NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

It promises to deliver lower-latency throughput to our database servers. We're pretty confident that we can take advantage because we've built out a new, lower-latency network. To date, we've migrated one SQL server workload, a fairly large one, on to it. We haven't really put it through its paces yet, but we like what we see so far.

We expect more capacity so that we could move more of our workload on without having to make some of the tougher choices about what gets moved and what doesn't; what gets moved off of spinning disk.

We're actually delving in to it, moving our large Oracle workloads on there. However, we don't want to necessarily move all of those components on. There are some that clearly might not benefit from All-Flash FAS. Being that there's a premium cost, a premium right now, and we only have one array, we need to be judicious in what we cut over. The smaller database environments are a given. Also, we'll be moving some of our VMware, more performance-sensitive workloads, onto that.

I’m not even educated enough. That's why I went to a NetApp Insight conference: to learn some of the details of flash. We're not so concerned about the value proposition of deduplication, compression. I know there are a lot of benefits of capacity. That's not our primary concern. However, as time goes on, that's going to be more and more of an issue.

Stability-wise, it's fine.

Scalability has not come up yet. Obviously, we haven't been able to scale anywhere.

We have not yet needed to use technical support.

We were previously using SAS and SATA. That said, with our Oracle environment, no one's been complaining. We've been getting quite satisfactory throughput. We just migrated from 7-mode, all on spinning disk, to Clustered ONTAP on newer hardware, smarter back-end aggregate design. We've really implemented more of the NetApp best practices. Actually, we're getting great performance out of our traditional arrays. For us, it's really a matter of education about how to deploy the All-Flash FAS units.

Given the advanced disk partitioning and ONTAP 8.3, that was a small learning curve, but that's not unique to flash. Actually, it was pretty simple to set up. The fact that we have a heterogeneous disk type in the array made it simple. Our choice of aggregate type was very simple. Basically, we split the unit, an 8060. We split the capacity across both heads. It was pretty much a vanilla roll out.

We were able to get good pricing; it was part of a larger acquisition. Other than that, if this were a standalone purchase, pricing would definitely be an issue. When we were pricing the AFF separately and comparing that to the other big company, a year ago, it really looked like the NetApp offering was very costly.

The last purchasing cycle, two years ago, it came down to a bake-off between EMC and NetApp. We've been a NetApp customer for quite a while, so our skill set is heavily invested there. Also, we're about a 50% file-based shop as opposed to block, so NetApp is a pretty good fit. I like their file solutions more so than EMC, that it's all integrated. It's not a bolt-on appliance.

In general, when I choose a vendor, I look for stability, supportability, and that the product has actually been adequately tested; that it's not beta.

Give more attention to your VDI solution. We have already implemented a VDI solution that's not using flash. That's a perfect workload candidate to put on flash. For my organization, it might have made more sense to put the back end on our NetApp All-Flash FAS, because we have the skill set to administer the storage, as opposed to bringing in another topology that might have some issues.

To be able to give it a higher rating, I would need to actually go and take that car out on some highways, where I could really open it up. I haven't given it a chance yet. That said, I would need to see it perform orders of magnitude better than the spinning disk, and that's what's advertised.

We decided to use the All-Flash because of speed. Most of the time, when we looked at the SAP database, what we found was, by using the All-Flash, we got almost 100% improvement on our jobs.

The best part about it is the density; otherwise, earlier, we used to use a lot of 300- or 600-GB disks. It saves space, saves power and makes us more efficient. The main thing is performance. If you can get the report done in half the time, it's good.

I would like to see the All-Flash FAS support virtualization better. I find that lacking in some areas; application and for disaster recovery. I know we have to do a lot of setup and we need to know exactly what needs to be done, but I would expect NetApp to make those best practices available automatically. Why do they say, “Do this, do this,” when they could say instead, “For DR, click this button”, which would automatically implement the best procedure, rather than having to figure it out yourself? That should be automated.

There are several other improvements that can be done, especially with the clustering. I don't know why we had to make back-end decisions. With software-defined networking, most of the decisions can be made at the front end. Right now, how NetApp works is, you get the data to the head, take it to the back end to make a decision and then pump it back. I just want to eliminate the switch in the back to the cluster. Why not make those decisions? Maybe they need to do something on the software-defined networking; maybe have some module in the switch to make the decision at the front-end, distribute the workload for the clusters in the back. I really don't like having another switch in the back. You know your data comes from this network.

So far, we have not had any major stability issues because I look for stability, then performance; the product has to be stable first, then comes the performance.

My uptime is 99.99%. Other people say “All five nines,” but I say, “Hey, when the CFO or the CEO wants access and it's down, it doesn't matter what you're doing.”

Stability is very, very important. The first thing is stability, then performance. Performance is important because performance is everyday work. Stability is like, you say nowadays, “IT infrastructure has to be like air. You don't look for air, right?” You can automatically breathe it like that. Storage has to exist all the time. That's the main criteria on stability.

So far, I don't know the exact size that we have. I know we can add more storage. We just procured some more disk shelves to add. I don't know the limits. I probably need to go check out how large we can be.

Also, we're trying to keep our environment separated. That way, there's no contamination. There are also regulations and other things we have to worry about. If we're putting everything in one box, putting all the eggs in one basket, we need to be really careful about stability, performance, and making changes.

If we want to scale out in the future, I think the system is capable. We should not have problems; I hope that will happen.

We might have used technical support a little bit but most of the time, it is working, so I don't think we made any calls. I don't think we are using it. We're paying for it but we're not using it much.

Our vendor was good, they did the initial setup; they helped through the setup. If you set it up right the first time, you probably don't have to mess with it a lot. If it is stable, there isn’t much else to do.

We were previously using NetApp with spinning drives, and we were also using some of the EMC DMX.

Now, we are using NetApp exclusively.

Initial setup was pretty easy. I think it only took maybe half a day to do everything; put it in, power it, connect all the cables, configure it. I think we put it in production within like half a day; not difficult.

We did run the eval and our PoC through other vendors, other storage suppliers.

There were two other flash players, and we finally ended up going with NetApp All-Flash. The reason being the migration would be much easier. We added our existing cluster to the same cluster, so that we could do the migration whenever we are able to do it. We didn’t need a big downtime to migrate it.

Also, when we buy other technology, we have to have people to manage it. We need to decide whether, “OK, do I need to use the current talent pool to migrate to All-Flash, or bring in a new player where we have to support both?” It adds to the cost.

When we are selecting a vendor to work with, we look at whether they want to work according to our interest or according to the vendor’s interest, because we need to make sure they can support us in the long run; that they are reliable; and that they have good people who know the product and have a good attitude working with customers. Most of the technical knowledge and other things, you can acquire, but attitude is important.

If you are a NetApp customer and considering a new technology, you need to look at the additional cost of doing things or administrating another thing. If you are completely moving from NetApp to a new vendor altogether, can they do everything? Transitioning from one storage to another takes a long time. At the end of the day, your servers and other things, they don't have anything there, like transient, that you can replace any time. But when it comes to storage, your storage is important.

If you give me the storage, I can do pretty much everything. If your data is available, you can figure out how to reroute it or do things with that, but if your data is not there, you have servers, everything is useless; network. Everything is useless. I still see people invest a lot of money on networking. I say, “Look, if the storage is not available, you don't need network; you don't need servers.” You need to look at your storage; it’s very critical. It has to be stable, perform well and you need to be able to protect it. If those things are there, you can take the storage anywhere and make it work. If you don't have compute, Amazon EC2 can give you compute, Azure can give you compute, but you need to protect your storage.

The most valuable feature is how user friendly it is. For somebody in my position, I have to be able to bring the system up quickly, efficiently, and also shut it down, if there's a power outage, quickly and efficiently, without having troubles. It also supports VMware. That's what we use, but we use the NetApp as our filer; it’s our only filer.

I attended a recent NetApp Insight conference to find out more about how we can benefit from it, to understand it more so, that way, I can employ it better during high-tension situations.

I never see the financial side, so I don’t know if we have seen any financial benefits. In terms of the manpower to run it, it’s me; I can do it myself. As a former grunt, I've been able to manage the system easily, ever since we got it four years ago. As far as administration, it only takes one person.

The graceful shut down feature is no longer there, in the version that I have. I believe I'm using ONTAP 7.0.x. on the FAS2040 and we’re also using the FAS2020.
I don't know where it needs improvement because I'm not that well-versed in it.

Stability is excellent. I've had no issues in the last six years that I've had NetApp flash storage. Just recently, on one system that's been out and had a lot of controversy in it, we had a filer fail on us. We were able to get a filer the following day. It was excellent.

Scalability was another reason why I attended a recent NetApp Insight conference. That's what I wanted to find out: where we're moving ahead, from here.

We have enough capacity for what we do. I can have up to close to 120,000 separate widgets running simultaneously and delivering data to other systems. Everything works; no problem.

Technical support is excellent.

I didn't evaluate anybody; higher levels than me did that. I know that NetApp won the contract again, so they must be doing something right. My organization’s not going to give a contract to nobody, for a bad product.

Right now, I'm concentrating our collapse-down strategy, where we're taking multiple systems and putting them all on one system. That's why I went to the NetApp conference. I'm curious to see how it's going to impact the filer; if the filer's going to need to expand. If we're going to be migrating to a new filer, etc.

To get my certification to build it, I found it a little bit grueling. Everything is tailored to our specific organization, following the documentation. It's different documentation than what NetApp uses. I’m not familiar with the NetApp filer documentation.

The input/output is the most valuable feature. When you have high-availability applications that need high IOPS, it's kind of a no-brainer to have an AFF. We're using it for some SQL databases now, and a VDI solution.

We did see some massive performance increases on all of the SQL databases when we moved over; that made the database administrators pretty happy.

It's worked very well. I know we'll see improvements in disk. You'll get better processors and things like that, which will make them faster, but overall, it's fantastic for our environment. Improvements in disk and better processors would be something I’d like to see in the future, but you're going to see that anyway.

I always get surprised when I see a new feature. Usually when something comes out, I'll see something and say "Wow, I would have never thought they would've went there." I'm not that good at future-casting.

I'm sure that people have issues. I haven't had anything, though. It's been great.
Maybe if it had some sort of game-changing technology. They're all very similar; that's the thing I learned through the POC process.

We have not had any stability or scalability issues at all, actually. It fit right into our current cluster, and everything works great. We haven't had any issues at all. It’s been absolutely stable.

We have not needed to use technical support for anything particular on the AFF. We do have a support contract and we do have support issues from time to time, but nothing's come up with the All Flash, so far.

In general, NetApp support is pretty good; overall, pretty good. I've had a couple of things that needed to be escalated but overall, the staff is pretty knowledgeable and they work pretty well.

We drove the decision to invest in AFF a little more than our database administrators had. They were fine with the performance, but we were seeing some things on our side that made us think it was time to go with a flash solution. They were driving too much IO over SAS and SATA, and we wanted to make sure we had the right solution for them going forward. We also wanted to futureproof it a little bit.

If you can set up any FAS, you can probably set up a AFF. Initial setup is pretty simple, if you know that technology.

The thing that I love the most about it is, being a NetApp customer for a while, they code their cabling; you know where the square plugs in, and you have a triangle and a circle. That makes it so much easier; they idiot-proofed it, very much. Then, of course, when you go through the setup and configuration, it alerts you if there's any cabling issue, so you can go back; that was kind of nice, too.

I don't handle pricing. I did a little bit of the negotiation. I thought it was fair for the value that we got, especially compared to certain competitors that we looked at as well.

We're a NetApp shop, and we've had a very good relationship with them over the years. Nonetheless, for certain purchases – obviously, for a big purchase such as moving into the flash arena – we wanted to be certain, so we did look at a few other options.

I felt like the AFF pricing was better. The fact that we had existing NetApp solutions and a great relationship with our NetApp partners was basically what won it there. I don't know that it necessarily does anything different than a competitor, but we've been very happy with it.

In general, when I’m considering vendors to work with, I like solid solutions. I like good support. You wind up trusting people after you get through a few solutions and through a few things with them. That's important to me.

If you have experience with NetApp, you shouldn't have any trouble with it. If you don't, I would suggest the training. It's pretty straightforward, but that'll always help.

At this point, performance is the most valuable feature. We're just putting it into production, on a pretty heavy performance-intensive workload. So far, its performed exactly how we wanted it to. Performance is the key on that particular device.

It's offloaded workload that was compromising other workloads because of performance degradation. It's enabled us to take that and isolate it; give it the performance it needs, saving other applications’ performance as well.

We don't have it running ONTAP 9 yet. Upgrading the OS to ONTAP 9 will definitely give us some advantages. From what I saw at a recent NetApp Insight conference, about how ONTAP 9 looks and feels, there are things to look at and learn how to use that, in performance monitoring tools as well. We still had some learning to do about what's available. We're using rudimentary performance monitoring. As far as that goes, the old tools are giving us what we want, but we're looking forward to upgrading to be able to take advantage of better tools.

We are especially looking for better performance monitoring. We want to be able to truly see what the load is doing at any given point in time, and especially if the user wants to know, “We're going to load this up. We want to see what effect it has on it.” We want to be able to give them real-time numbers.

Right now, that’s not easy to do. We can't get to the detailed level that we want to. We believe that that's available going forward.

We've only had it in production a short time. We've had it a total of about six months.

In the short time we’ve had it in production, six months, we haven’t had any stability issues.

We haven't had to scale it out.

We've had to call technical support only because the performance monitoring on it has given us some skewed numbers. Getting back to us on that was a little bit slow, to get us the answer that we really needed to see, but we got the answer that we needed. All is good now.

I wasn’t involved in the decision process to invest in this particular All Flash FAS, but I've been in many, many discussions about going to that technology. I'm part of our team to say, "This is what we think we're going to need based on what we've seen. This could be the right tool for the job." In general, with decisions like this, there’s no one person making the decision.

We were previously running on a different vendor platform. We had that device saturated, and there was nowhere to go with it. The scalability was non-existent. It was disk. This was a good opportunity for us to move into this flash environment with this particular workload because of the performance.

At this point, there really wasn't another player that was going to offer us familiarity with NetApp, for one thing, and what we needed.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are the ease of administration of an appliance; reliability of an appliance; and being able to adequately monitor what's going on with the appliance (which ties in with the administration of it). Support’s got to be on it, especially if it's in production. It's like, “We need help; we need it now.” The vendor has to be there.

Those are probably the three most important criteria. Price comes in there, but you pay a premium for those particular things. If the price point is right and those things are all right, then you've got a great thing going on.

Flash right now is just a hot ticket. If you've got performance-intensive workloads, and because the NetApp suite of tools that can come along with it, then, yes, I would recommend to colleagues that they take a look at it.

It's still pretty new to us, but what we expect it to do, it's doing. As we get more familiar with it, and if we see that we can scale it out and add more to it, I think I would be able to rate it higher pretty easily.

One of the biggest features, that we've been able to use the most, is spreading out across multiple environments using multiple protocols. Getting all flash in place for us has been really helpful in consolidating a lot of those environments down to a single network structure, as opposed to spreading way out, across fiber and copper. That's probably been the biggest thing.

Our organization is very VMware heavy. Going from old spinning media up to all flash has been a night-and-day difference.

I was at an executive briefing meeting recently. One of the things that I brought up, that I will continuously bring up whenever asked, is that it seems easy enough to upgrade the OS straight from the OnCommand management software, but one thing that seems difficult is updating disk firmware and qual packages. They almost require you to have a TFTP HTTP server in order to download those files. The easiest thing for me would be to have something on the GUI to just grab that package, drop it in and update it. That's what I want to see. I hope they add that; additional ways to update not just the OS but disk and shelf and qual packages and all that other firmware. If there was a central page to just upgrade all of that other stuff in ONTAP, that would be fantastic.

Stability has been fantastic. We've previously had other vendors for storage, and there have been issues. Ever since we've had the all flash in, we’ve never had a problem.

Scalability seems to be something that is a non-issue anymore. If we need space, we can throw in a shelf. If we need more compute, we can add more nodes to it. That was part of going into the purchase of our all flashes, knowing that we can scale both down and up. We haven't had to yet, but we know that it's there.

We occasionally use technical support; not too often. I did get certified right before we bought it, so I've been able to do a lot of my own. We have a good relationship with our SE and I've been able to reach out to him. We have several resources available to our company. We've used them, but not a lot.

When we have used technical support, it's been top-notch.

I was not that involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. I do know that, because I did have experience with it, I probably influenced some of the purchasers within my company. They knew that they had somebody on the team that was able to work with it.

In our particular scenario, we had a failing. We had another vendor storage array that was failing. It was a Hitachi that was all spinning medium. When that went down, we reached out to NetApp. They were able to help us out with CDW to get us loaner equipment while we were purchasing the all flash.

There was a little bit of complexity there. However, once we got the all flash in, we were able to cluster it together with the loaner equipment and move everything over on the back end. There was no impact to VMware, and everything else was as smooth as could be.

At the time, I don't think we were considering any other vendors, only because we were moving towards becoming an all-NetApp shop. This was the go-to thing. We did have a relationship with NetApp before. We had previous spinning FAS arrays. We do have some E-Series and so on. We do have a good relationship with our NetApp reps, so that probably went into a lot of it.

Offering advice is pretty difficult for me, because there's a lot of good to it. It depends on the application; that is a big thing. Smaller environments can probably benefit more from the E-Series. We're multi-client, so having the ability to break it out into SVMs is really helpful. The biggest thing is, if you've got multiple clients and you need to deliver performance to them, the AFF is hard to beat.

The two biggest criteria for me when selecting a vendor are knowledgeability and accessibility; being able to reach the people that support us, and having them know exactly what to do. I'm not expecting the first person I call to know it all, but them being able to say, "I know this one person that can help you out." That's good.

The best feature is just for databases; the speed that we can use for all of our database, Oracle and SQL. For example, testing with our programmers, testing the systems; as far as the speed of getting to the database, getting their data back to their applications.

The speed itself means it takes less time trying to run queries.

NetApp for me has been great. We went from about 30 physical servers and some blades, and now we're over 70 virtual servers and everything's on NetApp. Basically, our utility is about 95% NetApp for storage. There's maybe 5% that are actually outside of that. NetApp has been great.

We're using it with VMware; being able to do some mirroring to our DR site. The biggest thing I'd like to see would be the ability to break the mirror and stand up the DR site as a production site; see if there's a way to do that almost seamlessly. That would be a big thing to be able to do: if you lose your main site, stand up your secondary site and the customer has no idea.

We've had zero stability issues. We've had a disk go bad and the customer doesn't even know it. That's the best part about it.

I don’t think we’ve had any scalability issues with it. I think it's great because every time they want more storage or a bigger size, it's easy enough to give them. Growing disk space is great with flash.

We haven’t needed to use technical support.

We were not using a different solution beforehand. We had been using physical servers for all of our SQL and Oracle.

Testing with some of our programmers, there were some issues with speed compared to physical servers, physical disks. When we did the testing, the older physical servers were actually faster than some of our virtual. We had to do some testing with that and we determined that by going to the flash, we’d get rid of that latency, that issue of slowness.

Initial setup is a little bit complex, but we use a guy who pretty much builds all of our NetApp for us.

Before choosing AFF, we looked around a little bit, thought about some Cisco gear, but decided we just wanted to go with NetApp from talking with a couple of other utilities that we know, that work with us. They were using NetApp, so we just gravitated towards it.

In general, when I choose a vendor, the criteria that are important to me are stability, for one; longevity in the business already; and then, of course, word of mouth from other customers. How they treat their customers, how good are they at getting back to you. There’s nothing like having a fire and wanting your vendor to be there on the spot to fix it. Other than that, that's probably the biggest thing.

Start with planning and whatever you think you need, double it. That's the word of mouth; that’s what most everybody says. We bought 20 TBs of flash to start, thinking that's all we would need, and in less than a year, we already reached 14 TBs.

Once you go to it, you don't go back. Once everybody gets their speed, they don't ever want to lose that. The nice thing about flash is that it protects the poorly written code. That's our favorite thing to tell the programmers.

For the All Flash FAS, performance is the number one feature, above the reliability and scalability. First of all, the All Flash FAS is extremely fast. We're serving something in the neighborhood of a trillion transactions per month in SQL. We are getting great performance, submillisecond. As far as scalability, we can extend to new nodes and move data around at will. It's been a really good solution.

We are a customer-driven solution. We're running the environment and have some very demanding customers that require zero downtime, extremely good performance, and the solution has worked out extremely well for us.

We have a software that is a learning environment for schools, higher education and corporate businesses. User software for learning environments. And they use our class as their learning environment.

We need everything to be reliable and to work fast, and we have absolutely found that with NetApp.

I'd like to be able to move volumes between virtual machines, for one thing. That’s a little thing that has bothered me. I think I'm pretty happy with what the feature set is right now.

We had some bumpy roads early on, but it has been very reliable. We're doing very well with it.

With the ability to move data as soon as needed, we can expand and contract as we need to. It works out pretty nicely. We’ve had no issues in terms of scalability.

NetApp’s technical support is second to none. I have worked with other vendors that have not been quite as reliable. But, getting support to come out is easy and reliable, and it's always top-grade help.

I believe we have gone through EMC and Hitachi. I think that's it, actually. I personally worked with IBM. IBM’s support was pretty good, too.

If I was selecting a new vendor today, support would probably be the most important criteria for me. That has been the big differentiator for us; always pushing P1s for us. It's very easy to get support and prioritize it as needed; they help us extremely well.

I wasn't involved in that decision-making process, so I'm not sure what the driving force was. I was actually hired after the fact because I worked with NetApp in the past.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I think the team found it fairly straightforward. We had good support from NetApp. We worked very closely with our account team. They walked us through very well and we had no issues getting going, as far as I know.

I've been a NetApp advocate for many years, so I definitely say, look into it because of the performance, the stability, the scalability, the support.

Snapshot, de-duplication and the efficiency; the storage part and the efficiency.

The part of flexibility that I can add more… of growth, to enhance the solution.

To add more nodes, to put in additional new clusters, and to integrate everything in a set environment with many types of workloads.

For three years.

It’s very stable and there is great flexibility to work with this solution.

Today, we have two pairs of controllers which form a cluster where I can have various types of workloads between the two devices. And, it has great flexibility in order to alter a client that is using a slow disk to a faster disk.

We used another solution from NetApp with 7-Mode and we are progressing to this new solution.

It is very simple, let’s say, any person who has never even worked with storage can perform a load to the server very easily.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The ease of putting a number of technologies, for example, a backup, in a single solution. I don’t have to worry about other solutions in order to integrate, to format a new product and deliver it to my client.

Yes, I recommend the solution, and I even introduce myself by calling the clients to try the All-Flash, and after the client tries it, he/she does not go back to another player or another solution. 

Anyone who gives All-Flash a try won’t go back to what he or she had before.

I would give it a nine because there is a lot of flexibility in this solution. We are service providers and our clients have diverse demands, within this solution I can assist a greater number of clients in a variety of workloads.

It has improved my organization by being able to remove potential hardware issues from the equation; knowing that we're getting top throughput and performance from the system; and then being able to contain customer workloads within their subscribed tiers using QoS.

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The most valuable feature is the low-latency, high-performance utilizations of the system; being able to deliver a high-tier storage performance for high-impacting customer applications.

There's nothing that I can think of that they haven't introduced with what they announced at a recent NetApp conference, with the built-in workflow automation, where you can basically deploy it in a matter of minutes for a dedicated workflow. They've built all that into the ONTAP 9. From my experience, that might be the only missing piece: If you have standard deployments to follow in those workflows, it's almost a push-button build, essentially.

Across the entire FAS platform, or maybe even across the entire product line, I would like to see some sort of bare-metal deployment configuration standard. It would be nice if we could use DSC, Puppet or something like that to do bare-metal deployments within an environment for standard configurations, such as auto-support and so on. You can accomplish that now via PowerShell and scripting, but if you could have a server that constantly monitored that and kept everything within a standard configuration for that node; kind of like the rest of the industry is doing with platform standardization.

You have a lot of flexibility to do that through scripting and other means, but there's nothing enforcing it. In other environments, for bare-metal hardware for compute, you can run Puppet or DSC (Desired State Config) through Microsoft. You can create configuration files for that physical hardware. If anyone goes in and makes a change, you could either alert or alert and automatically set it back to what it should be. Something to monitor, some way to do that at a bare-metal level, in the hardware-node configuration; that would be the only improvement I can think of.

Stability is the same as the whole FAS series line; very stable, huge up time, non-disruptive upgrades and capabilities. It falls in line with the rest of the family.

It scales both horizontally and vertically with clustered Data ONTAP.

I have not used support directly for the All Flash.

For other issues, NetApp support is not as good as it used to be. They've restructured their support organization a couple times over the last couple of years. It seems difficult to get a high-priority ticket through for an experienced engineer. It takes a while to get a hold of somebody who can actually help you with your problem.

Because we're a partner and we have certified engineers on our staff, when we call in, we don't need Tier 1 support. It's very hard to get escalation up to an escalation engineer who's going to be able to solve our problem. It didn't used to be that way. I've worked with NetApp for probably over nine years now.

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We decided to invest in the All Flash FAS basically because of constant customer demand for a higher-tier, flash-based storage option. We didn't currently have anything with any other vendor available. It wasn't a storage offering that we had; not necessarily one that we thought we needed, because we use QoS and service levels within our environment, but customer demand mitigated purchasing an offering.

Previously, it was all hybrid NetApp FAS. We run NetApp throughout our entire environment, but we didn't have anything dedicated flash SSD. We would run flash pools in hybrid aggregate configurations, and then we would use QoS and service levels to guarantee SLOs. Customers, not really knowing what they want, hear the word "flash" and think they want flash storage for their application. Then, when they ask for it, and you don't have it as an offering, you're now an incomplete solution. Out of industry necessity, I would say, we've added it to our portfolio.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, the same as any other FAS solution, except for when you get into the disk slicing and other features for setting up your root aggregates. It’s pretty standard configuration, pretty easy. That has been our experience.

We looked at a couple of other options, just to see. It was between the All Flash FAS, which, because we're primarily a NetApp shop, was our first choice; we looked at Nimble and Tintri as potential other options; and then we also talked to NetApp about SolidFire as well.

We ended up going with the NetApp solution because there wasn't enough of a compelling reason to switch to a different architecture, to a different competitor, to take us outside of our current architecture, standards. There wasn't a good enough reason to not make that decision.

The main criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are full feature sets within a product, multiple avenues for manageability, and tie-ins to other possible orchestration applications; something that fits very well into the modern architecture and the direction that the industry's going, with automation, cloud and service on demand; and the ability to tie in to all of those, seamlessly into all of those requirements.

Make sure that you understand the entire storage portfolio, that you understand your requirements. Don't get into the situation that a lot of people get into – that we typically got into ourselves – and purchase something because you need it as an offering. The All Flash FAS solution is a great solution and it fits right into your current infrastructure if you're running clustered ONTAP and you're familiar with All Flash FAS, but understand your workload and make sure you're getting what you need.

I don't know that I have that good of a reason for my rating. Based on what I saw at a recent NetApp conference, when it comes to solid-state requirements, the SolidFire solution is probably more in line with that type of workload because you can set the minimum requirements. SolidFire introduced the minimum requirements for a workload, which will guarantee that workload that SLA. Within the FAS solution, you can just guarantee the SLO. You can set ceilings on everyone, but you can't guarantee that someone's going to get that performance every time if they need it. I would say that's the only thing, and then SolidFire fills that need in the portfolio. I'd say that would be the only reason why the All Flash FAS doesn’t get a perfect rating.

We are looking into purchasing SolidFire as well.