TrustRadius Insights for NetApp AFF A-Series are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
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.
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid.
Pros
Volumes created on these nodes are mounted as NFS datastore on compute
Volumes or LUNs used on these nodes are also mounted as datastore on our compute
CIFS are used
Snapmirror replication is used across different data center sites
Snapshots are used to have protection
Storage efficiency helps in less storage consumption
Cons
Configuration of fabric pool can be made simpler
visiblity of NFS volumes on what clients consume it can be improved
data analytics can be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
The concept of most of the environment being virtual makes it so easy to configure and setup.
Examples movings the network LIFs or the FC lifs across nodes makes it easy, without having to touch the FC zoning on the switches
The cluster node pairs make the HA easy to manage and setup
We use the NetApp AFF A-Series for hosting all Vmware datastores, iSCSI-connected LUNs, and several CIFS Servers. We use SnapCenter backups for the datastores and LUNs.
Pros
Amazing degrees of storage efficiency, constantly improving with each version
Exceptional performance that also keeps improving with each release
Ease of management with System Manager and other tools
Cons
Several new security features like multi-admin verify need improvements to be truly useful
The System Manager GUI needs to be enhanced to include more functionality
The upgrade process could be streamlined and simplified
Likelihood to Recommend
First: zero performance issues in nearly 10 years of using NetApp AFF A-Series systems. Vmware datastores have been very resilient and VM restores are usually very easy. SQL backups are quick and seamless via SnapCenter, and CIFS Servers save on Windows licenses.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
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.
Pros
Solution for data storage and data migration
Provide the useful and quality data reports
data integration are very effective
Cons
User training take lots of time to complete
User must be experienced to operate this storage
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
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
Cons
GUI Interface needs to improve
User must have experience to use this system
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Secure data storage for the business
Easy to access various data across other tools
Data integration is very effective
Cons
The user training takes a lot of time to complete
Some tool capability settings are not easy
To manage multiple different information
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Protective multiple project and business data is excellent.
Solutions for data storage and data migration.
Providing useful and quality data reports is effective.
Cons
Full training process is necessary.
Advanced functions manipulation and setting.
Large amount of data transporting process is not that easy.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Backend database processing.
Fast data processing for reporting.
Almost instantaneous snapshots using NetApp SnapManager.
Cons
Cost is still prohibitive for performance.
Performance tuning at the Fabric Interconnect level.
Automation and scripting improvements in the PowerShell module.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
<div>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:</div><div>
</div><div>Cache Database (Epic EMR and Sunquest Lab)
</div><div>Oracle Database (Multiple applications)</div><div>SQL Server (Hundreds of databases)
</div><div>All production systems are snap-mirrored between the two AFF systems for redundancy and recoverability.
</div>
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
<div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
