NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

With All Flash, the benefit we have seen is the real estate in the data center has really shrunk by leaps and bounds. We went from having a huge rack full to provide about 10 TBs of storage to using just two shelves to provide 72 TBs of storage with solid state. It saves a lot of power and adds to the IOPS that can be serviced.

I would like to see end-to-end automation that would enable service providers to get the infrastructure with faster provisioning, decommissioning, or even performance analysis; end-to-end includes compute, network, storage and applications.

We are interested in seeing more compatibility with other virtualization platforms, especially with Oracle. That's a vast area. There seems to be two worlds: Oracle is on one side; VMware, NetApp, Cisco and all of them are on the other side. They need to come together to integrate and provide more compatible solutions. We are Oracle service providers for Oracle databases and applications. It’s a niche area and FAS still isn’t there.

The ONTAP OS is stable. We have the performance of the SSDs. We have the CPU processing speed, which helps us support 1 million IOPS.

I think we have a couple of options for the ONTAP versions: the 8.3 version and the new 9, which I think just reached general availability. We intend to use the 8.3, which is more stable in our environment for SATA, SAS and hybrid. We will continue to use the same stable ONTAP version for our All Flash.

As I mentioned, scalability with respect to the space is very nice. cDOT gives us the scalability to expand the cluster. So we have a two-node hybrid. We added two more, making it a four-node cluster. We can expand it to eight nodes in a pure SAN cluster.

Technical support is nice. It has been working well for us.

We have traditionally used SATA disks; then we migrated to SAS, and then to a hybrid which included a flash pool. Now we have embarked on all flash. This journey has been really exciting for us. We have used each of these storage systems to package storage services for our customers.

We were previously using HPE 3PAR. I was not involved in the switch between 3PAR to FAS, and I’m not sure why we switched. When I joined this company, we already started with NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no problems. We usually have a professional service engineer in the data center, and we have certified engineers within our organization to work together to design and implement.

It has usually been a unified computing platform with NetApp All Flash; so you get NAS and SAN protocols from the same box.

I would encourage my colleagues to evaluate multiple products, and find the right fit for their use cases.

The most valuable features are its fast performance and that it runs on a native ONTAP operating system, which is the coolest thing.

If you are looking for high-performance, reliable, multi-tenancy supporting equipment, then this is a very valid, legitimate solution with a proven background and history.

If you have a system administrator doing workflow that you have defined, then it is not going to save you time or money. If you have some kind of automated system, even though you haven't paid for those services, then it is going to make a lot of difference. It will save time because this is a high-end, high performance solution.

See my comments regarding technical support.

The tool is stable. Over the past several years, ONTAP has proven to be very stable OS solution. People may have experienced latency issues, but my workflow and workload is significantly small, so latency happens on the fly and it is easy to fix quickly.

Based on what I've heard, this tool is highly scalable. Even though I am using it in our relatively small environment, the tool is highly scalable. Any medium to large size company can afford it and it will be a good fit.

We do have premium support or regular support, whatever they call it. Every time we have an issue, we call technical support, and they get online right away. I have found them very helpful. The NetApp technical teams are pretty excellent in offering services.

SolidFire is in the same boat as NetApp in terms of supporting this product. It is a fairly new technology for them as well. Comparatively, the level of support for this solution takes a little longer, but it’s all relative. It takes little longer to get support for this tool than it takes for any other FAS system.

I was partially involved in the setup. It followed the same setup process for any other FAS system. It is pretty slick. The setup is pretty decent.

I know it uses the same OS, so I don't see why it would be different than any other FAS system. It has a different flavor, but it is not completely different. It is not using an “out-of-the-blue” OS.

This is proven technology. You cannot question its reliability and its high scalability. It is a very solid solution. If you are looking for high performance storage gear, it is definitely a very strong solution.

We have been a long-time consumer of NetApp solutions. The reliability with NetApp is very valuable to us. We don’t want to put that at stake by trying another solution.

I currently use several other NetApp systems, such as cDOT. We are pretty much a NetApp house.

We are also using a number of systems in parallel with this tool. We have a EMC VNX unified converged solution, IBM DS, and IBM Storwize V7000.

If I were a decision maker, I wouldn't go with only one solution. I prefer to diversify. That gives me more flexibility to keep vendors competitive and then they can offer me more. I don’t want to get locked into only one solution provider. I prefer to work with multiple vendors so I have more flexibility with price.

All-flash performance and density are two important things for us. In terms of performance, we have a humongous database. Before this solution, we had a lot of performance issues. With this tool, we were able to nail them down to at least 20-30% performance gain. In terms of density, I don't have the numbers, but it is definitely better than the older disk-based solutions.

The business benefit is the rate. If you have better performance from your critical ERP applications and databases, that's a gain from the cost perspective. We are able to manage our data centers better from the space perspective. Those two pieces are the key benefits.

At a recent NetApp conference, I got a lot of good ideas from the sessions where they are trying to bring in a newer AFF. That should be good. I am looking forward to the SolidFire integration. That will give us more benefits.

I have not used technical support personally, but we do use technical support on our operational issues. The team is getting pretty good response from them.

This is where my organization's innovation comes into the picture. They keep their eye on the market and what's going on. We started that relationship around two years ago and we started ten years ago with NetApp.

We also keep an eye on how we can improve from a data center perspective. We are a big data center provider and we look at how we can make our data center more cost effective.

The ROI is good. AFF is definitely pricier than other solutions, but the price gets compensated by performance and the density.

When looking for a vendor, I definitely look the product they are offering. I look at what the change is and how it will make a change for us. I look at the costs and benefits, the ROI, and the operation.

I am not technical, so I cannot give technical advice. However, I am part of the decision-making process at my organization. We are the central hub of providing the whole infrastructure to the company. We do a lot of homework. If we decide that we want to go with this solution and we can prove the ROI to our senior leadership, then that's that. We are then on it.

What we like is the performance of the equipment. It's really much better than hybrid aggregate or machines with flash cache. We have been using the FAS series for a long time and it's still performing well. First we started with 7-Mode. Then we moved our databases to clustered data ONTAP. Today we have more than 24 nodes; we have a lot of machines working in cluster mode with all activities on site. It works perfectly.

We use an ONTAP cluster for the core Oracle DBs. The benefits are performance and the features we use, such as FlexClone to clone and restore the DBs everyday and to check if backups are properly done. These are great benefits.

In future releases, I would like to see improvements in performance. That's something that we always need. But the performance that we have right now is really good.

Also, I'd like more features related to All Flash FAS with OpenStack or All Flash FAS with Manila.

In terms of stability, it is much better than 7-Mode. In terms of stability and performance, it is a very good machine with very good improvements. The cache layers are warm and everything is solid state; the kickbacks are really fast; better than other solutions. It is really good.

We scale one or two controllers every year by adding an extra part to each cluster if we need it. Last year, we just bought a shelf, but in the previous years, we were increasing by one or two HA pairs per cluster; that's a lot for us. But, it's easy to scale. The most interesting thing we did is we moved volumes across the cluster without downtime and with a minimal performance impact. That's something that we couldn't do in the past with 7-Mode. So that's really good for the company. For a commerce company like ours, we can't support these functions with downtime; it must be while online.

Technical support is good, but it depends on the tool that you're using. In the past, we had troubles with DFM and we eliminated DFM from our infrastructure. Support for OpenStack, Cluster-Mode, and 7-Mode is really good. Because they have been doing it for many years. But in general, support from NetApp is really good.

We decided to switch to all flash because we needed better performance and lower latencies that are stable with higher IO. That's something that traditional arrays can’t do.

We normally set up our clusters ourselves. We request professional services from NetApp when we want to add new machines into the cluster. But for other tasks, such as to configure, generate reports, create the aggregates and move databases across the cluster, we don't need technical support. It’s relatively simple.

We tried SolidFire also and we liked it. But we don’t use it for Oracle, we use it for OpenStack. We also looked at other companies. For example, EMC, which is a good solution, but it's really expensive. If you compare it with NetApp, the performance is the same. When using NFS, the best is NetApp. For Oracle, we are using NFS. NetApp does not have a competitor for NFS.

The important features are space savings, deduplication, compression and compaction. By enabling the deduplication, we save a lot of space, because we use it for VDA. We also see some performance improvement compared to the SAS spinning disks.

This solution gives us better throughput, better performance and better space-saving efficiency. These are the benefits the user group has seen.

They should really prove the performance numbers they show you. They provide some general performance numbers, but performance varies for every different customer site and different workloads. What they say it will do doesn't necessarily match what it does. But we have seen some difference in workloads other than the VDA. So they should say, “For this kind of workload, here are the performance statistics and for other workloads, it varies.” They should not simply say that these numbers apply to every situation. That should not be the case.

We assumed that the performance statistics they provide are applicable for everything and we purchased it. Then, we found that this is not a scalable solution. We did not get the performance we expected. They could provide a clear indication that the numbers they show are only for a particular type of workload. They could also improve the performance to match the numbers.

Stability is good. We have been using NetApp products for a very long time. We are the first customer for NetApp and we have been involved in various other FAS deployments. Stability-wise, it's gotten better.

Three years back, we deployed many customer systems; we have a big 24-node cluster. So scalability is very good.

For this particular deployment, we have only one HA pair. Currently, there is no requirement to grow from a scalability point of view. Our requirement is very small.  In the future, we may think of adding additional HA pairs and we can grow that scalability; we can distribute it in the future.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just like any other FAS system. Just install and enable some features for the AFF systems. It was not like a regular FAS system, but other than that, configuration is exactly same; simple and easy.

Initially, we approached multiple vendors for this kind of solution.

We have a NetApp on-site PSE and a systems manager – a NetApp group – sitting in our company. They suggested, “Why don't you explore this All Flash FAS for the VDA?” Then we evaluated the E560, a NetApp product, as well as AFF. We also evaluated other vendors such as XtremIO from Dell EMC.

Finally, for the simplicity and the flexibility, we thought of going with the AFF system.
This is a newer deployment. We used to use just the FAS system with the spinning HDD. We have changed it to all-flash.

You definitely should consider it.

One important factor for working with vendors is flexibility. The ease to use many features like FlexClone, SnapMirror and disaster recovery features. Other than that, the support prospect is very important to us. So the storage unit itself was not the only thing we considered before deciding to go with this particular solution.

The most valuable features are speed, latency, and throughput. We have a few workloads where we need speed, high throughput, and fast response time. We have some OLTP applications. It is very useful for that environment.

In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, the other thing is we are short on rack space. We can fit a lot of this storage in less rack space. It actually helps us reduce our cost, and increase efficiency.

Right now, even though they say that you can increase the cluster to a certain number of nodes, internally, the HA is only in two nodes. It is two-node HA architecture internally in the cluster. I think they should try to really scale it out, as a solution. For example, if you have a four-node cluster. Internally, it's still like a two-node HA. You have two-node HA and two-node HA, and you can't combine that into a four-node cluster. That is, we can combine them but internally, it's still two-node clustering. If one node goes down, you are exposed. You are only on one node in your HA.

I have already spoken with the engineering folks. Maybe they can have a common back plane, so that every node can see all the shelves. They'll have to go to their hardware folks.

It is very stable. We have been using it for the last 2-3 years and so far, it's been very stable.

We don't scale it too much because we don't want a lot of workload in the same cluster. I'm sure we can scale it if we want to.

Technical support is really good; very experienced folks; very helpful; and easy to reach them. So far, so good.

We were using the hard disk version of ONTAP in our environment. We did a PoC with All-Flash. We saw the benefits of it, so we implemented it in our environment.

Initial setup was very simple, very straightforward. We knew exactly what to do, so it was easy.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other options, but I don't think we can name them. We saw a lot of benefits. Here, we can have multiple protocols. The other vendors were only supporting specific protocols on their storage. We thought this would be more scalable in the future.

So far, my experience with ONTAP is really good. It is highly available, easy to use, easily scalable, easy to implement, and so far, we are really happy with it. We are really happy with the performance, ROI, and the cost.

I would give it a perfect rating if they reduced the cost – it is still expensive – and then, what I have mentioned about HA.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a product are that it is highly available, scalable, and easy to use. It should be able to work in our environment, basically; in a mixed-workload environment.

The most valuable features are the performance, speed, and that it is easy to manage. The most important one is performance. We use it for SQL, Oracle and SAP.

It makes the applications faster for production. There are no complaints from users about slowness. Performance is the main benefit of the All-Flash FAS.

It has made us more efficient, because we are an oil and gas company. Most of our applications depend on Oracle, SAP, or SQL, where it needs good performance. We have 24/7 operation. We cannot stop for any reason, because we need to produce oil, always.

There is room for improvement with the price. I’d like the price to go down.

At a recent NetApp conference, I attended a lab for Data ONTAP 9. I don't know everything about it. I need to spend some time to go through it; to see what they can improve.

Other than that, I don't have anything in mind.

It's very stable; no issues. We have had it installed for the last 12 months, and there have been no issues up until now.

We have already decided to buy more of them. I think, by end of this year or the beginning of next year, we will release the order for this.

About 90% of our data center is sitting on NetApp, either All Flash, 8080 or something else. VMware is also sitting on NetApp. That’s also good; no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good. But we are also very good; we have solid knowledge of NetApp. I have been using NetApp for the last 12 years.

We previously used HPE, but that was a long time ago. Since we moved from HPE to NetApp, we’ve only been working with FAS.

Initial setup was straightforward. Installation is easy, but we spent a long time proving it's good; convincing our users, which are application developers or DBAs, to move to this one. But the initial setup is piece of cake.

As a storage admin, I just need to install my storage. I don't want someone to call me back and say, “Oh, there is an issue.” Right now, we don't have complaints from users. That means less stress, which is fantastic.

The interface is pretty good. It’s really easy to use.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are stability; how much they improve the technology; service; and support. All of these together are very important.

It's an all-flash array and it integrates with the NAS solutions we use; that's a key part. We were looking at the different arrays. For example, SolidFire doesn't integrate with the NAS. Our solution mainly focuses on the NAS part of it, so we we're looking for a high-performance array. AFF basically is geared to those needs, apart from the base services which come with the NetApp product.

It has improved, in terms of latency and performance issues we were having on the spinning media; those will be gone. We can sell the customer what they need; all customers.

I haven't thought much about additional features or improvements. We’ve only been using the product for a short period of time; the main part is that it integrates with the NAS solutions and all the backups, SMVI, we would like to do. We're happy as of now.

Maybe thinking from my current problems or customers is why I can’t really think of anything. Maybe our environment is not as challenging as others. That could be a reason that we're not looking for extra things.

An example of something that is lacking, not necessarily for the AFF, as such, and that we might not have faced, is that in the FAS series, we were told about the faster 3200, if we get into an issue wherein it’s looking at a cluster interconnect, we need to basically replace some motherboard. Sometimes even doing a failover and give back wasn't even possible. We had to do a forced takeover and give back, and we basically corrupted couple of databases; it went to that extent. Hopefully, those are not issues in AFF. We haven't faced that yet but you never know until you actually use the product for a while.

Basically, they could do better in terms of software integration. There are a lot of features that, when we try to do it or, when NetApp tries to do it, they come across a lot of bugs which could affect us as customers.

Bugs need to be addressed at a much earlier level. There could be more QA done at NetApp itself before they get it out as a product.

We have been using it for three months.

We have not been using AFF for a long time, but the FAS series has been stable. We had issues with the 3200 series, wherein motherboards needed to be replaced under certain conditions, which we didn't like. We had to take some hits on that. Otherwise, if we go to the higher-end arrays, they're very stable.

There haven’t been that many issues. We do not have a lot of performance issues or demands, so we haven’t had many issues, in terms of scalability or performance.

We have used technical support. Whether it's a hardware or software issue, we do use it. We use it through a partner, if not directly with NetApp. They're helpful. It’s generally been a good experience with technical support.

We were previously using the FAS series with spinning media.

One of the key factors in our decision to move to a new solution was that NetApp was marketing it very well. We were running five-year-old hardware and we were about to do a tech refresh on them. We looked at spinning media, FAS and the AFF solution. AFF was making some sense cost-wise and performance-wise, so that's why we went to AFF.

We used professional services from another vendor for the initial setup, so we didn't feel it was that difficult.

The training for AFF was not difficult; it wasn't complicated.

We looked at Tintri for the VM piece of it. Finally, we went to the AFF.

In general, when I’m choosing a vendor, I look at what kind of products or aspects of the product we are looking for, whether they satisfy that or not, as well as performance. Third but not least is the cost, as well as how much difference it is from our current NetApp solution because our staff needs to be trained on that.

It does integrate; if you know the FAS series platform, it's not much different if you know CDOT. It's not much different doing implementation.

Determine which volumes need to go where; do that preparation from the customer’s perspective: how they want to use the product rather than how to deploy a product.

The most valuable features are the speed and the predictable performance. Compared to the spinning disk, I don't have to worry about IOPS anymore. I can rely on the IOPS being there. I can worry about CPU now. It's one less thing I have to worry about as far as performance.

The latency is very predictable and lower. It's very sustained, we know what it's going to be, and it doesn't get impacted by snapshots and so forth.

The AFF, which is what turns on the bit so that you can have an all-flash array compared to the hybrid array; I'm having troubles in my environment buying systems for smaller sites because I want the all flash array and I want the speed. I can go hybrid and still do SSD but it's making choices hard for me when I'm doing a lot of SnapMirrors and SnapVaults between sites.

I want the all-flash but I know I can't because I have to have SATA for the low-cost SnapMirror and SnapVault. It'd be nice if they would turn the switch on per aggregate, or maybe even per node, so that I could use it on some nodes. That way I wouldn't have to choose. Right now, I'm having a hard time choosing between hybrid or flash. I want the flash but I can't get it if I have to go hybrid.

I’m also looking forward to more CPU and power that's coming out in the AFF 700 and so on.

Other than that, so far, I'm pretty happy.

We had a stability issue. We got bit by a bug that was a compression problem, and we had to do a WAFL check. It was the first time we've ever had to do that only on the all-flash array.

The bug had already been identified, but nobody had hit it. We were the first one to hit it. The QA lab had found it. They should have notified all AFF customers before we hit it, because then we could have turned off compression and not hit it until the bug fix was released.

Technical support needs improvement. We need access to the backend people without having to go through two layers to get to them, because we're always above the two layers. It's a waste of our time to have to work through them.

We previously used a different solution, which was coming to the end of its lifecycle.

Initial setup was good. It's quicker, now that they've started sending out the pre-configured systems, or optimized systems.

There weren’t any other flash storage vendors on our shortlist. We were already in a four-year cycle with NetApp, so we just stuck with the same vendor.

In general, when I look at a vendor, the most important criteria is that they have our interests at heart and want to partner with us. Since we're a non-profit organization, we need them to understand what we're doing because we don't have a lot of money to throw around. They have to invest in our belief of what we're trying to do. Cost is part of it, but we still try to pick the technology over the cost, first.

For me, the most valuable feature is the simplicity of being able to have a pool of storage and not worry about: How many IOPS do I need? How many disks? Or carving up aggregates. Everything can just share. I can just go with the simple features of the GUI to allocate storage quickly and not worry about anything.

The management tools with NetApp really need improvement, in general; just giving good, simple tools for evaluating performance and performance headrooms, and seeing where you're about to run into things. ONTAP 9 seems to be taking steps in that direction, from what I've seen of it. This is my first ONTAP 9 system. I think they're making progress there. Until I have some more problems with the system and see how the tools serve me, I can't really give better insight on that.

I have been using it for about a month.

So far, it has been very stable; no downtime. We had some random error messages but no downtime issues; just getting used to the new ONTAP 9.

It looks like it will meet the company’s scaling needs moving forward. We don't have a high-performance need out there, so it's more about a simple solution than scalability, in this particular case. So far, it looks like it'll meet our needs.

We found NetApp support to be a mixed bag. Sometimes, it's real good; sometimes, it's real bad. It can take a while to get things escalated to the people you need it escalated to. I'm not terribly different from most of the industry, I'm sure.

We get our support through Datalink. We have to go through Datalink first and then get escalated to NetApp support. It adds another layer there, but costs a lot less.
For this project, the support has been pretty good. So far, I’m happy with how it's going.

It's a simple setup. What we spent our implementation time on was getting the fiber channel LUNs presented to the host; that went really well. The problem is, we need to configure it in Wisconsin and then we shipped it across an ocean and had some non-IT people install it into a rack and turn it on. That was the complexity. We all added it ourselves. With that said, because it was a simple, one-shelf system, they were able to get through it and get it done. There was one cable that wasn't connected right. Support helped me track that down, and then I had them go plug it in right. They turned the connector upside down and then it worked; what a shock...

For this install overall, for NetApp's part, it was simple; we have the complexity.

We looked at Hewlett Packard, EMC, a Nutanix solution, and probably a couple more I can't remember. Nutanix had been way out there; just a totally different way of doing it.

When selecting a vendor to work with, for whether or not we talk to them, I think we look at those things like reliability and reputation.

As far as who we choose, once we've got that process started, it tends to be the vendors that are willing to work with us in the sales process and give us lots of answers; give us lots of demos. We like to get a feel that they actually understand what we need; that the tech teams and the local teams that we're working with are capable of understanding what is going on technically; and they're not just fly by night: "They've been working here for three months and now they're going to move on." We try to figure out whether they have capable folks in the field. Does the sales team care enough about us to make a deal versus just saying, "Here's a price. You can take it or leave it."?

Unfortunately, we don't have budget, so a lot of our decisions do come down to dollars. We spend a lot of time looking for teams that can do both. Who's going to come in cheap, yet still give us all that personal attention and support, and feel like they're going to be partners with us in the process, rather than just a reseller that's going to kick us over to support? We want people who are invested in making us successful, and not everyone's willing to do that.

We needed something that could do multiple protocols. We had a need out there for CIFS and NFS and fiber channel storage. NetApp was one of the few vendors who has a solution that's capable of handling all that and is easy to use.