NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Reviews

I normally work with customers. I'm a senior consultant so I'm responsible for giving information to customers and I make assessments for them about what technology is the best for them to use.

In terms of which features I've found most valuable, this includes rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas - their cloning tools.

Also, the deployment is very quick and very simple.

There is a lot of room for improvement. What I don't like is that they do not create barriers in the areas. The data management is based on the software and they do not use segmentation on the storage. That is the main problem - there is no segmentation. You cannot segment the data on the database. You put the data there but you don't know where the data goes on each disk. The information will be there but there is no segmentation. There needs to be improvement in data segmentation.

In future releases, I'd like to see federation and segmentation. Those are the big problems with NetApp at the moment. Compared to HP, Dell and HPE 3PAR, they cannot do the federation which is very important. We have to do remote replication and work with two or more storage sites in different locations. If I have a site and I have a second or third site - they require working federation and NetApp cannot do this right now.

I have been using NetApp Series All-Flash for about four years.

Until now we have not had issues on the four databases, the four storage units we are using.

In terms of scalability, it's okay. 

But they do have one problem with scalability - they cannot do federation of storage.

I have not contacted support directly. The customer has specific teams for that.

But I work directly with the support on tests for crash recovery. More than a year ago we made these tests before the customer bought the solution. But at the moment, I know that the support in Portugal is very limited because they don't have people working in the office. I think they only have one person working in the Portugal office.

As I mentioned, the deployment is very quick and very simple to use.

I have customers with four storage sites, and we have all the virtual environments and the production cloning for disaster recovery tests on NetApp.

On a scale of 1 - 10, I'd give NetApp EF-Series All Flash a 5. It's a low rating because as I mentioned, they have to improve their software. NetApp is an array that is made on the software. Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation. Fragmentation, in particular, is a problem that could be improved for big customers since big data is so important for them.

I usually run a POC for our customers.

The solution is very good. It offers very good performance, and very good data services to customers. 

The ONTAP is excellent. 

SnapMirror is very useful. It allows the customer to be able to see the entire relationship. It's one of the best features of the product.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

For the most part, the solution is stable.

The technical support has been pretty good for the most part.

The solution should really build out a more hyper-converged product. In Indonesia, there are many competitors for hyper-converged products, such as Nutanix and VxRail from Dell. Those products in particular are so strong. They need to improve the NetApp for hyper-converged solutions. Whereas, NetApp for storage is still pretty strong in Indonesia.

The dashboard could be simplified. There are many, many features on NetApp, and they could be combined onto one centralized dashboard for ease of use and access.

The stability so far has been very good. It's a reliable solution. For AFF, I still have not noticed any bugs, for example.

We mostly deal with medium-sized organizations.

When we have an issue we still cannot open a ticket yet as we are working when the customer has not yet sent an IPO, and so we cannot open a ticket. Typically, we ask for help from NetApp Southeast Asia. They are helpful. We request via email, and they always tend to help us.

The setup process is okay for the common line installation. I'm familiar with the process, so it is okay.

When we reach an issue in customer, it can take a long time. However, when there's no issue in the customer environment, we can set up it very fast.

In terms of the cost, I do not handle the price or the payments at all. I can't speak to how much the solution costs or what the licensing structure is like.

I'm working as pre-sales for NetApp. I help the NetApp team to test the POC for the customer. My company is a distributor of NetApp in Indonesia.

We might not use the latest version of the solution. We use the AFF Series and the C Series.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're mostly quite satisfied with the solution so far.

The primary use case of this solution for databases.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access.

It's simple in operating and for maintenance. Also, they provide a warranty for the I/O output.

All-Flash is made by Solid State Disk, it's not like HDD or spinning disk.

The price is important, and we would like to have it less expensive.

Better integration with other brands is important so we would like to see it easier to integrate.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

We are using one of the older versions, with a capacity of 12 TB.

This solution is stable. All-Flash has drives that are very stable. If dropped it's not broken. It's not the same as a hard drive and the old-style hard drive. It won't be damaged by a power surge.

We have 50 users, some are administrators and others are different businesses.

Technical support is good. If we have some issues, especially from NetApp, they give us an early warning system. When there is a potential error, it will come up and let us know immediately that it will occur. This prevents it from crashing.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It's very simple to run the application and run the database. It's more measurable with little to no variables.

It took less than a week to deploy.

We did not use an integrator, we used the resources from our company. We have a team of five engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is an expensive product.

I will continue to use this solution. I think that the technology is still the latest one. 

If there is more development storage technology in the future with other venders then I will consider using another solution.

Depending on the business needs, there are variables to consider with the expense. It's still worth purchasing as the support is good and also the performance is very good.

Some of the engineers are still considering changing to a cheaper solution but they worry that the support and maintenance will not be as good.

I would recommend this solution. From my experience, this is still the best product available.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution as storage for our application server. It is used in the virtualized environment in our data center. It hosts our critical applications such as databases and our critical application workload.

The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload. This feature is unique to this vendor and the competitors do not have it.

I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems.

Better monitoring should be implemented.

I began working with NetApp All-Flash Arrays about two years ago.

This solution is very stable. We use it for our critical workloads and it is used on a daily basis.

This solution is scalable. We have more than 500 users in our company.

We also have plans to extend its capacity.

I have been in touch with technical support and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We did not use another enterprise-level storage solution before this one. We switched to NetApp All-Flash arrays because of the high availability and the ability to assign specific margins of performance to individual workloads.

The initial setup is very easy. It includes a very good Cisco NetApp deployment engine that makes it very simple.

We did the installation on our own.

This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive.

For anyone who has critical workloads like Oracle databases or DB2, NetApp All-Flash Arrays will suit their needs, as long as it fits within their budget.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a tech services company and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients. We also use this ourselves.

Personally, we use this as a unified SAN solution. Our clients use it for CCTV and media applications. For example, one of our clients uses this to handle video data for game development. Depending on the customer and their requirements, we will configure an all-flash storage solution for them.

The capacity is very good and better than in past models.

The management software is very good. It supports reporting and different policies that are useful.

The price of the All Flash solution is very high.

I have been working with the NetApp All Flash Arrays for the past two and a half years. In total, I have been working with NetApp for almost six years.

The All Flash Array is stable and highly available.

This solution is scalable and you can just add more storage.

We are satisfied with the NetApp technical support.

The initial setup is simple. Compared to solutions in the past, it is very simple.

I have done three All Flash deployments with the help of my team for different clients.

This is an enterprise-level solution and the costs are very high. Adding more capacity will increase the cost.

NetApp All Flash is a system that I recommend for a rapid storage solution. It is good for organizations such as banks and media companies.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for banking services. It is one of three of our production systems in which we store all of our customer's data. 

Thirty percent of our production traffic for our company is stored with this solution.

The deployment model used is a private cloud.

The main advantage of this solution is performance. 

This solution does not have any compression or deduplication, but instead gains better performance through concurrency.

We cannot share data in what is described as a trunk port, which is a disadvantage.

Technical support is an area that needs improvement.

In the next release, I would like to have staged access. The administrator would be able to connect to all of the storage and see real-time performance and issues, not only in the web interface. If the administrator is working on the console they should have access to all interfaced controllers.

I have had a couple of technical tasks, but I think that they have good technical support when you inquire about hardware. They have a problem when you ask about software-related issues. 

When you have a hardware issue, it is reloved within the time limit described and agreed to in the SLA. 

When it's a software-related issue, it is difficult to find an engineer that can help you. You spend time describing your issue to a person who then says that they can help you, but it will take time. A week later you explain it again. 

Only when they prioritize your request, will they assign an engineer to resolve your issue.

The initial setup was easy. I spent an hour with the setup. 

One of the last initial setups I performed was difficult. It was on IBM Storage and the manual stated that you could connect to an IP address. It was supposed to work but when you connected to this address it did not ping and you cannot connect to them.

We had to connect with the console and create a cluster manually. This took approximately five hours. In the last two years, since the deployment, I have not had any issues with it.

It is very easy, and even a person with a minimal background could do it with no problem.

We are not talking about using this for all of our data storage, as that can be very expensive. We have singular pricing for the solutions we use.

Vendors who provide all-flash storage have singular pricing that depends on a couple of factors.

If we compare this storage solution with Concurrent, the price is the same, but the performance is much better.

The pricing is comparable with other competitors and similar in mid-range solutions, and for high range solutions, it would depend on our requirements or needs.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use NetApp for storage.

The solution allows us to segregate one storage unit from another.

Being able to partition different virtual volumes of storage is really valuable for us. It is pretty simple to manage.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any improvements other than perhaps better integration with some of our Cisco products.

The solution is pretty stable. We haven't had many issues with it.

I am not very familiar with how well it scales. Ever since I started it's been the same so we haven't really grown into it.

I never had to use their technical support, so I don't have any opinion about it.

I would probably switch to one of our new HyperFlex environments, which includes everything that we need. Right now with NetApp, we have to manage the storage and computer networking separately. With the HyperFlex solution, we could manage all three components in one place: storage, computing, and networking. That would be much easier.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The more you can make it integrate into one solution, the better it is. It is less of a headache than having to configure three or four different things. One solution and one GUI is just the way to go.

I would rate the solution about seven out of ten. It would be closer to ten if it supported integration with other products, not just Cisco.

The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure.

The user interface is very intuitive.

For us, in our country, the solution is a bit expensive. They should try to work on a better pricing model for our market.

NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate.

The solution is very stable.

I'm satisfied with technical support. I've called them several times and they were very good.  

The initial setup was very easy. Deployment only took one or two days of light work.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend this product for high-speed database applications.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.