NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

• Easy to manage.
• It's quick. It's very fast.
• We've been getting something like 27-to-1 compression, so it's been really good.

Because of the speed and storage efficiency, we have no complaints from the customer and we don't have to buy as much space, because we can compress it.

I know we're looking at cloud solutions, so maybe if they have something cloud-based, that might be something. It could be important soon. Right not it's not but it could change soon for us.

Two years.

We haven't had any down-time yet. So far the disks are really reliable, so I'm happy about that.

We haven't had to buy any new flash for a while because of the compression. So far, being able to compress the data has been able to help us save money on buying more disks.

I haven't had to use it yet. I've been able to do it myself so far.

NetApp's been responsive on other issues. So far, on the flash side, I haven't had any issues to have to call them.

We needed something quick for our SQL DBAs, so that was the recommended path that we take, and it's been great so far.

We were using the 600 Gig drives, regular SCSI drives, and they weren't fast enough. We switched because of the complaints of how slow the disk worked prior to us moving over to the flash.

We had a vendor help us, but it seemed like it was pretty straightforward.

Our primary use case is for SQL databases. We use it for block storage.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for a mission-critical storage system, based on our experience, because of the speed. We have a cluster, so the high availability. Those are the two.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Dependability, like at 3:00 in the morning, if I need help, they're there. That's really number one for me.
• The willingness to be able to train me so I can do it and I don't have to constantly call them.

Those are the two, my major factors.

To a colleague in another company who's researching a similar product I would say, "Go for it." If they don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night saying their backups are slow, they've got to go with the fast disks.

• The speed
• Performance
• The storage efficiency is very good.
• We use the SnapMirror for disaster recovery, though not for tiering.

By moving everything to the All Flash Array, our outage times have gone dramatically down, if not disappeared completely, for the most part.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for our mission critical storage systems based on our experiences with AFF. We are actually moving all of our production data onto our AFF system right now as it's been extremely fast and stable.

More reporting on a granular level within system command.

I have personally used NetApp for 15 years now. A long time.

It's extremely stable. We've never had an issue with it, even through multiple OS upgrades.

It's excellent. We added a shelf three weeks ago and it took less than 10 minutes.

We haven't used technical support yet.

However, I would recommend if someone is researching NetApp and similar solutions that they take a look at the support offered by other companies and look at what Netapp offers as well.

Our existing solutions, which were Netapp, were basically just overrun.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

We looked at not only Netapp, but we looked at EMC which was the big one. Then we started looking at some cloud providers, but we actually moved away from that.

We had a very high impression of NetApp as a vendor of high-performance sound storage before purchasing AFF, and an extremely high impression of them afterwards.

The primary use case for our All Flash system is VMware. It's NFS-based, therefore it's NAS-based.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

Typically, with vendor selection, it's going to be more about the support after. Most of the features across the vendors that I've talked to are pretty much on par with everybody else.

One thing we see is the kind of flexibility NetApp is giving, taking the Snapshot and other features; wherever we want to keep it, we can keep it. Those things, are really impressive. We don't have to look into that traditional backup model like a tape backup model or protecting your data.

Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it.

In the future, a few things.Performance. Mostly with our default settings it's good. All of the factory settings are fine. We don't have to tune it. We want to see that in NetApp. It's very important from the operational perspective.

It's really good. We would say 99.99% up-time, we are seeing that with the NetApp product. It's really good.

On a scale from one to five, I would say four.

It's really good. We're getting the right response, so everything worked.

Right now, in current scenarios, we don't get many issues with the NetApp products. We mainly use them for the upgrade.

And so far we are getting good response in case the case of a disk failure or some cluster issues, then NetApp support is there, really.

We have a kind of recycle policy, and the end of warranty. We look at every purchase in the last three years, book value. We'll use that analysis as our first indicator.

The second one, the demand from our customers, our internal customers. What kind of application they are going to use, what kind of power they will need. We'll check with NetApp, our account team, whether there are any new solutions available from NetApp, or we can use the existing one. Mainly the NetApp account team will help us on this.

I'm only involved in upgrades. They're pretty simple, and their documentation is very clear, and it's all really nice.

Our primary use case for All Flash is just as an alternate solution of storage. We are just exploring how it fits us. We use it for file storage right now but we have a plan for block storage also.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission-critical storage based on our experience with AFF. We are in the very initial stages of the AFF storage. It's very good. We are seeing good performance with it. But still, we need to see, with our mission-critical applications, with NetApp... Because right now we are just using the file storage, and we did not put any mission-critical applications.

Our company has certain policies a vendor has to meet; first they must meet our company basic criteria to be a vendor. For example, a vendor has to be in the market for more than this many years. Then, we look at other areas like how good they are in the market and how stable their products are.

• Data availability
• Speed

Being able to keep the system up - five nines are better - so I have that system online and have that data available to our customers. And the new flash stuff is really fast.

The ability to manage very easily, and the replication between sites for backups is also very easy to use. And it stays up.

I'm just keeping a really close eye on where NVMe goes and how that's going to affect the next lifecycle of disk and connectivity to the server. So that's what I'm watching for.

One thing they could improve right now is support. Other than that I've been pretty happy.

Stability for us has been good. We've had a few bumps, a few bugs, but it's based on the new hardware platform.

Scalability is great. In the cluster, being able to add nodes as needed, and to be able to move data around within the cluster to balance the workload on the nodes is just crazy easy.

We use technical support a lot. It's doing better. It's got some hurdles to overcome but they're certainly doing better. I can see them making progress towards what they need to be, but it's a little hard to get through level one.

When we get through level one and get to the back-end guys, we definitely have the right guys.

It was lifecycle for us. Equipment had aged out so it was time to replace.

Since we already had it running on a fast system, we just added them to the cluster and moved the data, without the customers even knowing. Just seamless.

We use it for Oracle databases and for our virtual environment, and use it for file storage, not block storage.

Our impression of NetApp as a vendor of high performance SAN storage before we purchased it was that we could use them for general purpose storage, didn't really think of them as high-performance, but they're definitely there now. We are likely to consider them for our mission critical storage because we've been running on them now for eight years and they've been running our critical applications, so they've proven it to us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include that they've got to have a pretty good track record. We don't do business with very small companies because we're a pretty big enterprise, fast customer; so they've got to be up in the reviews. We use reviews to tell us all of those quadrants and where they sit, and then we typically do an evaluation and an RFP among the big players in those fields, and then select a choice.

For a colleague who is considering a similar solution, I would tell them to definitely consider what NetApp is doing and how easy it is to use and migrate data.

• The compression
• Dedupe
• The speed

With the ONTAP, the flexibility is also a nice feature.

We've had quite a positive response since we've moved to the AFF for our VCD and our VDI environments. The feedback from the end users and the virtualization team that manages it has been very positive.

We have a fairly large vCloud, vCloud Director (VCD) environment, which we use for our AFF systems, that and VDI. We use it all for file storage.

It is solid.

It scales out very well. We have not had any issues trying to move anything around or when it comes to expansion. We haven't had to expand the AFF yet, but other ONTAP systems are very easy to expand.

They're very professional. They usually find the issues, within the first couple of calls. The software support for all the SNAPManager products, sometimes the support is a little iffy on that, but the hardware support and the ONTAP support have always been pretty solid.

We had some issues with SNAPManager for Exchange around Snapshots not getting deleted, and it's been an ongoing problem for us. We haven't really come up with a solution yet. That's still been a problem. It's gone around the block a few times in support. In support you get a new guy, they start over with a case, that's been the frustration.

It was all disk space, it was on a FAS system, it wasn't AFF. We switched because of growth. The amount of IO that we needed from our existing system just couldn't handle it.

I felt that NetApp was a little late to the game, but I guess that made them a little bit more mature when they got there. However, I've always been a fan of NetApp, an advocate.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.

We looked at Pure. We looked at some of the Nutanix stuff, but it just wasn't what we needed.

I have been an advocate of NetApp for a long time. It's a good company, has good equipment, and good support. I am more like to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experiences with AFF.

Our current AFF is not part of a cluster of NetApp FAS systems, we have other systems that are multi-node clusters.

Definitely, heavily look at NetApp and its AFF solution. It's a rock solid platform. That's my recommendation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability and longevity. That's why I'm looking at some of the other Flash providers out there. They haven't been around long enough really for us to know that they're going to be there when we need them. NetApp has been a pretty solid vendor for us.

Usability, in general. Currently, just basic functionality and consistency is all we really aim for.

Potentially. Hopefully just the consistency and integrity. That's our main goal as a small shop, compared to some.

Hopefully, you never have to actually use those backups but those backups are probably completing 90% faster. If we had roll back to a backup, then we're going to have more consistency. That's the main thing - that I hope I don't have to use - that would be there for its benefit.

Lower the price. I would say being forced as a small shop wanting to go to All-Flash and being forced to buy all of the licenses that we don't use and we don't need, that was a bummer, and that was a stretch as far as convincing management. That's probably the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.

I've been in charge of NetApp for three years.

I've never had a problem. We've never had an outage. All the upgrades have gone well. There have been a couple of hiccups getting to the point where you can upgrade, as far as configuration changes, but nothing that caused any outages, or data loss, or anything like that.

We'll see. We're only running about 27 terabytes in production right now. We're keeping everything else on our secondary FAS in our DR location. So we think it would scale well. But we'll see. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We haven't used it for a while, and then only a little bit. Just conversing about upgrades and making sure we're set to go to various versions.

They've been very knowledgeable. I haven't really had any problems with them. We haven't had anything critical where I needed an immediate response. So I also haven't worried that much about it.

We didn't need invest in a new solution but our support was up on our system. So we had to upgrade. We had a 15K SAS disk before that was sufficient but it was going end-of-support at the end of this year or the end of next year, so it was a good time to upgrade.

We chose NetApp because we put a lot of money into the training already. I'm very comfortable with it. I like it. It's pretty industry standard. It's very a valuable skill. So I'd rather not go to some smaller start-up vendor and then, if I ever do look for a new job, I can say, "Yeah, I'm very experienced with NetApp," not whatever other company. And HPE was horrible four or five years ago.

I'm coming from a HP MSA and they were just horrible. Very unfriendly. Disks failing every week. Every month.

We had a NetApp FAS8020 before and I thought it was great. We went from HPE to NetApp and there's no comparison. We looked at a couple of other vendors but they weren't as robust so we stayed with NetApp.

We looked at a company called Datrium. They were not robust enough to fit all of our needs. I looked at Nimble Storage. I don't remember what the other company was. I didn't actually talk to them, but I looked at their product. Everything's basically the same price and so why not just stick with NetApp.

We use it as our production stack, VMware, Oracle, and file shares for the most part, and use it for both block and file storage.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems, based on our experience, because we didn't have a disk fail in six years with our first FAS. That's hard to beat that. I hear different stories on that, but that's our experience. So I'm pretty happy.

Everything runs well. The main thing that we've noticed is Oracle including backups at night, and queries and the like. Other than that, the database guys were the only ones that complained anyway. So they're happy now and that's my only job, really.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Primary is data integrity (not losing my data).
• Secondary would be uptime. With NetApp we haven't had any down-time.

In terms of advice to someone who's looking for this kind of solution I would say do your research. You can't go wrong with NetApp. But make sure you're getting the right product for what you use or what you need it for. With the right use case.

• Performance
• Reliability
• Scalability

They're important because it's critical user data. As a global bank we need to make sure that users' data is accessible at all times; that there's no outage window or things like that. Performance is key.

The consolidation, the physical rackspace. For example, we've got a project ongoing at the moment in consolidating our footprint from 20 rackspaces down into two. I think we've got a 70-80% footprint reduction in going from old FAS controllers to AFF.

There's not really anything that's standing out at the moment.

Perhaps the node count on a block basis, even though we don't really use it that much for block, but that would be one.

The only other thing from our point of view would be, on the storage efficiency side, the compaction storage efficiency - there's no way of seeing that on a volume level, you can only see that on an aggregate level.

We've had All Flash installed now for coming up to two years. I think it was February, 2016 that we put in the first All Flash array.

The All Flash is very good. So far it seems more reliable, there's not been any issues with it.

Good. We've not really had much scalability, so far, to grow that much on the AFF, but what we have had to do has been good.

Very good. As an enterprise, trust me we've got quite a lot of the account team that were involved with this, so quite a lot of NetApp staff helped us out in the build, the design, the configuration, the maintenance, etc.

We were using NetApp. We were using FAS NetApp, and it was just the new system, the new growth that we needed.

Straightforward. No different to any old system that we've put in before, so an AFF is no different to a FAS.

Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM.

NetApp are our chosen vendor for IP storage.

The primary use case for our All Flash FAS is user data: Windows user file data, application data, NAS IP data. We use file storage.

We've just got a great partnership with NetApp. We've got NetApp installed in over 52 different countries. I think our hardware install base is over 600 systems globally. We've got a very good relationship.

We are more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage because of the reliability that we get with them, the support that we have with them, the infrastructure that they have available.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• Manageability
• The customer base that they have
• What enterprise accounts have they got
• Cost is the main thing

By manageability I mean how easy is it to manage the infrastructure. You don't want to manage a complex infrastructure and have multiple use cases, of having issues which are hard to manage. Having a single vendor and being able to manage it through a single support center makes it much easier.

My advice to a colleauge considering a similar solution would be: Depending on the work load that you've got, that you require your systems for, if you're looking for high performance NAS then you'd look at NetApp. But you've definitely got to be able to manage the estate that you've got, so depending on the size of the infrastructure that you have would determine the solution that you choose.

Ease of use: We're familiar with the NetApp platform and ONTAP. We're comfortable with the tool sets that it has. We've been trained on it as a group for quite sometime. We started out with IBM-branded NetApp with 7-mode. We've grown from 7-mode all the way into ONTAP 9.0. The cross training amongst players or team members allows us to help each other with issues that we deal with on a regular basis. We find that there's a lot of value in that.

We use it for a storage location for Riverbed centralized storage. We use it for VMware, VMFS volumes, and for our VMware platform. We also use it for iSCSI and for regular RDM server storage. We use it primarily for block-related storage.

We use it for multiple apps. It's enterprise-wide. We have eMARs. We have what they call the Obamacare Exchange running on it, and HBE for the State of Kentucky. We have a lot of VMware running on it, which have 1000s of servers that their VMDK files are nested in VMFS volumes which run on the AFF8080.

One of the primary reasons that we went with the AFF was because of the dedupe, the compression, and that it's not software-based, but it's hardware-based. It's inline.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

• Performance
• Integration into the ONTAP
• The cost of the product itself

With the compression and dedupe, it's not necessarily a one-to-one gigabyte for gigabyte, where the compression and the dedupe allow you to buy a lot less, but to obtain a lot more storage capacity at the same time, hence getting the performance of SSD but they are not impacted by the two components of dedupe and compression. In summary, they don't get in the way of the performance of the product.

I would like to see a little more integration with some of the core fundamental components of OCI as part of the ONTAP OnCommand Manager, instead of it just being either all OnCommand Unified Manager or being able to see OCI and all of that it does. With what we pay for a node-pair and the OnCommand Unified manager, there ought to be at least a third of that integration in performance monitoring and alerting, and there's a lot there, don't get me wrong. We've got all the alerting and everything, but there should be a little more of the OCI bundled into the OnCommand Unified Manager.

In future versions, since we own every license that NetApp has except SnapLock. I would like to see SnapLock integrated into the platform, and not be an additional cost for a license.

We had every license when we purchased our platform. We're a major player in NetApp when you consider our total platform, as far as all the data that we manage is around about 12.5 to 13 petabytes. When you consider the size of our investment into NetApp, whether it's the AltaVault storage grid, E-Series 2800, FAS8060, 8080, or the AFF8700, we have a substantial purchase into all of their products at both the Commonwealth datacenter and also the alternate datacenter. When you consider we own every license that they have, except the SnapLock, and that's the one that we need the most right now for our stakeholders' legal purposes.

It's pretty good overall. With the auto-supports and the support SEs which are on staff when stuff goes bad and we have bad hard drives, we found that it's a pretty stable platform.

Also, all storage platforms have issues. There's things that go wrong with all storage platforms. There's no magic platform out there, but the response of the NetApp support staff, engineering, the ticketing, and the people whom help when you call in a ticket, they're very responsive and that also has a great value.

It's very scalable. Right now, at our primary site, we have four FAS8060 nodes. We have two node-pairs of 8080, and we're adding an additional node-pair of 8080 along with a node-pair of A700. At an alternate data site, we've got a node-pair of 8060 and a node-pair of 8080. We're adding a node-pair of 80200. For the upgrade at the primary site, the only portion of that would be considered risky is it has to go through change control when replacing the intercluster switch. Because we're expanding beyond the capacity of the original switch that we purchased, and it's very scalable, and we like the product.

They're always very good. Whether I contact them online or whether I call in, they're very diligent in following up and making sure issues have been resolved before they close the ticket.

Learn about the benefits of NVMe, NVME-oF and SCM. Read New Frontiers in Solid-State Storage.

We have multiple platforms. We have EMC, VNX7600s, and we just got rid of a VNX5600 and 5400 that were not able to keep up with the compute for what we were driving through them. We had on one of those systems, the VNX5600, we had 250 terabytes of free space that couldn't be utilized because the processing power on the platform couldn't keep up with what we needed. It was over-utilized, therefore we went with NetApp because it has the ability to handle the load that we throw at it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was somewhat complex, because we did cutover from 7-mode, where we stood up a brand new platform, were having to move the data from one to the other, and were dealing with the outages that were involved, but also going from the seven-mode to the ONTAP and the clustering and how it is different.

I also do a lot of the infrastructure, as far as the fabric management, the ports, the trunks, and the fiber-connections from the NetApp platform or the NetApp cluster to the IBM Brocade Branded Directors. I do all of it: the zoning and the fabric management. It's very detailed and very complex. You have to really know what you're doing in order to get that set up properly. It is not on NetApp. That's just in general. If it was any system, you would have that to deal with.

Every time we go through an upgrade process or we have a new purchase, we look at what functionality is offered by each vendor/manufacturer and we don't purchase based on fidelity to a single vendor. It has to be based on:

1. Monetarily does it make sense for us to go with that vendor. Are they willing to work with us on the price?
2. What they're offering. Does it give us what we need?
3. Does it allow us scalability in what we're doing?

We just got finished purchasing a new node-pair of 8080, AFF8700, and an 8200. If Unity would have come in at a comparable price, we could have gone with them. We didn't simply because of the scalability of the product.

Look for these three major components when researching a similar product:

1. Supportability with tech support
2. Scalability
3. The stability of the platforms.

As far as AFF, we've had far better response and longevity of the actual drives themselves because they don't wear out as fast as a spindle drive does. I would say don't go with spindle. Go with All Flash unless it's archive.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Supportability
• Performance
• Scalability.