have considered using WEKA.io or S3, but we have a solid history with NetApp. We have it in multiple layers, so we can't make those shifts without interrupting many business systems. Ease of use is one of those critical things. We're familiar with it. Making those changes is too much of a lift and would be costly. 

When you evaluate what it costs to bring in a new vendor or platform versus what you've already invested in that app, it makes that decision easy. Right now, I plan to start doing some more data tiering. We bought a storage grid we use for backup but want to use for data tiering. S3 will be a protocol we can use for clients needing to access things from various platforms. 

We want to add more. We want to build out our source grid infrastructure because that can allow us to do data tiering, backups, and another protocol to enable users to use data more efficiently. It's also secure, and all those things are part of our effort to be more efficient. You can't have one without the other. 

Our organization recently underwent a major upgrade, and we're expecting exponential data growth over the next few years. We must embrace what we currently have and the building blocks to grow and understand the demand. We have to do that seamlessly, but we can't do it with the same resources we have now. 

We could not consolidate resources between NFS and Sys services without the NetApp appliance or something like it. 

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10.