Azure NetApp Files Reviews

We are using Azure NetApps Files for our houses.com solution.

Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial.

We were looking for a clustered solution that has over-complicated things because we had it in AWS, which is Amazon. There was a solution for clustered NetApp. That meant there would be two NetApps that were not clustered because there was no solution for a cluster. We would like there to be an HA cluster solution.

I have been using version 9.9 of this solution for approximately one month.

The solution is stable and reliable.

We have not gone any further than what we are doing with the solution to see whether expansion comes in the future. We know NetApps reasonably well and scalability normally is not an issue. We are in the cloud, and I am not sure how this will translate scalability-wise.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We are currently on a pay-as-you-go model with the storage that we use.

My advice to others is to make sure this solution is right for what they are going to use it for.

I rate Azure NetApp Files a nine out of ten.

We are using it for virtualized SAP systems in Azure, running our SAP systems in Azure.

It does extremely fast backup and restore processes. For our customers, it has the benefit that we don't influence their running of SAP systems while taking backups, so we can do backups more often. They also benefit off very fast resources, if they need something. In the end, it is an end customer benefit, not directly for us, as we are a service provider.

One benefit that we are evaluating right now, that is unique in Azure, is its multi-protocol access to a file share. This means that we can access it via NFS from our SAP systems and via SMB and CIFS from our customers. So, the customer can access the share via SMB and the SAP system can operate via NFS on the same share. So, we have a shared data place where the customer and our SAP systems can access and can share data in-between. That is unique in Azure NetApp Files and not available with any other Azure services.

You can change it non-disruptively. You can increase the size and decrease the size online, which is a huge benefit compared to Azure disks. It just works seamlessly. You don't need to stop the instances.

Fast snapshotting: You can back up and restore in seconds instead of hours.

The ease of use and optimization are very high as Azure ensures the complete service operation. It's a SaaS service, so you don't have to configure or manage anything on the hardware. That is a huge benefit for us compared to our own data centers. We migrate several systems or workloads to Azure right now. That extremely simplifies the use for us because we don't have to administrate the storage nodes.

Reserved Instances for Azure NetApp Files would improve more use cases, making them more valuable in Azure as the cost would be reduced. 

They should remove the whitelisting right now. You still have to whitelist customers, subscriptions, etc. 

It is very stable. We have had no issues using it.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution provide flexibility in both capacity and performance. Everything is automized, so we have scripted a lot around this solution. Everything runs for us non-disruptively and unattended, so our operating teams don't have to do anything in this case. There is minimal maintenance on our side.

Scalability exists. We haven't had any scalability issues; we are far from the limits that exist. There is a minimum of four terabytes, which is sometimes challenging for small customer environments, e.g., if a customer wants just one system in the Azure NetApp Files services, then it is too expensive in that case. So, if you want to try it out for one system, it's not worth the effort nor cost in the end. That is where we bump back to Azure disks as well for our customers. However, as soon as you have three or more instances, it's cost is definitely worth everything. In this case, compared to Azure disks as well, because it's more cost efficient.

We have one person involved from solution design, who is also involved in costs and calculations. There is another person from our operations team, who is involved with new features. We have a regular call right now with NetApp and Microsoft about new or upcoming features, as we are in the private preview program. There are two people from Ops automizing stuff.

I have not used the technical support for this solution.

Previously, we were using all types of NetApp solutions on-premise. Therefore, our entire on-premise infrastructure runs on NetApp.

The initial setup is straightforward if you are looking at it and using it on a simple basis. 

Because we are running a highly automized environment, our initial setup was a medium effort. It took us one to two weeks of effort to automize around the existing solution.

We set up everything alone. We had a conversation with NetApp itself to get onboarded, but that was not for technical reasons. Technically, we did everything on our own. It is a well-documented REST API. Everything for us was fine and we didn't have any questions.

For deployment, I was the only person involved.

The huge benefit of Azure NetApp Files is that you can increase the performance online and don't have to take the old instance down. You can directly do this online, which is a huge performance increase from Azure NetApp Files. For example, we have customers who need more performance on the weekend or at the end of the month for their regular tasks. We just increase the performance on that weekend or at the end of the month, then decrease it afterwards, because the performance is not needed any longer. This saves a lot of money. The amount saved depends a lot on the customer use case. It can be from 10 to 50 percent in the end. 

The solution’s dynamic resizing has saved us a lot of time. We don't have to talk to the end customer to get downtime for their systems. This saves our operations teams a lot of time and effort. It is saving us a half an hour per system, and that is a lot.

It is not that you can just migrate everything over with less costs. You have to think about your setup in Azure. If you consider it carefully and have a look at your costs in the end, then it's worth it. You will save a lot on operational stuff. You also don't need to talk so often to the customer, which saves a lot of time for maintenance. 

It is expensive in small environments, which could be better. The reason is the four terabyte minimum. A one terabyte minimum would be better, but it is what it is right now. I think it's needed that a Reserved Instance will come so you can pay upfront or in a monthly bill. 

We are using NetApp on-premise. In the end, we have the same performance in the cloud as on-premise. Therefore, there is no benefit or increase for us, at least compared to Azure disks, because we have other disks setup which are also running in Azure. It is relatively the same from a performance perspective.

We use Azure disk-based systems on single systems and small customer environments. It is more cost efficient in those scenarios with the drawback that the backup and restart takes longer.

Simply try it out because it's worth the effort to have a look at it. It's a strong service that gets improved quickly with new features, like backup and replication to another site. Have a close look at this solution, which workloads you like to migrate, and the costs. Overall, it's worth the effort.

It is definitely worth having a look at your actual setup and Azure's setup to determine if something on your setup could be more cost-efficient. 

The speed is adjustable by size of Azure NetApp Files and the performance tool. So, it is working perfectly, if you choose the right performance tier.

We did a lot of research, development, and testing in 2019. Since starting 2020, we have around 80 terabytes, which is not much from our perspective. From our perspective (maybe not others), this is really low usage until now. However, we plan to migrate a lot of customers over to Azure. We also have some new programs where customers will be directly deployed in Azure. So, we plan to increase that within a year to around 200 to 300 terabytes, depending on how fast customers come and we can migrate them.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. 

Some of the instances in the cloud, they needed NFS mount, and Microsoft did not have anything. That's why we are using Azure NetApp Files, we need to export NFS shares across multiple clients.

We are using version 1, which is the best version in my opinion.

This product is deployed in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. 

Azure has their native tools. We use the server tools to monitor the response time and availability of the shares.

• You can scale.
• The response time is very good on Azure NetApp Files. This is important because it solves the problem where we can export our Unix NFS shares with Windows as well as our UNIX clients.

We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up.

They could probably improve the versioning and other advanced features. The replication is not available in all the Azure Availability Zones.

We have been using it for about six months.

So far, we are not having any issues with the solution. It is working very well.

It is very easy to scale. We can scale. There are some certain limitations on the size, but we haven't hit the limit yet, so I don't see any problems.

It has been very good. Whenever we call the account team, the support team is very responsive. So, we don't have any issues with the support.

Our management made a decision that we had to move into the cloud. They went into a agreement with Microsoft that they would like to reduce their on-prem data center infrastructure and move as many applications into the cloud as they can. As part of that decision, we are migrating some applications from an on-prem environment to the cloud.

It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have been using NetApp products for long period of time, so we understand how they work. There is not a huge difference between the way these products are implemented in the cloud. Because we have been working with it for a long period of time, it's easier in the cloud to deploy.

This is very easy to implement. It doesn't take a long time to create shares and go through the security team to get approvals, open firewall ports, etc. So, it improves the delivery time a lot, it's very fast to deliver, and it is very easy to deploy.

We deployed it with the help of Azure consulting services. Our experience was good.

The performance has improved by about 30 percent.

The solution’s combination of the ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot. It is very fast to deploy. It's very easy to maintain. You don't have to do a lot in the cloud to maintain this thing, so it gives good performance. It's fast to deploy, easy to maintain, and it gives a better performance. These are the most basic three criteria for any application. This saves cost because the manpower you need to deploy is going down. You're getting better performance and not buying new resources. You have resources available in the cloud. It's just a couple of clicks, then you're good to go.

We have not yet seen ROI. We are not at that point yet. We are just recently starting using it.

We are working with the NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. One issue with that is you can use single node. It doesn't have redundancy right now. That is something we are a bit concerned with. So, we are thinking about it, and what are the alternatives?

The solution is solid. It works as designed. You get better performance and it is easy to use. It's a solid product.

We are using the same applications and not doing anything new. However, we are thinking about it.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10).

We use Azure NetApp Files mainly to collect events and for configuration.

Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution.

The solution could be easy to use and the security could be better.

I have been using Azure NetApp Files for approximately three months.

Azure NetApp Files has been stable.

In our use, Azure NetApp Files has been scalable.

I have previously used Splunk and I prefer it over Azure NetApp Files. Splunk is more secure and it is important.

The deployment of Azure NetApp Files could be easier.

We have five technicians and two engineers that do the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

The price of Azure NetApp Files could be better.

This is not the best solution for our use case but there are aggressive politics to market this solution.

I rate Azure NetApp Files a seven out of ten.

We are using it for some of the workloads related to SAP. We are also using it to store data related to videos coming from some of the cameras in the customer facilities.

We have been using its latest version.

Its security and ease of use are most valuable.

The main hurdle in promoting this solution is the price. Its price definitely requires an improvement. It is more expensive than other options, so customers go for a cheaper option.

We have been using this solution for about seven years.

It is definitely stable.

It is definitely scalable.

We have our own support team. We haven't had the need to take support from Microsoft for Azure NetApp Files. The information that we found on Microsoft portals has been enough for us to use the tool and give support to our customers.

Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end.

We recommend this solution to our customers because of its ease of use, availability, and security, but they don't usually go for it because of its price.

I would rate it at least a nine out of 10.

We have implemented Azure NetApp Files in our lab, and we have tested the NFS and CIFS protocols. We are looking for the multi-protocol approach, where the clients can leverage both protocols to access files, whether they are using Windows or Linux. Once we have this, and the data protection is in place, will we begin using this solution internally.

One of the benefits that I saw was that the administrators are hands-off, and don't have to worry about disk replacements. All we care about is creating volumes and giving our clients access to those volumes. This functionality is critical because we are a very lean team, and it gives us back a lot of cycles.

In terms of seeing a performance increase, I would not say that this is our use case. We are concerned with functionality at this time. Traditionally, the way we see it, if we want more performance then we keep it local because we see the price point going up when cloud applications need higher performance. As of now, we don't have any applications that require that kind of performance in the cloud.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution provided flexibility in both capacity and performance. In terms of operations, this solution has given us a lot of cycles back. We don't have have to deal with the scheduling and the data center folks when it comes to things like third-party disk replacement. It is hands-off.

I would say that ease of use is one of the highest items because it doesn't matter if I'm there in the company or not, tomorrow somebody else might come in and for that person, the learning curve is very linear. They will be able to pick it up in, probably, a couple of days and it's not a lot to learn. It's very intuitive when we are using Azure NetApp Files.

We have only done preliminary testing with dynamic resizing, but I would say that it has not saved us time.

At this point, using NetApp Files has not given us the opportunity for new use cases.

Features are being added to this product at a very slow pace, and they should be speeding that up and being a little more aggressive.

The critical features of this solution are SnapMirror for replication, data protection, and SnapLock.

Replication is important to us because we are a financial company, and we would like to have a second copy of the data available to use no matter what. Whether we are running on-premises or in the could, we would like to have it available in a different region.

The data protection is important because regardless of the disaster recovery, we were running into a situation where the data is corrupted in both locations. 

SnapLock is used for WORM files, where they are locked for a certain amount of time and nobody will be able to delete them. It is SEC compliant, which is important because we cannot put data onto these systems until the FINRA or SEC compliance is there.

This solution is intuitive, easy to learn, and easy to use.

We would like to be able to replicate data to different regions as soon as possible.

The data protection piece is missing.

We would like to have backup functionality built-in so that we don't run into the issue where the replication process makes a copy of the corrupted data.

Technical support needs to be improved.

We trust the stability of this solution. We have been using ONTAP for probably a decade and we trust the code. This is basically the UI that is changing, and we believe that everything else under the covers is still there, operationally.

NetApp Files is definitely scalable. However, to what extent and what price point is something that is yet to be seen for us.

We do not have to pay NetApp for support, but at the end of the day, we still have to have support, regardless of the product. So, either way, we pay NetApp or Microsoft so it doesn't matter. We still need support for the product.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the technical support a two. There are very few people who understand this technology inside NetApp. If you need to have an answer on a specific question then you need to go to the right people, which means that you have to know who the right people are. Otherwise, the question will be lingering around for months.

Microsoft brought this solution forward to us. Once I heard about it, I saw the value in getting our time back. That is very important for us because we are a lean group and we do a lot of things with very few people. That is one of the main drivers for implementing.

Azure's Service and support did not influence us in going with this solution.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. Anybody who understands Microsoft Azure will find it pretty straightforward to create volumes or enable the licensing. It's very easy.

I deployed this solution, myself.

Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features.

We do have Cloud Volume Service on AWS, which is pretty much the same, I would say. There's no difference between this solution and that one. However, Azure NetApp Files is better for us because we manage Microsoft Azure as well.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is that it's a good opportunity for companies to save time on operations.

Definitely, I would recommend Azure NetApp Files over AWS because I have seen more of them, and I prefer NetApp. We have built a lot of functionality ourselves in the form of traditional, homegrown scripts. Even though the snapshot capability was not there, we had the ability to do it using scripts. It was easier, I would say. AWS has been there for a very long time so it has that benefit. It's more mature than Microsoft Azure NetApp Files, but personally, as Microsoft users, we recommend this solution.

This is a good product, but they have a couple of key elements in the works that need to be delivered within the next one or two quarters.

At this time, I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use this solution for SQL backups and restores.

Right now, we've stopped using this solution because we finished our migration. We are looking to work with Microsoft and NetApp to see what other innovations we can do with this solution, on other practical problems in our infrastructure that it can solve.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution have provided flexibility in both capacity and performance. We were able to scale up and add more capacity with zero downtime, allowing us to continue in our migration without having to refactor anything.

NetApp's dynamic resizing has saved us hours.

Prior to implementing this solution, we could not perform really rapid database backups and restores. This new use case allows us to easily do data migrations instead of them becoming a time-consuming, very long-planning affair.

When comparing ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost, I would say that this solution is fair. It is about four times the cost of premium storage on Azure, so in order for us to use it, we'd have to be willing to increase our storage costs by four times. It would be nicer if there was a little bit less of a differential.

The most valuable features are the quick spin-ups and spin-downs, ultra-fast SQL backup and restore.

The speed of Azure NetApp Files is incredible. Instead of taking three to four hours to do a back and restore operation of a large database, we were able to conduct it in about 15 minutes.

I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region.

The stability is rock solid. We had no issues with it during the migrations.

We were able to scale really quickly.

The technical support for this solution is excellent.

We were using backups to Azure blobs and it was taking far too long to do it. A Microsoft Cloud solution architect suggested Azure NetApp Files, and when we saw the time reduced from hours to minutes, we were sold on the technology.

The Azure service support did not influence our decision because we had an established relationship with Microsoft, so their recommendation is what influenced us.

The initial setup seemed very straightforward, kind of point and click.

The NetApp engineers worked with our Microsoft engineers, which worked with our team to both imagine and deploy this solution without our architecture within hours. The three of them worked great together.

While I cannot share dollar figures, I can share customer feedback. We received almost zero complaints because of our reduced downtime, which to us is a huge ROI.

Using Azure NetApp Files got us out of a really difficult situation quickly, effectively, and at a reasonable cost.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to definitely try it out. Benchmark it against their existing solution to see if it can improve their throughput.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case for Azure NetApp Files is unstructured data.

We have this solution deployed both on Microsoft Azure and on-premises.

Azure NetApp Files gives our clients better options.

My clients have seen a performance increase in a range of between five and thirty percent.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution have provided flexibility in both capacity and performance, as well as billing. It has streamlined our operations, making them more flexible and allowing for easier growth.

The dynamic resizing has given us better position, accuracy, and deployment, so in this perspective, it has saved time.

As a partner, we have multiple use cases on a daily basis. There is a lot of flexibility and lots of use cases that fit well with this solution.

With regard to the ease of use and reduction in management versus the cost, this solution is excellent. The time to market is quick.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility.

The speed of this solution is adequate.

The fully integrated Active Directory was exactly what I was looking for.

This solution would be improved with more innovation.

I have been selling NetApp for about fifteen years.

Stability has been good to this point.

Scalability has been good, so far.

The technical support for this solution has been good.

We are a Microsoft Premier Partner in Cloud, which made for a nice bridge because we were already partners with NetApp.

The initial setup of Azure NetApp Files varies. It can be anywhere from the basics to extreme complexity.

We are the solution integrator who implement this for our clients.

The licensing fees for this solution vary, ranging from a single shelf to a full suite.

We did not evaluate other options. NetApp is always on our short-list.

I recommend Azure NetApp Files.

This solution just fits our needs, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.