NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

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.

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. 

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.

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'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.

We use if for low latency, high performance, OLTP database. It's dedicated to a single application.

The benefits are better up-time, better response time.

Low latency.

It needs a better management tool.

We found it very stable.

Not very scalable.

We use tech support and it's pretty good. The system was stable so we really didn't need a lot of support or a lot of help. The few times we called, we got the right answer.

We were using ONTAP, a FAS system before, and we couldn't deliver the performance that was needed. We were missing our SLAs. We looked at some other solutions from other vendors and EF gave us the best performance, price, and value.

In terms of important criteria when selecting a vendor, and how important consistent low latency is compared with other criteria, I think what's important is the partnership that we have with them, the relationship that we have with them, that they are willing to work with us to find a solution.

At the end of the day, low latency was what geared us towards the EF. That was the best proposition on the table.

It gave us the performance we were looking for, at an excellent price that no one else was able to beat. We already knew the solution through the E-Series, so we knew how to work with this type of system, we had that familiarity. It's simple to manage. It was a no-brainer, in this case.

I think it's definitely worth taking a look at this solution.

• Performance
• Reliability

The primary use case for our EF-series system is High Performance Computing (HPC) big data analysis. The AF system is dedicated to multiple applications.

• It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads.
• It also gives you a very good throughput using the controllers.
• It is a pretty stable product; it never fails.

Our file system sitting on a controller.

They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing.

Stability is excellent.

Scalability is very good.

Their technical support is excellent.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Go for NetApp. It has the better stability.

Ideally, the organization is trying reduce the footprint. Our current footprint is all on Lazy Theta and flash hard drives with Flash Pools and so on. To have one consistent platform that takes the same amount of data in less amounts of space is key. It is just a matter of getting to that next level of datacenter integration.

The primary use case for our All Flash EF-Series is currently being used for Vidya, with all subjects, Zinap, using our server to allow us to increase performance of our user experience on Vidya. We have high use cases for SQL databases. Most of our business critical applications use SQL to allow us to complete the DoD mission needs, so we have been using the EF-series for about two years now and everything has been going smoother and faster. We currently purchased 20 efi 60s with 1.92 terabyte SSD drives and it has been pretty effective, so far.

I would have to say performance at this point, because the application it is based on is so diverse.

Having low latency is always key, so if I had to rate it, I would rate it a 10 out of 10 of getting the best out of what we can - the best performance and low latency.

Better support technicians for CAPP.

So far, it looks good in terms of stability. It is easy to manage driven by new technology driven, Raytech. Having a singular thing to manage everything and hopefully optimizing the user experience altogether without the need to uplift and remove the expand.

It definitely meets our needs. What we hope for is that it all flies fast and once we get it in that we don't have to scale, because right now we have requirements of random 50 terabytes here and 100 terabytes there, so the ability to not need to scale and hopefully receive the benefits of the new features in 9.3 of reducing your footprint.

We have a lot of ONTAP NetApp Sales Engineers (SEs) helping us throughout the process. Some of the partners are being evolved with the beginning to get us acclimated to the new changes.

Their SEs are experts. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Currently, all of our technology is on Legacy FAS systems that are end of life. We have taken the last one we can go to, and now, we have 20 sites and terabytes of data that we have to refresh and renew, so it is just a matter of time before we get to the next stage. In some instances, it is the HCI, and it other instances, it is the All Flash FAS, so it is not going to be a one-size fits all.

I was involved with the initial setup. The E-series are the easiest to set up.

The price is perfect. The price point that we're getting is very competitive in the market. Since we are buying in such a large quantity, they gave us a huge discount.

In some cases, we do consider Oracle ZFS.

Oracle ZFS is one of the vendors that's in our market arena because they don't have a maintenance policy. They have a contract internally that allows when they submit their cost estimates or their notes there is no maintenance because they have another contract vehicle that takes your maintenance. If NetApp had a similar contract vehicle to allow the maintenance to be excluded, that would significantly increase their business because their maintenance cost is killing them, or the major complaint I hear from my customers is their maintenance cost is insane.

So, in one instance we will go with NetApp. In the other instance, we will go with ZFS, because it is cheaper.

Take advantage of the node transfers that you can have with the SEs and getting to know them at their level where they are willing to help you in all aspects.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support.

Our e-App system is dedicated for use with multiple apps.

We are currently going to buy some All Flash FASs next year to go with the 08300's and the 15.3 terabyte SSD drives. A huge order of 12 nodes, six AJ pairs should be imminent, second quarter for DoD.

It's quick. That was our big requirement, it had to be fast enough that there's no latency in our applications between when the end users are logging in through Citrix, and then those servers all talk back to our back-end servers. There can't be any major latency be it disk I/O or network I/O. So, it's all pretty quick.

It's pretty easy. If you ever have to add another target, it's pretty easy to go through, you just add a new one, map the drives out to our ESXi host, and then we're all set and good.

I'm not too hands-on with it, so I don't have any major input on things it needs or things it should have. As long as its functionality is there for me to use, as somebody just to use the storage on it, that's all I need it for. I'm very simple.

It hasn't gone down. We have no issues. I'm not their storage admin, so he'd probably know a little bit more about it, but we haven't experienced any major issues that I'm aware of.

We haven't had the use for needing to scale it up as we're going, so it's just kind of been as it is.

I think we used the professional services for initial deployment, and then we've gone along with it. I don't think we've used tech support for that. We've used it for our NetApp shelf that we've got; we sometimes run into some issues. But not for this thing.

I don't think we were previously using a different solution. Our business was finally letting us spend some money on some good hardware and we decided to take a chance, I guess.

I actually wasn't involved in that process, so I don't know the answer to that.

Our use case is both corporate storage and for all of our datacenter and back-end enterprise applications. We store it all on the flash, so it's quick.

We use it for multiple apps. J.D. Edwards, so it's our accounting software, and then all of our BI business intelligence is sitting on there. Those are the major ones. We'll see, we might be getting HCI soon so that might change, put some more on there. Mostly just our big I/O.

For us the most important criteria when selecting a vendor: oftentimes it's reviews. Support is critical. Ease of use isn't so much an issue. Usually we just look at the feature set and see if it coincides with what we need, what we require, and then we pick whatever most closely fits that.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking at this type of solution I would recommend this one. It depends on the size of the company. Obviously to a small, medium size business, you're probably not going to recommend it because it's probably overkill.

When I say overkill, I mean it's probably way more than a smaller or a start-up company would need. They're not gonna have that much of a requirement for that kind of speed, that quick. I'd say for small, medium, unless they have deep pockets, I don't recommend it. They can probably get something comparable that more fits their budget. Once you start hitting a certain threshold, you're definitely going to have to start investing some money in IT to make sure it's stable and stays up and you have no issues.