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NetApp AFF A-Series

NetApp AFF A-Series

Overview

What is NetApp AFF A-Series?

NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users have found that the NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays offer a great experience in data management and provide a reliable and …
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Popular Features

View all 6 features
  • Flash Array Performance (6)
    9.7
    97%
  • Flash Array Integration (5)
    9.7
    97%
  • Data Compression (5)
    9.6
    96%
  • Simplicity (6)
    9.1
    91%
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Features

Enterprise Flash Array Storage

All-flash array storage is a solid state, high performance storage option.

9.4
Avg 9.1
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Product Details

What is NetApp AFF A-Series?

NetApp® AFF A-Series systems are designed to help organizations transform their infrastructure more quickly and fuel data-driven strategies. Powered by NetApp ONTAP® data management software, AFF systems aim to deliver performance, flexibility, and data services and cloud integration to help companies to accelerate, manage, and protect business-critical data in the hybrid cloud.

AFF A-Series systems, whether entry-level or high-end, support end-to-end NVMe technologies, from NVMe-attached SSDs to front-end host connectivity of both NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) and NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP). These systems deliver low latency for an enterprise all-flash array, so they can run demanding workloads and AI/DL applications.

AFF is used by companies to:

  • Simplify operations with data management on the premises and in the cloud.
  • Speed up existing and emerging applications.
  • Keep business-critical data available, protected, and secure.

NetApp AFF A-Series Video

NetApp AFF A-Series Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.

Reviewers rate Flash Array Performance and Flash Array Integration highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of NetApp AFF A-Series are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(34)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users have found that the NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays offer a great experience in data management and provide a reliable and secure data storage platform. The software has effective capabilities for storage capacity planning and configuration management, making it convenient for users to access project data and perform data analytics. With easy report creation, users appreciate the capabilities provided by the software.

Customers have experienced drastic performance increases after switching to NetApp AFF, achieving write and read times in milliseconds compared to minutes. The visualization of different data offered by the arrays is incredible, providing accurate and productive results in real-time. The NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays support various protocols like NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, and FC, making them suitable for a broad range of applications including cache databases, Oracle databases, SQL Server, AIX Boot from SAN, VMWare guests, and NFS storage. Additionally, the software is used for redundancy and recoverability with production systems snap-mirrored between two systems. It is also flexible, supporting NFS, iSCSI, and CIFS protocols for small mid-range projects and database servers. Overall, NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays offer a reliable and secure data storage solution with impressive performance capabilities for a variety of use cases.

Reviews

(1-7 of 7)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Best Solution offers for different organization great experience in data management, reliable, secure data storage platform.
Easy to set the security and provide the access to others data projects. Easy User interface to set all feature to perform effectively and generate great quality service.
  • Solution for data storage and data migration
  • Provide the useful and quality data reports
  • data integration are very effective
  • User training take lots of time to complete
  • User must be experienced to operate this storage
Easy user interface and accessibility of the feature are very effective and provide the great solution for data storage and data migration.
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Array is most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data, capacity plaining tools and others configuration options are best and easy to use.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash arrays support the NFS, CIFS ISCSI, and FC Protocols. We are using this product for our small mid-range projects and database servers.
  • NetApp support the NFS, CIFS ISCSI and FC Protocol
  • AIX and Linux servers are booted with SAN Disk
  • Oracle and My SQL data base
  • High Performance
  • GUI Interface needs to improve
  • User must have experience to use this system
NetApp Storage supports the NFS, CIFS, ISCSI, and FC Protocol. It's well designed for small mid-range projects and organizations to manage the database and application. Handles workloads really well. This product is a very secure platform for any organization for all business, capacity planning tools.
Cedeno Amanda | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The best solution offers various companies great experience in data management and a very reliable and secure data storage platform and the capabilities are reliable to all business productions. Easy to set security and access other project data easily through this solution and on data analytics. I also like the capabilities provided, as well as the easy creation of reports via the platform.
  • Secure data storage for the business
  • Easy to access various data across other tools
  • Data integration is very effective
  • The user training takes a lot of time to complete
  • Some tool capability settings are not easy
  • To manage multiple different information
Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
Annette Gilmour | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Storage capacity planning and the configuration management capability this software offers effective capabilities. Easy interface to set all the features to perform effectively and to generate great quality services through the platform. The ability to manage services and data analytics and even reporting functions provides accurate and productive results in real-time and visualization of different data using NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is incredible.
  • Protective multiple project and business data is excellent.
  • Solutions for data storage and data migration.
  • Providing useful and quality data reports is effective.
  • Full training process is necessary.
  • Advanced functions manipulation and setting.
  • Large amount of data transporting process is not that easy.
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays has powerful and stable features which were very easy to configure during the initial deployment of the product. The features offer multiple capabilities like data storage environment management, easy planning of storage capacity, and moving big data through this platform is easy and time managing and even reports which the solution can generate are excellent.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We had a project that had a need for a very high I/O for the database backend. We were using NetApp Clustered Arrays with multiple filers, but the wait time was still too high. We switched to a NetApp AFF and immediately noticed drastic performance increases. We were able to achieve write and read times in milliseconds compared to minutes before the swap. At one point, we were actually overloading the IP Stack with the number of connections the database could now handle.
  • Backend database processing.
  • Fast data processing for reporting.
  • Almost instantaneous snapshots using NetApp SnapManager.
  • Cost is still prohibitive for performance.
  • Performance tuning at the Fabric Interconnect level.
  • Automation and scripting improvements in the PowerShell module.
There is a lot of tuning and performance improvements that can be done with NetApp Clustered Arrays, but if a colleague is running into high wait times on database functions after performing all the tuning they can on their current system, then this is the only way to go. The performance of these AFF Arrays is insane.
Paul Lemmons | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently own 2 AFF systems. One in the primary data center and one in an off site location. Both are used for a broad range of applications:

Cache Database (Epic EMR and Sunquest Lab)
Oracle Database (Multiple applications)
SQL Server (Hundreds of databases)
AIX Boot from SAN
VMWare guests (Over 1,000 VMs)
NFS Storage

All production systems are snap-mirrored between the two AFF systems for redundancy and recoverability.
  • It is fast. We have multiple large and vastly different types of workloads and our response time is always sub-milisecond
  • NetApp has done a phenomenal job with developing Ontap. It continues to improve in large leaps on a short development cycle
  • The snapshot technology at the heart of Ontap is incredibly powerful and versatile. It is at the heart of most of their most useful technologies.
  • Non-disruptive moves of volumes between nodes, aggregates and even different media types makes management vert simple
  • Volume level data encryption. We have this enabled for all volumes and have seen zero performance impact.
  • The GUI of Ontap is in constant flux. Every time there is an upgrade it appears to be completely redesigned. Some stability in its design would be nice
  • As new or improved technologies addressing compression, compaction and deduplication occur within upgrades it would be nice if preexisting data could benefit from it by background processes looking for opportunities to apply savings to data in place.
  • It is not simple to see when data from the AFF is being access inefficiently through the cluster interconnect. Because data moves sometimes access to the data remains with the nodes that originally owned them. I would like to be able to easily identify these instances so that I can take corrective action.
We us our AFF to support all applications that have a response time imperative or are IO intensive such as databases, email, VMware VMs and applications that have users at a keyboard needing a responsive interaction. It is also where we put all data that must be encrypted at rest such as HIPAA data.

It is of no value to data that is generally archived, little used or has low IO requirements. These would include scanned images, videos, IP Camera storage and most CIFS and NFS file based storage. For these types of applications SATA is still a better choice.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NetApp All Flash FAS is currently being used to host our production data across all departments. It hosts our CIFS shares which are mapped as network drives for all the end users. It also hosts our entire VDI environment. It helped us tremendously by giving us the flexibility to use NFS, ISCSI and CIFS protocols as we use them all.
  • Supports CIFS, NFS, ISCSI and FC protocols. Not all flash products out in the market today support all protocols and this makes it harder for small - mid scale organizations who cannot afford multiple million dollar storage platforms.
  • Handles workloads really well. We have VDI, SQL DB, Production workloads running on it all at the same time and the array doesn't choke on latency or IOPS.
  • CDOT has come a long way and with the newer versions of CDOT, the data reduction and compression makes way for a lot more usable storage than what you pay for in RAW.
  • As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
  • GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
  • Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
It is very well suited for any organization who is trying to host network drives as it supports CIFS protocol and is very good at it. We looked into multiple products including SMB with other flash storage platforms and still went back to Netapp because it does CIFS really well. Any organization who is trying to host VDI on flash will benefit from the use of NetApp All Flash FAS as we did. Our users immediately noticed a difference in performance of their VDI bootup times and overall experience. From the admin's point of view, they noticed server reboot times to be a few seconds. Overall, this array provides a lot of IOPS, does data compression and reduction really well and is worth the investment.
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