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NetApp AFF A-Series

Score9 out of 10

35 Reviews and Ratings

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What is NetApp AFF A-Series?

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

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features NetApp AFF A-Series has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 35 ratings of NetApp AFF A-Series's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Flash Array Performance

    Solid state flash arrays offer high speed compared to hard-disk drives

    Category average: 9.7

  • Flash Array Integration

    Integration with hypervisors and applications

    Category average: 9.2

  • Simplicity

    Flash arrays should be simple to use and require little training

    Category average: 9

Areas for Improvement

  • Non-Intrusive Upgrades

    Software upgrades are often seamless with no performance tuning required

    Category average: 9.3

  • Power Savings

    Flash arrays use significantly less power than hard-disk drives

    Category average: 8.1

  • Data Compression

    Flash Arrays include compression and deduplication features to reduce storage requirements

    Category average: 8.5

Reviews

What users are saying about NetApp AFF A-Series.
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NetApp A900 usage and review

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

  • Currently we are in migration phase to A900 nodes
  • So not sure of the impact on ROI
  • But we are expecting to have a lower bill on our storage usage

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Dell RecoverPoint and Hitachi Command Suite

Other Software Used

Dell RecoverPoint, Hitachi Command Suite

NetApp AFF A-Series Systems "Just Work" With No Performance Issues

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

  • It has drastically reduced storage waste through thin provisioning and storage efficiencies that save multiple TB of data
  • In one extreme case, we have a volume using only about 6 - 7 TB that actually contains over 15 TB of content
  • The value of zero performance issues in nearly 10 years can't be overemphasized - it "just works"

Other Software Used

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, VMware vCenter

Very Easy and Secure Company Data Storage and the Best on Data Analytics Production.

Incentivized
Cedeno AmandaView profile
.NET Software Engineer in Marketing at Ariadna Communications Group (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

  • Easy on clean and straightforward reports building
  • Quick data migration
  • Project data management and analytics production

Other Software Used

Huawei OceanStor, Dell EMC ECS (formerly Atmos), IBM Cloud Object Storage

The Best and Secure Data Storage Environment Platform with Flexible Features.

Incentivized
Annette GilmourView profile
Senior Project Manager in Information Technology at Linio Group (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Return on Investment

  • Data protection capability offered is helpful.
  • Amazing reports rendering.
  • Easy on transferring large amount of information and secure channels.

Other Software Used

Cisco NX-OS, IBM Storage Insights, Huawei AR Series Routers

Insane Performance Required

Incentivized
Jacob Bradley
Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at QuikTrip Corp (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

IBM FlashSystem

Other Software Used

NetApp SnapCenter Backup Management, NetApp SnapMirror, NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software