Netapp AFF in a HealthCare environment
July 01, 2019
Netapp AFF in a HealthCare environment
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with NetApp All Flash FAS
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.
- 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.