NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

We use this solution as storage for our application server. It is used in the virtualized environment in our data center. It hosts our critical applications such as databases and our critical application workload.

The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload. This feature is unique to this vendor and the competitors do not have it.

I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems.

Better monitoring should be implemented.

I began working with NetApp All-Flash Arrays about two years ago.

This solution is very stable. We use it for our critical workloads and it is used on a daily basis.

This solution is scalable. We have more than 500 users in our company.

We also have plans to extend its capacity.

I have been in touch with technical support and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We did not use another enterprise-level storage solution before this one. We switched to NetApp All-Flash arrays because of the high availability and the ability to assign specific margins of performance to individual workloads.

The initial setup is very easy. It includes a very good Cisco NetApp deployment engine that makes it very simple.

We did the installation on our own.

This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive.

For anyone who has critical workloads like Oracle databases or DB2, NetApp All-Flash Arrays will suit their needs, as long as it fits within their budget.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We are a tech services company and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients. We also use this ourselves.

Personally, we use this as a unified SAN solution. Our clients use it for CCTV and media applications. For example, one of our clients uses this to handle video data for game development. Depending on the customer and their requirements, we will configure an all-flash storage solution for them.

The capacity is very good and better than in past models.

The management software is very good. It supports reporting and different policies that are useful.

The price of the All Flash solution is very high.

I have been working with the NetApp All Flash Arrays for the past two and a half years. In total, I have been working with NetApp for almost six years.

The All Flash Array is stable and highly available.

This solution is scalable and you can just add more storage.

We are satisfied with the NetApp technical support.

The initial setup is simple. Compared to solutions in the past, it is very simple.

I have done three All Flash deployments with the help of my team for different clients.

This is an enterprise-level solution and the costs are very high. Adding more capacity will increase the cost.

NetApp All Flash is a system that I recommend for a rapid storage solution. It is good for organizations such as banks and media companies.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

On-premises

I normally work with customers. I'm a senior consultant so I'm responsible for giving information to customers and I make assessments for them about what technology is the best for them to use.

In terms of which features I've found most valuable, this includes rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas - their cloning tools.

Also, the deployment is very quick and very simple.

There is a lot of room for improvement. What I don't like is that they do not create barriers in the areas. The data management is based on the software and they do not use segmentation on the storage. That is the main problem - there is no segmentation. You cannot segment the data on the database. You put the data there but you don't know where the data goes on each disk. The information will be there but there is no segmentation. There needs to be improvement in data segmentation.

In future releases, I'd like to see federation and segmentation. Those are the big problems with NetApp at the moment. Compared to HP, Dell and HPE 3PAR, they cannot do the federation which is very important. We have to do remote replication and work with two or more storage sites in different locations. If I have a site and I have a second or third site - they require working federation and NetApp cannot do this right now.

I have been using NetApp Series All-Flash for about four years.

Until now we have not had issues on the four databases, the four storage units we are using.

In terms of scalability, it's okay. 

But they do have one problem with scalability - they cannot do federation of storage.

I have not contacted support directly. The customer has specific teams for that.

But I work directly with the support on tests for crash recovery. More than a year ago we made these tests before the customer bought the solution. But at the moment, I know that the support in Portugal is very limited because they don't have people working in the office. I think they only have one person working in the Portugal office.

As I mentioned, the deployment is very quick and very simple to use.

I have customers with four storage sites, and we have all the virtual environments and the production cloning for disaster recovery tests on NetApp.

On a scale of 1 - 10, I'd give NetApp EF-Series All Flash a 5. It's a low rating because as I mentioned, they have to improve their software. NetApp is an array that is made on the software. Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation. Fragmentation, in particular, is a problem that could be improved for big customers since big data is so important for them.

On-premises

The primary use case of this solution is for banking services. It is one of three of our production systems in which we store all of our customer's data. 

Thirty percent of our production traffic for our company is stored with this solution.

The deployment model used is a private cloud.

The main advantage of this solution is performance. 

This solution does not have any compression or deduplication, but instead gains better performance through concurrency.

We cannot share data in what is described as a trunk port, which is a disadvantage.

Technical support is an area that needs improvement.

In the next release, I would like to have staged access. The administrator would be able to connect to all of the storage and see real-time performance and issues, not only in the web interface. If the administrator is working on the console they should have access to all interfaced controllers.

I have been using this solution for two years.

I have had a couple of technical tasks, but I think that they have good technical support when you inquire about hardware. They have a problem when you ask about software-related issues. 

When you have a hardware issue, it is reloved within the time limit described and agreed to in the SLA. 

When it's a software-related issue, it is difficult to find an engineer that can help you. You spend time describing your issue to a person who then says that they can help you, but it will take time. A week later you explain it again. 

Only when they prioritize your request, will they assign an engineer to resolve your issue.

The initial setup was easy. I spent an hour with the setup. 

One of the last initial setups I performed was difficult. It was on IBM Storage and the manual stated that you could connect to an IP address. It was supposed to work but when you connected to this address it did not ping and you cannot connect to them.

We had to connect with the console and create a cluster manually. This took approximately five hours. In the last two years, since the deployment, I have not had any issues with it.

It is very easy, and even a person with a minimal background could do it with no problem.

We are not talking about using this for all of our data storage, as that can be very expensive. We have singular pricing for the solutions we use.

Vendors who provide all-flash storage have singular pricing that depends on a couple of factors.

If we compare this storage solution with Concurrent, the price is the same, but the performance is much better.

The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use NetApp for storage.

The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another.

Being able to partition different virtual volumes of storage is really valuable for us. It is pretty simple to manage.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any improvements other than perhaps better integration with some of our Cisco products.

The solution is pretty stable. We haven't had many issues with it.

I am not very familiar with how well it scales. Ever since I started it's been the same so we haven't really grown into it.

I never had to use their technical support, so I don't have any opinion about it.

I would probably switch to one of our new HyperFlex environments, which includes everything that we need. Right now with NetApp, we have to manage the storage and computer networking separately. With the HyperFlex solution, we could manage all three components in one place: storage, computing, and networking. That would be much easier.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The more you can make it integrate into one solution, the better it is. It is less of a headache than having to configure three or four different things. One solution and one GUI is just the way to go.

I would rate the solution about seven out of ten. It would be closer to ten if it supported integration with other products, not just Cisco.

The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure.

The user interface is very intuitive.

For us, in our country, the solution is a bit expensive. They should try to work on a better pricing model for our market.

NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is very stable.

I'm satisfied with technical support. I've called them several times and they were very good.  

The initial setup was very easy. Deployment only took one or two days of light work.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend this product for high-speed database applications.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We depend on this product for our storage needs. We have a private-cloud deployment.

We use more than the All-Flash Arrays on site. We have a hybrid model with all types of storage including flash, SATA disks, and SSD.

We need a center related to NetApp in Egypt so that we can deal with them directly.

If the pricing of equipment were more discounted in Egypt then it would be better.

The implementation could be faster.

We have been using this solution for about three years.

This is a stable solution.

This solution is scalable.

Here in Egypt, we do not have an official office or central point of support. This is our biggest complaint. We do not want to have remote support. Rather, we want an office here. It is very difficult to get an engineer here, on-site, from NetApp. This is true even pre-sales; we want to sit with the NetApp team, and not with partners. It's not that partners are bad, but it's better to meet with NetApp directly.

We did use another solution prior to this one, and we switched because of the technical support. It had originally started off quite good, but after a while, it was no longer good, which is why we switched.

The implementation of this solution took approximately one month.

The pricing of this solution is competitive with other vendors here in Egypt.

This storage solution is both stable and scalable, and it works for our needs.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use the on-prem deployment model of this solution. Our primary use case of this solution is for better speed for the database. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is its speed. 

The pricing could be cheaper and it should have documentation in more languages, specifically, Russian.

They should develop faster building for the next release. 

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It's very stable.

We haven't really tested the scalability options. Only I use this solution. We have around 1,000 clients using the database. 

Their technical support is very good. The power went off and they called us around five minutes later to ask what was going on. Whenever we have any questions they have quick answers. 

The initial setup was straightforward. I read the documentation and it was simple for me. The deployment took around three days. 

The prices are average but in the last year we bought three of these and it was expensive. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. In order to make it a ten, they should make the price cheaper. 

I would recommend it. It is very stable, fast, and offers good support. It fits our needs. We don't have issues with it. If you need a stable solution, you should choose NetApp. We have two NetApp solutions in my company and we don't have problems with either one of them. 

The product allows us to configure and manage the services we choose to provide and to offer the service to the customers. In our organization, there are at least ten people using this solution to service many customers. This solution is dependable for us and our clients and that is what we needed to have.

The most valuable features are those that involve the replication process and mirroring. These are very valuable for safeguarding data.

The product might be improved with additional features for encryption. I think they do not do enough with encryption and that would make it more flexible and useful.

I would also like to features that better support the product implementation with cloud solutions. If the problem we need to resolve is with cloud solutions, the product is not so easy compared to other products for easily integrating the cloud data. A cloud solution is important to implement.

We have been using it for about ten years.

The stability of the solution is quite good. We do not have problems with the stability.

The EF-Series is not the most scalable solution. However, I think it is a good compromise considering the features and the caliber of the solution for this type of model and how we use it.

The support for the product is good. They are quick in the response and they are able to give us the correct person to resolve the issue that we are having. These are the most important things to look at when evaluating technical support. Because we have these two points we can evaluate the technical support as good. The response time is important. But the time and the skill they have to resolve the problem together make a difference.

The setup was quite complex and required assistance.

We installed the solution with the assistance of a consultant. That is mostly because we found that it is complex.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It has various small flaws like not being very scalable, difficult installation, lacking good encryption and better cloud support. However, we use it for what it is currently designed to do. From one to ten, I would say it earns a seven for the scalability and a seven for the stability. These things hurt the other things it does well.

Our company used this solution primarily for databases. The customer who currently uses it mainly uses it for the data store. He uses it as a single silo with the storage it offers, so he implements the project and uses what he needs to. The solution is not that flexible that you can change the workload so it depends on what you designed before. So you have to compute for your load or for your use before you do the setup.

The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our databases. What's great about this solution is that it speeds up our data store because it is a cheap solution for flash performances.

What I really like about this solution is that it is easy to use and the implementation was straightforward. The availability is another feature that stands out for me, as it offers a variety of ways to connect to our customers. 

One thing that may need to improve is the software monitoring as it is based on a work station that is serviced to give support to the management. The manager may not be as fast on board the controller, so it needs something else to make it easier to manage. Managing the storage is, therefore, the only single point of failure.

We have been using NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays for ten years, but currently only one of our customers are still using it. He is using the EF560 version of this solution.

We've used the NetApp EF-Series for ten years and it has been extremely stable. 

I think the scalability of the solution is really good. We can scale with the space, but not with the computation capabilities or with the controllers. I believe the reason for this is that it is an old style storage system. There are some new products on the market that are more agile and more scalable. 

I am not sure how many users our customer has, but I think it is about 100 users. The scalability would depend on the kind of VM system they're working on.

The technical support is very good. The solution doesn't require that much maintenance because it's quite easy and very robust as a storage system. When we did call in the help of support, they responded quickly and offered the correct solution. 

Our client used another solution before but they found that the NetApp EF-Series is much faster when it comes to performance. And they saved a lot of money with the cost of the fast drives.

The initial setup was straightforward and having fewer features to install makes it really simple. You only need a strong internet connection and once you've applied it onto the network, it is easy to find the managing software and to set everything up.

The deployment took no longer than 50 minutes. Once installed, you only need to supply the management IP address and after that, depending on the number of the LANs to be implemented, everything is complete. 

The biggest part of the job is first to configure the IP address for the management. The maintenance is really simple and you can upgrade without interrupting services. When implementing, the main job is to do some configuration, implement the LANs, the zoning and the masking. After that, it will stay as it is for a long time. I believe firmware updates can be handled by one person alone. 

We never use an integrator - we do our installations ourselves. And so far we haven't experienced any trouble.

Our license is fully integrated now, so we don't have any additional payments. We do use volume cryptography, but I believe it is free.

I will rate this solution a nine out of ten because it has limited storage. Before you take on a project, you must know how much storage you need, but once you focus on the system, it will give you great performance, reliability and ease of use.