NetApp AFF - All Flash Reviews

NetApp All Flash FAS:

We're also using FlexClones, and we're able to flex clone our database to a test environment and a dev environment. We're able to keep it all underneath one storage system, so we don't have to manage multiple arrays to run test and dev.

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NetApp All Flash FAS:

The speed and low latency are the most valuable features. My customers or users noticed an improvement in our EMR application, once we moved our SQL environment over to the AFF.

I think the OnCommand System Manager has been excellent. I like the newer version myself. We're not on ONTAP 9 yet, but I do love 8.3.

Pure Storage M20:

It's just simple. There's no clustering. You take that complexity away from NetApp, you get rid of the clustering. It’s a dual-node controller system. You can have dual or single aggregates, whatever, the same thing. But they don't do clustering. If you wanted to mirror that data off, you have to purchase another Pure, plug it into the expansion port and basically mirror between platforms. Whereas in the ONTAP, your data is clustered, you've got HA failover. You still have HA failover in Pure, but it is just on the controller only.

NetApp All Flash FAS:

I'm not involved in the price-making decision. I just throw the number at the manager and say, "Hey, this is what I want."

We're going to take a good look at Solid Fire for SQL environment.

I’m not rating it higher because when we piloted our AFF against a Pure Storage M20, we were getting much better deduplication out of our SQL database on the Pure product. I’m told that this has been improved in ONTAP 9. The deduping compression ratios are more on par with what Pure has been able to do. It's not an end-case decision. We have plenty of storage available. Our database is growing. We'd love to keep as small of a footprint as possible, but we still have overhead room in case it does expand beyond what we're expecting it to. Nonetheless, in the future, I'd like to see better deduplication out of SQL. That’s difficult to do; I get it.

Pure Storage M20:

I don't know what could be improved at this point. I haven't used it enough to know where they really are lacking in anything. It's fast, it's very easy to set up, it's very easy to maintain.

Nonetheless, there is no clustered data. Your data resides in a single point, so then it's up to you to mirror it, replicate it, copy it, however you do it; DoubleTake replication or if you buy another Pure product and do their onboard replication. I guess It all depends on your pocket book, really.

I would give it four stars because it's pricey. I do believe Pure was more expensive than the NetApp when we were pricing last time. Of course, that really varies on what time of the year it is. I think NetApp end of year is March or April. I'm really not sure when Pure's end of year is, but they call me every few months with a better price.

NetApp All Flash FAS:

It is very, very stable. I'm noticing a difference between it and my FAS 2230. Storage efficiencies are much faster. Deduplication is awesome.

Pure Storage M20:

We didn't see any issues with stability. Of course, we only ran a demo for 90 days.

NetApp All Flash FAS:

We're looking to scale it up because our FAS 3220 is coming up for maintenance renewal. We're thinking we'd probably be better off chucking a couple more shelves at the AFF, and running our vSphere environment off those shelves because we're not touching the controllers on that AFF. I hate to say they're running ideal with 2,000 SQL users on it, but it's running very well.

Pure Storage M20:

Scalability is pretty much the same as on NetApp, depending on what controller you buy, how many shelves you can attach to it.

NetApp All Flash FAS:

Technical support is hit or miss sometimes. Sometimes I get the run around. I have to go through multiple support engineers to help me out with whatever issue I'm dealing with at the time. Other times, they've been spot on: The first guy I get has said something like, "Oh I can fix that for you right now." I think it really depends on the complexity of the problem.

Pure Storage M20:

I did not use technical support for Pure.

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NetApp All Flash FAS:

I was involved in the decision to invest in the All Flash FAS. We were modeling it against Pure Storage. We already had 3220 running for a couple of years, running VMware. I made the decision; I didn't want to split between multiple vendors. I wanted to keep it all underneath one hood. The AFF allowed us to do that. We could not put our SQL environment on spinning disk, obviously; not with the scalability that it's at or the number of users we have hitting it.

We were previously using Fusion IO cards, striped. They’re PCIe slot cards – some are on x8 slot, some are on an x16 slot – with Windows striped between all those cards. That was what I walked into when I was hired by AHN. They were using SQL mirroring. In the event of a system failure, they could always fire up the mirroring to resume production. Doing it with a NetApp has pretty much eliminated that all the way.

NetApp All Flash FAS:

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very smooth, very easy.

Pure Storage M20:

Initial setup was very straightforward. You plug in a management port, you plug in your iSCSI, your NFS or your fiber channel ports, and you're up and running.

Keep an open mind. Different vendors do different things in a different way. NetApp is highly complicated, it's very robust. In comparison, Pure's interface is about as simple as it gets. But they all support fewer protocols then NetApp.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is approachability. I like people I can talk to; if you get overly technical and it's all technical garbage and you're not really a personal type person. I hate to say it, but I base a purchase off that. If I'm going to be working with someone for a number of years, I want to make sure it's someone I can relate to.

All-Flash FAS:

We were beginning to have performance problems. Our databases were getting larger and larger, and we needed to move to something that had that low latency, and this has greatly helped us with this.

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

All Flash FAS:

One of the most valuable features is the very low latency, especially when it comes to the databases, very demanding applications. Also I like the very small form factor, compared with the older models; what used to take seven or eight racks now use four. It's just amazing. The savings in power, cooling, and everything else is just incredible.

All-Flash FAS:

They could maybe make the documentation more available. Every time I want to find a document, I have to log in with my username and password. If I go to Google and look for stuff, it's sometimes hard to find. Things like that.

They have several issues that have been solved with the new line of products that they showed us at a recent NetApp conference; they really solved a lot of things I didn't like. For instance, when you allocate spare drives, you can only allocate one spare drive per node. If you have one spare drive, you can either go through node A or node B, and once you assign it, that's it. You have to know if you need to use spare drives. With the new product line, that no longer applies. That is one thing I didn't like, but they fixed it in the new release.

EMC VMAX 10K:

If you look at their CLI or their GUI, it looks like there isn’t any order to anything; it's just horrible. To improve it, they would have to re-architect the whole thing from the bottom up. I don't see them doing that anytime soon, and I can see why not. They are very loyal to their customer base. People have been writing scripts for their systems for 30 years, and they don't want to break those scripts. In order to support those people, there are a lot of things they can't change, and that's what's really holding them back when you compare them to NetApp or something else.

All-Flash FAS:

I've only had it for three months but so far, no problems. It's been great; it's been pretty stable.

EMC VMAX 10K:

It's very complex, but if you get it to work after a very long process or
if you have it working already, the thing never fails. You can use it, leave it on an island and you'll never touch it again. It's very stable, and we kind of like that.

Then, if you want to change things around, such as take the data out and put it somewhere else, such as FlexClone, you can't do that; you couldn't do that with an EMC.

All-Flash FAS:

I only have the one, so I haven't really scaled that all that much. It looks like from the specs and everything else, you can scale it incredibly easily.

EMC VMAX 10K:

We only have that one, so I can't really comment on its scalability. It looks like it could be scalable, but we're not thinking of going in that direction.

All-Flash FAS:

I might have used technical support a couple of times when installing the All-Flash FAS. They were great. There were a couple of times when I had to get on WebEx with them and they walked me through whatever I had to do. It was awesome.

When a drive fails in the NetApp, they send me a replacement and I just put it right in the array. I don't have to wait for anybody to do anything.

EMC VMAX 10K:

When it comes to the EMC, everything is so complicated that even when the drive fails, an engineer has to come onsite to change it. It is that bad.

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

I was not involved in the decision process to invest in the All-Flash system. It was just given to me, I took it and I just ran with it.

Before we switched to the All-Flash, we were using the old FAS. It was also NetApp. It was a 3100 series. They got deprecated and we went to the All-Flash.

All-Flash FAS:

I already had some prior knowledge of the spinning FAS systems. Compared to those, this was much easier. It took us something like three hours to set it all up. It was really fast.

EMC VMAX 10K:

I was not involved in setting up the VMAX. I just have to deal with it.

Before choosing this product, we did not really evaluate other options. We have an EMC VMAX 10K array, and the thing just sucks. We also used it mainly because we are required by politics not to be locked to one specific vendor. As an engineer, I can tell you that NetApp is the best solution; we all know that. We're slowly pushing management to try to change their model. What NetApp sells you that nobody else has is the feature set; you get the FlexClone, the SnapMirrors, and it's all very easy to use. God, the EMC is so difficult that it sometimes makes no sense. It's a very reliable solution. If you get it to work, it just works but then again, I have so many things I can't really do with it.

It's getting to the point that every time we get a new application, every time we get a new requirement for storage, we don't even think of the VMAX, we put it on the NetApp, because it's so much easier to work with.

For instance, we have a UAT environment that can't really work with the EMC, because the EMC doesn't have a FlexClone capability that the NetApp does. Every time something else or something new comes in, we have to ignore the EMC and just put it on the NetApp. For the stuff that's working there right now, it works great, but for the new things that come along, it doesn't work so well.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are the ease of use of course, stability, reliability, and feature set.

Talk to your peers. Go talk to the industry; talk to all the people in the industry. See what they're using. See what their thoughts are. I think that if we had done that from the beginning, we might not have done it the way we did. Maybe we would have gone NetApp all the way; I don't know. That's one of the things I would do I guess, in hindsight.

We switched over from an EMC array that didn't have dedupe. Now with the AFF model, we were able to do compression and deduplication across the board. I think it's like a 4-to-1 compression rate.

For example, we did probably about 20 TB of space and in the EMC side, it was about, I would say 70 TB but we're not even finished yet.

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

One of the things that we like is the sub-millisecond latency that we find, especially with SQL and Exchange. Everything's working faster than it did on our previous unit.

I would like to see them improve the GUI. It's not really AFF; it's across the board. The GUI is a little antiquated in my opinion. Looking at the other GUIs like the HP, which we've used, and also the Unisphere for EMC, they look a little bit snappier. The NetApp GUI looks a little old.

Also, the way you create storage, where you have to create a volume and then a LUN underneath it is kind of, in my opinion, a waste of time. If it could just do it in one shot, that would be easier.

We haven't had any stability issues, but we've only had the product for about two or three months. It's stable; so far, so good.

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

We recently moved from EMC to NetApp. We were pretty much running out of space on our current infrastructure for storage and we knew that we needed something else.

Initial setup was straightforward, but it was because we used professional services, to have somebody come in and let us drive as they guided us. The console is pretty basic, but the professional services answered all of our questions, which made it easier for us.

We did a bake-off with HP, NetApp and EMC, and picked the NetApp solution.

Pricing was a pretty big reason we chose NetApp, but it wasn't up-front pricing; it was pricing across the four or five years that we were going to keep the unit. We also chose them because of the amount of IOPS sent and the sub-millisecond latency requirement we had given them for performance metrics. Also, we were able to just add discs rather than add controllers, which we had to do with the HP and the EMC.

Generally, when we choose a vendor, we pretty much always go with Gartner because if we have the service, why not use it? NetApp is always up there, along with the other ones that I mentioned. That helped out a lot, along with the sales reps, of course. The technical team for both sides and the things that other customers say about it.

Definitely use professional services, because there are a lot of moving parts and they can guide you through the best practices. If you are going to do it, give your current performance metrics to NetApp or whoever else, so that they can see how much storage you're using, how much it would be if it went through the dedupe scenarios and also what your response time should be at the end of everything.

The most valuable feature of the product is its performance; we haven't really put it to the test yet, but just overall performance and taking our existing workload and smashing it really.

It has improved our organization with efficiencies for our developers and similar items; some of the work and the way they do it. It's actually improved their speeds quite significantly.

With the interface in System Manager, sometimes you have to go back into your aggregates from your SVM to see how your storage is going. It would be nice if you could see trends, so you don't have to keep tagging back and forth.

It would be nice to be able to see the aggregate status/capacity from the SVM view. I realize that it is logically located as a cluster-managed component, but to be able to quickly view the usage of the aggregate, from a capacity point of view when provisioning new volumes, saves having to browse back into the cluster view.

I’ve been using it for about nine months. But, as I’ve mentioned, we haven't migrated all that workload yet, so we haven't put it to the full test.

So far, so good; we haven't had any issue with stability.

NetApp’s very scalable.

Technical support has been indifferent at times. Probably about a year ago, I found the transition to the Indian tech support a bit difficult, at first, to deal with, in terms of quality, but that's improved. I've had a few dealings with them recently. I found them definitely a bit better now.

I was instrumental in saying, we need to go to the 8000 platform, full stop, because we'd been on the 3000s for quite some time. Over time, they kept growing, and the performance kept decreasing.

I used to work in the partner space. I'd see an environment with the 6000 series and we just threw everything at it; they didn't take a beat. So, I knew that by the time we were looking at upgrading to the 8000 series. I basically said, we need to forget about this smaller series and treat ourselves like a proper enterprise and go to the 8000s and get the right performance we need.

We actually had a partner assist us in setting it up, but it seemed pretty easy. It's a lot different with a cluster and IPs; you have to think about things differently. Other than that, it seemed pretty easy.

We did not really consider anyone other than NetApp. We've always had a good relationship with NetApp and we’re quite happy with how we can manage it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with can be anything from cost to how they treat their customers. Some vendors can be quite arrogant. NetApp's always had a good setup. For me, I prefer to have the ability to call on our SEs when we've got issues and so forth. That's always been good. At the end of the day, at my job level, I wouldn't be making final choices for vendor selection any way.

Make sure you don't jump into something that you'll regret later on. I think a lot of people are jumping into other smaller vendors at the moment and I think they're going to get burnt one day. Really look deeper into the solution and the products.

I haven't really given it a full go yet, but so far so good.

I liked the performance; it's fast. We use it for Citrix XenApp profiles and we would always have issues in the past from spinning disk with lagging profiles. They'd be slow to log in, which impacted end users. Since we've been using the FAS solution, it's been zero down time, very good response, no issues whatsoever.

We live on the US east coast and when we have snow storms, a lot of users work remotely and that's when it impacts, as profiles get used very heavily. When you have three or four thousand users all logging in at nine o'clock in the morning, trying to pull down profiles because nobody's coming into the office and our company never closes, on spinning disk, the impact is very high. On flash, you don't see it, it doesn't even blink; cannot even tell.

Where I see room for improvement is their technical support.

Stability is the same as the spinning disk solutions. NetApp solutions, in general, I think are very stable. I don't have any issues with them.

I haven't had to scale the AFF, in particular, so I would assume it would be the same as the spinning disk solutions, where we've been able to scale to multi-node clusters.

With NetApp's technical support, when you get the right person, you have a good response. Sometimes, it's a little hard to get to the right person. We have a support account manager, so he helps negotiate that a little bit, or facilitate that. I think NetApp support still has some work to do. Once you get the right person, you usually get the answers you need, but sometimes it's hard to get to the right person.

Installation was fairly simple.

Before choosing this product, I didn't evaluate other solutions, actually. We already had this use case, in particular, running on a NetApp filer. It kind of was a natural progression to move it to a flash filer.

I think that you need to evaluate your use case and do a proof of concept, testing on multiple platforms, and see what works best for you.

For me, the most valuable feature it has been the capability to provide fast VDI services for our call center. In North Carolina, we get some harsh winters, a lot of ice; not really snow, but some ice. Call center workers can't come in to work. We still need to field the calls when they come in. With the VDI platform, we're allowed to let them use their home computers to call in and use the services like they were in the office. The low latency that the all-flash provides, allows for the actual call center software to work flawlessly. It's like they are in the office and it's been working out great.

It's been a great product in my quiver.

As an example, if we miss a call reporting a fuel leak, that can cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Missing those calls is not possible. With this product, we can turn around agents across the globe, left and right, just turn them on and they provision so quick that they don't even know that stuff is happening. If a VM happens to mess up, we can delete it and provision a new one. It's super-fast.

Make it a little bit cheaper, but I don't think I would change anything of the system. Right now, each release has surprised me. Actually, I'm very happy with the results.

I’m looking forward to them coming out with SnapMirror to AltaVault; that's going to be awesome. Right now, I have to use a third-party product to do backups from my FAS systems over to the AltaVault. Then, it goes over to Amazon S3. With the SnapMirror, innovation I can go directly from my NetApp straight to it. I no longer have to have a third-party product to do it. That's coming up, I believe, at the end of the year.

Their platforms are always rock solid.

You can keep adding shelves and it works.

I haven't had to use tech support. The product's been that good.

We knew needed this type solution based on a lot of research. We needed to provide an experience similar to the desktops. That really pushed us towards the flash array.

I did not previously use a different solution; we were just using regular desktops. We did not have an environment to support at that time.

Initial setup was very easy; it took maybe 30 minutes to do.

The choice was really simple: either going with a hybrid FAS or an all-flash FAS. We did a quick bake-off and the all-flash won hands down.

We did not consider any other vendors.

The most important criteria for me when considering vendors to work with has to be their interoperability between the platforms. NetApp has clearly done that.

Look at the full product range that NetApp has to offer. They have something for everybody. Their portfolio is so wide. If you're a DevOp shop, look at SolidFire. There are products for the Edge consumer, ROBO, and cloud. All of them talk together with the data fabric.

ADP (advanced drive partitioning), which eases capacity management on smaller capacity platforms. Great performance for OLTP systems.

The Oracle workload, which was previously deployed on physical servers with direct-attached storage, has greatly improved mostly with transaction processing speed. Latency has been almost eliminated on protocol and physical disk layer.

Mostly security-related bugs on various DATA ONTAP for c-DOT versions. No comments on the physical platform itself.

Since October 2015 (10 months).

Configuring ADP seemed a bit more difficult than traditional aggregate setup.

Most of our current solutions are based on spinning media and hybrid solutions. Due to the greater performance improvement on flash systems, the higher number of IOPS and less latency on the storage back end, I would recommend deploying performance-dependent workloads on SSD platforms.

The initial setup was straight-forward with the exception of the ADP aggregate setup and spare drive management.

Implemented in-house.

Carefully estimate the IOPS profile of the workload that is going to be deployed on AFF as it is optimized for random I/O.

• Speed
• Performance
• Low latency

We do not use it now for our customers, but just to manage our criticla internal CRM proposals. It helps us manage our entire CRM. We had problems with latency in the regular NetApp storage devices (many concurent access attemps for small data) and AFF has improved it.

The price needs to come down. Also, it has a learning curve and I needed to learn a lot to do the installation.

We had no problems with deployment.

From what I know, no problem at all with stability.

We have not scaled it yet, but we are thinking about it.

Customer service is perfect every time.

Technical support helps us every time.

We used IBM before, after the contract finished we tested NetApp, and from what I know it filled the hole. It’s excellent. It has flash pool disks on a cluster, and we switched as we got it for a good price. We have a dual strategy with Inter Telecom and normally we get good prices for NetApp products.

I set it up the first time myself. I needed to learn it and read the user guide for it, but it’s easy for technical people.

We tested many products, but no other flash ones.

I would advise you to make sure that you need flash as it is very specific and regular FAS may work for you. However, if you need flash, this is a good product to get.