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Users have found that the NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays offer a great experience in data management and provide a reliable and …
Overview
What is NetApp AFF A-Series?
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
- Flash Array Performance (6)9.797%
- Flash Array Integration (5)9.797%
- Data Compression (5)9.696%
- Simplicity (6)9.191%
Features
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Product Details
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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 Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
NetApp AFF A-Series Downloadables
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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(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!
- Business Problems Solved
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
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 18, 2022
Very Easy and Secure Company Data Storage and the Best on Data Analytics Production.
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
90%
9.0
- Easy on clean and straightforward reports building
- Quick data migration
- Project data management and analytics production
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.
90%
9.0
- Data protection capability offered is helpful.
- Amazing reports rendering.
- Easy on transferring large amount of information and secure channels.
February 03, 2022
Insane Performance Required
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.
53.33333333333333%
5.3
- The cost was comparably high.
- The performance was necessary for the product infrastructure.
- Integrates well with the rest of the SnapManger infrastructure, so backup strategies didn't change.
The IBM All Flash FAS was similar in performance and price, but we were already a NetApp shop. This made the decision easier to go with the NetApp AFF system so it would tie in with our SnapManager architecture, as well as keep the learning curve short.
July 01, 2019
Netapp AFF in a HealthCare environment
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.
63.33333333333333%
6.3
- Epic, our EMR providor, has very aggressive guidelines for performance. The Netapp AFF meets those guidlines easily eben in a mixed workload environment. This has helped us meet our business objectives by not having to diversify our storage platforms or vendors.
- Multi-protocol support (block (ISCSI/FiberChannel) or File (NFS/CIFS)) Allows us to use the Netapp systems to solve all storage requirements regardless of the system needing storage
- Clustered technologies along with non-disruptive movement of data between nodes on the cluster make hardware refreshes simple and allows the business to keep running without interruption even during massive data moves.
I have been an IBM and EMC storage customer. I used EMC CX and VMX series SANs. I have used IBM Shark SANs before that. Much has changed over the years. It is my experience that Netapp has shown a great deal more innovation with large leaps in technology, ease of use and an aggressive progress while the two other vendors that I have experience with are more tied to their legacy technologies.
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.
- ROI has been tremendous as it has come in handy in all the scenarios we were looking at
- Users and admins both happy with the overall performance and management is happy that they got a good deal from reseller.
We looked at Pure, Nimble, XtremIO and NetApp. Although all the arrays did really well, the ability to support all protocols sets NetApp apart. Each vendor had its own pluses and minuses and we bought the array that best suited our business needs and budget.