NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rate NetApp 10 out of 10. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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

We are the local government, so we have a lot of customer data. With NetApp, we feel secure. We feel our data is safe. NetApp has good compute, so our apps run faster with this solution.

We use ransomware protection, which is very good technology that NetApp provides to us. We can enable it with one click and our data is secure. We do not have to use any other product to protect the data when our data is residing on NetApp. 

I would rate the ransomware protection technology an eight out of ten. Without it, it is very hard to manage our data and protect our data. Nowadays, we see all kinds of attacks on public data. Without NetApp, we would not at all feel safe.

We just updated to the latest version, and the GUI has changed a lot. It is user-friendly. Everybody can use it, not just the technical people.

Their customer support can be better.

We opened a couple of tickets for their support. Not all of them were bad. We had issues with some of them. For example, we scheduled a meeting with their support at 5 PM after hours, but their support never showed up.

We first chose to have Pure Storage, but after the PoC and a few trials, we decided to go for this solution because it is stable and scalable. It is also more user-friendly.

We have not used a lot of features that NetApp provides. The only feature that we use right now is ransomware protection. For ransomware protection, NetApp stands out for our company.

Innovation was a factor in our decision-making process. NetApp updates its products almost every day. They are on top of the technology. They now have AI, ransomware protection, cloud, and other things.

We need to migrate our data to the cloud. It is difficult to migrate the amount of data we have in a short time. Our current challenge is migration.

We would like to use NetApp Cloud. That will have a big impact on my company because it will be easier to use for us and more secure. We would not have any headaches related to expanding or scaling it. Our goal is to move to NetApp Cloud.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and cybersecurity. These are the top priorities that we have right now.

It is hard to say if the evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced our technology decisions. That is because we have to provide the information or data to AI in order to get the AI working correctly, but I would consider using AI.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Better customer support will make it a ten.

Our use cases are related to VMware Infrastructure.

AFF has helped us simplify our infrastructure. It's made our operations more stable and dependable. There's not much downtime.

It provides very high performance for our business-critical applications.

Moreover, AFF has helped to reduce support issues such as performance tuning and troubleshooting. Overall, it has been helpful. The system is very stable and reliable.

AFF has helped to reduce our operational latency and optimize costs very significantly. 

From an IT perspective, there's not a lot of babysitting. It maintains itself. It is a very dependable tool.

In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems. 

We have been using AFF for seven years. 

I am happy with the stability of the solution. 

It is able to scale according to our needs. I can grow my storage capacity as much as I need, there is no limit.

The customer service and support are fantastic. They have been great. 

Positive

We used a different storage solution prior to AFF.

We made a switch to AFF because we wanted to keep everything consistent and wanted to have ONTAP everywhere. So, we decided to standardize on NetApp AFF for all our storage needs. It has been working out well for us.  

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The stability of AFF alone has been a significant ROI.

We evaluated other options. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We are a semiconductor manufacturer. We use the solution for our data for manufacturing, design, research, and development. Our customers are satisfied. We deliver products on time, sometimes ahead of time. For our customers, the solution has contributed to the stability and the performance has contributed to the way we actually roll out our products. Partially our customer satisfaction is coming from the fact that we are always on time and our quality is high. And of course, storage reliability is one of the components of that.

The performance, reliability, and stability are all very good. 

NetApp has helped to streamline our internal operations and adapt to changing market conditions. Storage tools and protocols, like SnapMirror or FlexCache, have enabled us to move data more quickly and with more ease and handle distributed data pretty much without any additional hassle.

Over the years, the main features have been great, and the introduction of Snapshot has become really big. Most recently, it's been the addition of FlexCache.

We'd like to see data move faster. We have distributed data around the world and we'd like to synchronize and move data faster between our locations.

We'd like to have faster reaction time to particular needs.

We have been using NetApp since 1996.

We plan to deploy more servers to more locations and enable FlexCache for most of our data.

The customer support, the amount of experts that the solution has as a company, and then making them available to us, has been great.

There are a lot of competing companies, in particular, EMC and Pure Storage. We have the most familiarity with this product since we've been using it for over two decades.

We haven't tried everybody in the world, and we probably don't want to say that the solution is the best since we don't want them to rest on their laurels. That said, I would easily rate NetApp nine out of ten.

Now, all other companies are copying that solution's success.

The most important aspects of any solution are cost and innovation.

I am a storage engineer at a government ministry. We enable our customers to use storage on-site because we are a government entity and don't use a public cloud. We enable almost all features available within the NetApp portfolio.

Governments are quite slow when it comes to business. I'm always trying to bring the storage side up to speed with current technology and hoping the rest of the organization follows. They're doing that but at the speed of a government. 

It's heading there, but when I got here five years ago, they had no plan for the storage infrastructure. I first needed to get everything on a level playing field to have storage for specific business cases like VMware, user data, and SAP HANA. I had to set everything up correctly. Now, I'm trying to step it up a notch to get to 2024. 

Our data includes every Dutch person's social security numbers, so we cannot have that on a public cloud. Our biggest challenge is to rebuild the public cloud privately. 

When I arrived, we were far behind anything that works on the market, so I first needed to get the basics in order. I am busy setting up ransomware detection and application policy rules. Once I complete that, the next step is to get AI within the data center.

I hope other teams from our environments, like the Linux and Yammer teams, will join. We already have a storage grid so we can use S3. That's not a problem. We use all those things. The only thing we need to do is build it ourselves. 

NetApp's most valuable features are ONTAP, FabricPool, and media storage.

I would like NetApp to be more aware of organizations that don't run it on a public cloud. Everything is built on the cloud, so if you want to run BlueXP in an environment like ours, it's a real pain because it wants to host too much info on the cloud. 

It causes some friction with the security guys. BlueXP is also there in complete dark side mode, but it's a significant hassle to install and create. You don't get all the features. You're trying to get the same out of it because you have your own data center, and you can't go out due to government regulations. 

I've been an admin working in the NetApp environment for a long time. I used NetApp with different companies before but have worked at the ministry for five years.

I've used their support multiple times. One aspect that stands out about NetApp support is that the system is yours. You have it in your data center, so it's your system. You can press any button that's in there. Nobody will say you can't do it. Support will say that it was foolish to press that button but won't stop you.

A lot of other storage vendors don't allow that. They have the interface they want you to be in. They say no if you need to do something under the hood because there is a problem. You have to go through support for that. But what if we have multiple issues? We don't need to go to support to make changes. I can run ConfigAdvisor, and support says it's okay. 

Positive

NetApp was deployed when I joined this organization. They asked me to help because I was already involved with NetApp. I'm constantly checking if someone has a better solution than NetApp, and the answer is "no" in most cases. Especially with old-fashioned NAS environments, I haven't seen a competitor that does a better job or costs less. 

I rate NetApp nine out of 10. I give it a high rating because of the support. Nothing is ever perfect. For example, ONTAP is a software solution with millions and millions of lines of code. Something can always go wrong with it. Bugs happen, but I like that you have a very good support organization behind it. I've found bugs that were so incredibly large that NetApp couldn't roll out systems to other customers for 48 hours until they solved the bug.

NetApp allows us to provide resiliency in operations. We had some data center outages before, however, our operations under this service offering were untouched, unscathed. Due to that, we're deploying more of the product in our infrastructure.

We had many issues with our current NAS offering with the competitor's product. With some enhancements to the Apple stack, we're able to provide a better service. It also allows us to tier off older data at a cheaper cost.

We use StorageGRID, which is now our go-to archive platform. We're able to use that tool to archive a lot of other third-party arrays from Dell EMC and Data Domain, and specifically with the PowerScale platform, we're able to archive using their native tiering tools to the NetApp platform.

We're keeping our data archive for more than seven years. We needed a cost solution that was better than AWS. We looked at different vendor offerings, including ECS and VAST, and we chose StorageGRID over them.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI influenced our technology decisions. We wanted something that would integrate with some type of malware protection. And we did a POC on Cloud Insights, and then, used the BlueX Blue classification tool to identify the data, figure out who owns the data, and to provide some governance around our data. It's a really good product. 

Once we automate the provisioning process through our cloud portal, we're going to be presenting this as a better offering to our customers. Right now, it's behind the scenes. It's word-of-mouth. We still have a ton of studios and tons of other segments wanting to get on board with our tools. 

We had some issues with some of the product's POCs; however, once the bugs are all ironed out, everything is golden. We had a lot of issues with two-factor authentication using, for example, Okta.

We looked at a few other solutions, including Pure Storage and Dell EMC.

We chose this solution based on integration with automation tools such as Ansible and the native tools of fabric cooling, and native tiering within the product.

Our next goals would be to add some type of QoS to the platform and also be able to integrate with other cloud providers as we migrate stuff back from the cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's really, really good.

While our main driver is innovation, upper leadership's concern is always cost. We're always pushed towards cost. We found a good solution with this product.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around data storage and optimization, cybersecurity, and AI. We're doing all three at the same time. We'll have to get the go-ahead from upper managers to pursue AI initiatives. At the same time, we're getting a big push from global security to do malware intrusion protection. 

We want a way to dedupe and replicate our data. We were using filers using SnapMirror, and now we're taking our snapshots across data center support on StorageGRID. 

It's helping us achieve our budget constraints while allowing us to work in other areas.

It has sped up everything through the all-flash storage. Everything is faster than it used to be. Everybody can access their VDIs fast and get to their servers fast. There is probably a 5x or 10x faster speed, but I am not sure. It is just quick. Nobody is waiting for things anymore.

The switch to the work-from-home model because of COVID was the key challenge that our business wanted to address. Before COVID, it was all in the office, and then after COVID, everyone was working from home. We wanted to scale the VDIs easily and spin up VMs that people can use on a day-to-day basis.

All-flash storage has definitely delivered the most value to our organization. We have a large VDI deployment, and there is now no wait time when they are booting up. Everything is quick. Everything builds fast. I would give it a ten out of ten. It is easy to use. It just runs. I never have to touch it. Without it, we would probably not have been able to grow our VDI deployment. The compression and dedupe required would not have been possible without it.

I would like to improve the ransomware aspect. We get a lot of false positives, and there are no details of what is happening. This seems to be already fixed in the new version.

Previously, we have used Hitachi and other lesser-known solid-state storage vendors. I do not know the reason for choosing NetApp at the time because I was not there for that decision.

I am familiar with other solutions. The advantage of the NetApp solution is that it is easy to use. SnapMirror is very nice and easy to set up. It is easy. When we push in a volume, it is automatically replicated to our DR site. It is touch and go. We can do it with one click.

We have been working with NetApp for the last five to eight years. We have not evaluated any other solution. We have been happy with them, so we stuck with them.

We definitely like the anti-ransomware capability. That is cool to have. I am excited to go to the new version where we also have fewer false positives. There is all-new reporting which is cool, so I will have to look at how to do more in-depth reporting than what we do now.

Data is always growing. We will see where our usage goes. We have had the biggest impact by going to the all-flash storage. We just purchased a C800, so that would be around for the next couple of years. We do not have any goals for our next technology investments over the next couple of years.

We are not yet too big on AI. It would be exciting to try to use some of the AI features. I want to see how that works.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have used it for storage services.

NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our infrastructure while still getting very high performance for our business-critical applications. It has helped to accommodate a non-structured environment. I have a diversification of Windows and Linux in my network, and it has supported both networks.

NetApp AFF has helped to reduce support issues such as performance-tuning and troubleshooting.

NetApp AFF has definitely reduced the operational latency. It has reduced operational latency by 30% to 40%.

Its consistent stability is one of the things that I like, and the performance is also very good.

The dashboard needs improvement. The dashboard needs some uplift.

I have been using NetApp AFF for eight to ten years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

We were using a small configuration Dell server. The configuration was not so high. We chose NetApp AFF simply because of its performance and stability.

The initial deployment was a bit complex. At the time of implementation, we created a parallel setup and gradually shifted from the old setup to the new setup.

We got it done directly from the NetApp support team.

I have not worked out the ROI. After implementing it, COVID came, and we did not work much on it. Its renewal is around the corner, and at that time, we will go into ROI.

Its price is quite competitive, but there is still scope for better pricing.

I evaluated NetApp, Dell, and HPE storage. I chose Netapp AFF because I had used NetApp earlier as well, so I was well aware of the performance of this solution.

Overall, I would rate NetApp AFF an eight out of ten. I would recommend it to others.