NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

Our biggest use cases for the AFF are virtualization and data bases. We use it for file storage.

For any of the performance intents of applications, it's just been night and day from when we put them on. We had them on spinning disk, then converted them to the AFF. The latencies have become really low and my customers are all happier for it.

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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.

Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those. If we could find some way of not getting so many, so that the alerts that do come in are real and valid, and not so many false positives, that would make a big difference.

We've been really happy with their stability. We did run into a bug that nobody else knew about and they came up with a patch for us to help fix it, and it's been rock solid ever since. So we're happy.

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With their clustered ONTAP we can scale as big as we need to.

I've been happy with them. They've gotten me the answers every time I've called in. I haven't had any problems with getting the escalation I need. I just ask for it and they're able to kick it up and get the response that we need.

It was a little complex. There were a few changes that we were not privy to. For instance, they had the 40 gig converged NIC that we didn't even know was available until we got it. Learning how to adjust that and manage that was a little bit different, it was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not horrible at all.

We've been a customer of NetApp for a long time and they're a good, strong company and we have a close partnership with them. We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on our experience with AFF because they're a great company to work with. They put out some good products.

The most important criteria for us when selecting a vendor would be

• somebody who is stable
• somebody whose industry standing is a big deal
• and then price point.

They're a good strong system. I don't think that anything is perfect, but it's pretty close. It takes care of everything that we need. It's a fantastic solution. We haven't regretted getting it.

Performance.

• Application performance
• Less capacity required due to storage efficiency

More performance features. We need our jobs to run faster.

Yes, it is stable.

Yes, it is scalable.

Helpful for troubleshooting.

We did not have a previous solution. We chose NetApp because we have other NetApp systems.

It was an easy setup. It was done very quickly.

The big benefit is the performance increase over the previous versions and the previous systems.

Also, to be able to do things such as moving machines around, moving volumes around, the little maintenance and everyday things you need to do. The tasks become that much quicker, and that makes it that much easier to do. You're not, say, waiting for a Storage vMotion to take half an hour to run, where on an all-flash system if it takes half the time of what you were used to. That's awesome.

In addition, less time that you have to worry about troubleshooting stuff.

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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.

I've definitely thought about this at earlier times, where I would probably have more stuff than I do now. The integration is pretty good.

I think there could probably be some more functionality out of like the VSC-type of plugins for the virtual environment.

The backup-type of functionality that comes from NetApp is okay, but I could see some enhancements in that regard, too.

It's definitely impressive. I haven't had a problem with the system. Been running it for about nine or 10 months now. It's stable, absolutely, 100%.

We have a smaller environment, just a two-node cluster, one our primary side and one on our secondary side. One of the benefits that NetApp brings to the table is being able to add nodes to it if you want to, if you need more storage or you need more power, more processing speed - and boom! You can just add nodes and that's it.

I've used them many times. There are always some techs that are better than others, but I've found that NetApp support is better than some other vendors, even non-storage related vendors, whose tech support you have to call.

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We mainly run virtual environments, VMware NFS. We were previously using just SATA and SaaS disk and we went to the All Flash and the performance was way better. It was a great improvement over the previous system.

We maxed out our previous system in terms of its space and also the IOPS and the actual performance we were getting out of it, as we continued to grow.

We were a small company. Our parent corporation rolled us into our own corporation, we did an IPO. Then we grew a lot from that, so we had our older system that we had previously and, as we grew, we threw more databases and the like at it. We saw the performance was definitely not able to keep up. Once we implemented the All Flash FAS, it really wasn't an issue any more.

It was very straightforward on the setup.

The upgrade was actually very easy too. We didn't even really need to do a traditional migration when we did our "migration" to it. We didn't have to do the setup by migration tool. It was easier to set up the new cluster next to the old one, and then set up intercluster links and SnapMirror all the data over, and then just bring that volume. We did a planned failover, like we would for a disaster recovery, where you just bring up the new system, bring down the old system; that's how we did it.

Actually, we took that old system to make our disaster recovery, so we just sent that to our failover site and then we already had the data in sync too. We didn't have to do that whole process of syncing the data across the LAN, we were able to do it right next to each other on our LAN, so it was super fast, and then sent over our system, and then just resume the SnapMirrors.

We had NetApp already, so they were always a front runner, but we were looking at EMC, EqualLogic. And even, instead of having a NetApp, a different DR solution altogether, where we would have a third-party replication system that could replicate our data - instead of having another All Flash FAS or another FAS on the other side - and just relying on a different DR system altogether.

Once we took into account the easy integration of everything, and how everything worked together, and since we already had that familiarity and that comfortability with it, it was easy to decide on NetApp; the company and the product.

Right now we just use it for file storage. We were using block and file. I'm going to be using block in the future as well.

In terms of my impression of NetApp as a vendor of high profile SAN storage, before I purchased AFF, I always liked NetApp. I was always impressed by the company in general, as a NetApp customer previously. But the All Flash FAS definitely has even increased that and enhanced my opinion of them more, based on the functionality, the new stuff in ONTAP 9. We were using an older 7-Mode system, so the transition was pretty easy; and just the overall benefits of the system and the new functionality.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage systems in light of our experience with AFF because of the reliability, the ease of the failovers, and the high availability of the system.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor include responsiveness of the company to their customers, what they need and they want. I feel that NetApp has a very good finger on the pulse of their customer. They have good relationships with their partners and the third parties, so it is a very easy transition when dealing with NetApp partners. It makes the actual buying, and dealing with the quoting, very simple.

Also, in selecting a vendor, support is definitely an important issue; having someone to lean on if there is an issue - and when there is a mission critical issue - that you know you can rely on. It's important to have someone who is going to respond right away, so that you're not waiting for someone useful to help you.

Do as much hands-on testing as you possibly can. It's hard to test it out in the real world. The NetApp Insight conference is cool because you can see the product up close and personal, and they do demos and labs. But definitely do your research, as much as you can and pick something that works, that makes sense for your company, and organization as a whole.

Our use case is really just our Exchange environment right now. In terms of block or file storage, we present it to VMware and then present it off as RDM's to the virtual servers. Our AFF is not currently part of a cluster together with other NetApp FAS systems.

Because of all the inline deduplication and the integration with SnapManager, it allows us to set the storage and forget it with the Exchange team. They do all the restores through the Snap Single Mailbox Restore.

And it's quick, it's fast, even though IO is not huge for the Exchange environment, it's still nice to have that speed for when they do have that need.

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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.

For us, probably the best feature would be an ONTAP-as-a-whole feature, the fabric pulling directly to cloud with unaccessed blocks over time. For us that would be the feature to revolutionize where NetApp stands, and bridge their connection with the cloud. It's actually a feature that they're introducing now, it's just not mature.

Right now you're only aging snapshots up to the cloud, and only if the aggregate is at 50% or more. It would be cool if the feature was that the fabric pulled just aged/unaged blocks. Who cares if a block is still there or not after it hasn't been accessed in three years? Just age it up to the cloud, if suddenly I need it just pull it back.

That should be automatic without extra things. You could use FPolicy to do it one way or you could do it a different way. But if that was just in the array and part of the normal hybrid flash pull array with the fabric pull on the end, to get rid of that extra old data.

It's really stable, in our experiences, this stuff has been pretty rock solid.

We haven't had to deal with scaling yet.

I use NetApp's tech support all the time. I actually think they've done a great thing - the introduction of chat support has been really great.

Increasing hours for that would probably be good because it's easier to be on a chat call and be troubleshooting with something. Sometimes a lot can be lost on a phone call.

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We've been a NetApp customer for a while so we've used disk-based and hybrid storage from them.

We use Nimble for our primary VMware storage right now. We haven't switched that back to NetApp yet. We're going to see how the next few years go and then we'll figure out from there.

We were using Exchange, we were using NetApp storage before, and we knew the SnapManager products were a huge part of that. And when you couldn't get the same functionality out of trying different things with different vendors, you don't want to beat your head against the wall reinventing the wheel with what you're doing. It was a natural progression for us.

It was pretty straightforward. Our need and setup for it wasn't crazy.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage before and after we purchased AFF was good. For our primary VMware storage, before, we went with a different vendor for a little while. Then we pulled back to NetApp for this, because of the ease of functionality and ease of use relationship with ONTAP.

Based on our experiences with AFF we are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future because of its reliability. We've tried out other vendors, and we might end up going back to NetApp for those solutions, given our different experiences.

When selecting a vendor to work the most important criteria for me would have to be:

• Support - To me, that's the most important. Being an engineer, you have to rely on the support people to know what they're doing.
• Ease of use, what you're familiar with, obviously - NetApp has a big community out there so it's easy to look up other stuff, and to find other opinions, and work with the information that's available, in the information age that we are in. In some cases you might find other solutions compared to when you call support. Support is down to looking through the same thing you are.

As for advice I would give to a colleague in a different company who's looking at AFF and other similar solutions, it depends on how they support their Exchange environment. But if they were willing to pay for the SnapManager and the Single Mailbox Restore suite, it's really hard to beat what NetApp has done with it. If you set up everything properly, and restores are pretty much a non-storage event, you can mostly push that off on your Exchange team, and just worry about when they need large data increases.

It has resulted in more customer revenue. We've got a very diverse crowd as far our customers go. Different customers are asking for faster, more performance, more service, and AFF pretty much delivered that.

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

I don't know if it's really specific to AFF, but metrics as far as performance. I would like to see a lot more of that.

Also, ZAPI is kind of difficult to use. You know, it's SOAP-like, it's not really SOAP. I would like to see it more of a REST-based JSON, instead of XML.

One of the biggest things that would really help is if it were driven like AMQP on the EMS would be really nice, so I can actually see when things are being created instead assuming things are created based on API calls.

It's very stable. I don't think I've noticed any problems with it at all. It's one of those things you don't really think about until you run into a problem. I haven't run into a problem, so it's actually very stable.

It's scalable. As far as NetApp products go, in general, they're very scalable.

I haven't used it directly. We have residents so usually, if I need support, I go to the resident or one of the Professional Service guests that works with us. But the support they provide is excellent.

I'm generally not involved in initial setup. Usually where I get involved is after it's gone through RDS, and I do the automation orchestration as far as our customers' provisioning and billing, etc.

For the most part our use case is databases. We use AFF for both block storage and file storage. We've got arrays for both. We've got a very mixed NetApp setup. We've got some that are just AFF, some that are AFF FAS systems - flash pulls and the like.

I've always been a fan of NetApp. I've dealt with other vendors but I like NetApp because when we need support, they're usually there, they show up, whereas other vendors don't quite do that. As far as AFF specifically, it's just another good product that NetApp put out. We're definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future, based on our experiences with AFF due to the support that NetApp provides. Very good support

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are

• support
• generally performance - if it's a performing product
• scalable is always good.

I would pretty much tell colleagues to go with NetApp because of the support. When something goes wrong, that's usually the most important thing to me: how do I get support? NetApp's always delivered on the support side.

One example is we're moving a legacy application over. I'm actually in the middle of a project for that right now, where it's four Windows servers each with eight terabytes, that our actuary department uses for data analytics. With the efficiencies on the AFF, that eight terabytes has gone down to about two and a quarter of actual capacity used. So we're going to save a lot of space there, in addition to letting them run more simulations and get more simulations done more quickly because of the storage being so much faster than what they're on now.

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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.

Looking at the road map that's out there, I think they're heading in the right direction. Additional performance, additional data efficiencies, that's what everybody wants right now.

And then the integrations that I'm really excited about - and part of the reason I'm here at the NetApp Insight 2017 conference - is to look at the integrations with AFF and things like StorageGrid Webscale. So you're getting even more efficiency out of the platform and offloading cold blocks that you don't need right away.

We haven't had any issues, even going back to the longer experience I have with the FAS platform. They're typically few and far between, especially compared to some of the other vendors we've worked with. When we do uncover an issue, we typically get escalated to the right teams and get it worked out.

It's really good. There are some that things that could be done better there, like NetApp is doing; it's other products like Webscale and SolidFire. As long as you're aware of the design considerations, it's very, very easy. Shelves go in like a snap. As long as you make sure you have the proper compute to go with it, you're good to go.

We're not really having scalability issues, it's just you have to make sure that you're not exceeding the capacity of your heads when you're expanding your logical storage out, that's all.

It has caused problems for my company in the past, but I think that was the result of not having storage administrators with a high level of proficiency and knowledge of NetApp. They made some very poor sizing decisions, but you can't blame the vendor for that. It's more of the admins' fault for not specking them out properly.

For the AFFs, I don't know if we've had to specifically leverage NetApp support yet. I don't think we've had an issue major enough that we've had to reach out. That's been more on the FAS side.

Support has generally been pretty good. Occasionally there are struggles getting to the right people but, once you do, they know what they're talking about.

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Yes and no. We're in the process of retiring some old storage frames, old Hitachi frames actually. I believe it's just disk-based. There are actually three different Hitachi frames and they're different. One is all flash, one is hybrid, and the other one is purely disk-based. So there's a mix. We have another all-flash platform that we could move workload to, but the NetApp fit the workload a lot better for this in my opinion. So it made sense.

The original intent was actually to extend our NAS - we primarily use NetApp for NAS and a lot of our environment. But we've pitched the AFF that we just installed, the A700, primarily as a SAN platform. So we're really trying to leverage more towards that now.

It will eventually be used for both block and file storage. It was originally slated for file usage NAS, but we're leveraging it more for block.

I had worked with NetApp as block storage in the past, and I always had a high opinion of it. I think NetApp is the best in the industry at providing a unified platform for file and block. Hands down.

We don't get too deeply involved in the cost analysis, but management and engineering rely heavily on the input from myself and my co-worker on the storage team, for these kinds of decisions, on a technical level.

We had Pro Services, but we were heavily involved.

For someone who is experience with any NetApp platform it's very, very straightforward, very similar to anything else that you would do. Obviously there are some specific guides, specific to AFF. You want to make sure you're following those best practices, but other than that it's a cinch. It's something that I could have done on my own without Professional Services, that's how easy it was.

We have storage frames from most of the large vendors, so EMC would have been on the table, IBM would have been on the table, Hitachi. And really with the ecosystem that NetApp has built up around it, it just makes the most sense from a management perspective for sure. And the performance and value for money is there as well. It's a tough combo to beat.

We have a 8080 EX HA pair, an 8040 HA pair, and an A700 all in the same cluster. That's our production cluster. We also run an AFF8040 for non-production and then a couple of other FAS heads: two HA pairs, 8040s for DR. So we've got some NetApp spread around.

Based on our experience with AFF, we are definitely more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems in the future because it's the same quality and the same value for money as we have always come to expect from them.

This is the direction the industry is going. My personal opinion is that SaaS 15,10k is going to be dead, completely within the next three to five years. Everything is going to be flash for performance and cheap and deep SATA, probably object storage for archival. I just think this purchase puts us better in alignment with where the industry is headed as a whole, it's more future proof.

When it comes to the most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with I think what's important is performance, value for money and, in addition to that, having support that's easy to work with, that can get you the answers quickly when you need them. That is the other big thing.

I give it a nine out of 10 because there's always room for improvement. I don't think anything is perfect in IT, but it's pretty darn good. It's really pretty impressive technology when you get it running.

What would make it a 10 goes back to what we talked about above, with the additional integrations and single panes of glass and getting a whole functional flow; what NetApp keeps pitching on the roadmap as the "Data Fabric," getting a single pane of glass for everything in your infrastructure and tying it all together.

Advice as far as choosing a solution? Everybody's requirements are different, but if they don't have NetApp at the top of the list as candidates, they're doing something wrong.

• Performance
• Density per rack unit from the capacity perspective with some of the other drives.

It solves the performance issues of the past. 

The primary use case for my customers is enterprise vSphere workloads or Oracle workloads. We have customers using it for both block and file storage.

This is not a directly specific to AFF, but I like the idea in the cluster that the data from ONTAP would allow having a mix of All Flash HA pairs with hybrid arrays. This allows for a somewhat tiered approach for storage. So, that is cool.

I am excited to see how the data fabric story plays out from the entire NetApp portfolio that connectivity of all the different devices. I know in the beginning when it was first spoken about, SnapMirror was something talked about. I liked that idea of just having the ability to transfer data between different NetApp platforms, and that would obviously include the All Flash line.

Cluster data ONTAP as an operating system is very stable and very mature. We seemed to like with 9.2 that there is inline deduplication at the aggregate level. That is a welcomed addition.

Since we are talking 24 nodes for NAS, that is really good. I forgot what the scale number is for block on clustered data ONTAP, but I have not run into any opportunities where we had to go beyond what we had.

When you are looking at NetApp as a scale-out NAS player, they have been in the SMB in the FAS space for long time. They have done it well. They have done the multi-protocol access, NFS to NTFS access and reverse really well. They have the ability to have a cluster of disks contained of different kinds of disks, which has been useful. Also, as a unified box, it is like the Swiss army-knife of the unified boxes.

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.

It has improved our applications' overall performance, and it has simplified our management of it.

We use it for all of our VMware infrastructure as well as for our X-ray data storage, for the short-term storage. We use both block and file storage.

Now, we can manage failed disks in our SAN before we replace them or manage how quickly they are replaced. All these kind of decisions, we can make. This flexibility is critical to having a comfort level with our environment.

Being able to move SVMs from one cluster to another.

We have had two issues:

1. There was a server and one of the heads rebooted because there was a system failure. We were unaffected, because the system stayed up and running. So, that was awesome.
2. We had an issue, which was a self inflicted outage. Unfortunately, that one actually took our entire environment down. This was our own fault.

Overall, the stability has been pretty amazing.

Scalability is excellent. There has never been a question as to whether it could scale out. It has been more a question of, "Do we have the finances to be able to do it?"

They have always been good about being responsive. I love the auto support. The people that we get on the phone are usually pretty knowledgeable, and if they are not and they don't know what to do, then they hand it off to somebody who does.

We also have Pure Storage.

It was pretty straightforward.

We did have a rep on site as well that helped us with the installation. We have used it as part of a cluster to connect with other methods.

NetApp does a good job of being able to provide a lot of options for its customers and supporting those options with information. Even before AFF, we always used NetApp for mission critical stuff.

It offers everything we need.

If you are considering this solution, ensure you do the research and know what you are actually getting. Also, make sure you know what your needs are before you start doing that research.