NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

Our primary use case is for shared storage. We use the solution to support our ERP environment, where our teams want to share storage between different servers/apps. We're mostly using it for NAS.

It's meant to do the same thing in the public cloud that we were doing in our private cloud. In the private cloud we can control the infrastructure, whereas in the public cloud we don't have as much control. This gives us a way to optimize resource usage in the public cloud, without overpaying or wasting resources.

It also provides unified storage no matter what data you have. It makes sure we have control of the data and that we know what it's being used for. The main thing for us is that we need to know what applications are consuming it and responsible for it. The solution helps us do that.

In addition, it helps us because we know what it's used for, who owns something, and who's accountable for those storage costs. Ultimately, it helps us reduce our storage needs and that's where we get our savings.

Compared to native cloud storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to better manage shared storage.

I don't have a preference for any feature. It's meant to optimize storage and usage within the public cloud.

Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database.

I've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about three years.

As far as I know, everything is stable.

It's very scalable.

We focus on apps or IT services that are using it and currently the total is in the neighborhood of about five.

I haven't used technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

Our challenge is understanding all the different storage that we set up and being able to tie each storage that we create back to an IT service and, ultimately, a cost center. That piece was difficult to set up and we had to do some things manually.

As for the amount of staff required on our side for deployment and maintenance, it's very minimal.

We used NetApp to help with the setup. We focused on just getting things up and running, rather than making sure everything was set up the way we wanted it to be. Part of that was the JCI issue, and part of that was that the vendor might have helped us better plan and better organize.

Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is to make sure you have a proper foundation and design in place to manage everything from A to Z before you start deploying your first storage on NetApp.

Generally what we show our customers are possibilities for using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for multi-cloud environments, to do disaster recovery and to back up sites.

Our company provides backup and DR professional services. We allocate people to support our customers' needs in these areas. We implement the solution that the customer requires.

By creating snapshots and a multi-cloud dictionary, the solution doesn't have to replicate all the data. The dictionary can point to some of the data on another site and create a correspondence between sites. It's going to lower the storage cost. For example, it saves my clients between 50 and 60 percent.

One of the features our customers like is that it can be used from one cloud provider to another. They can use it from Azure to AWS or vice versa. That way, they don't need to use the same provider for backups. If something goes wrong on the primary site, having the same data in another cloud service provider is important.

We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side. Those requirements are just for our big customers. We have one, here in Brazil, that is very big that uses a lot of mainframe storage. But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers.

We have been a NetApp partner for three years. We have been distributing this solution for about a year and a half.

I cannot precisely say what the SLA availability is for the platforms, but in general, the stability of the cloud service provider, whether you put it in AWS, Azure, or even in GCP is very good. There are very few moments during the year that those platforms have instability. Normally their availability is at "four-nine's."

We have people assigned to us from NetApp to support us in both pre-sales and post-sales. On the post-sales side, our customer may open a case with us and we will open a case with NetApp.

NetApp's support is responsive.

Positive

We started using Spotinst and then NetApp acquired the company. From that point on, we have done a lot of business together with NetApp.

The setup is familiar because many software as a service providers have created the same types of stacks and permissions and roles. We are able to use the same skills to do these kinds of installations.

Overall, the pricing of NetApp is aggressive and the pricing becomes more aggressive as the amount of data increases. The cost for a given volume of data that you are storing becomes lower. The greater the volume of data, the cheaper the license.

With increased volume, it is expected that the cost of each megabyte will be less. It's not a "wow," or a compelling feature. It's much more compelling when you say that, by using the solution, the data replication will be improved. Those are more technical arguments and better than saying if you increase your volume you're going to decrease your price per megabyte. Other features are also more compelling than that.

The licensing is very straightforward, with the cost based on the volume.

In the past, we have tried to resell other solutions, like Wasabi, and we evaluated the Commvault solution. NetApp has many solutions for us, not just the storage and itself. It doesn't just create a repository for saving things with a lower cost. NetApp has cloud products as well as an open-source project. That variety of offerings is the main aspect that is important for us.

We use it to store all kinds of data, both structured and unstructured.

The way that it has helped our organization is that it requires less time to manage. It's almost like a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution. We don't have to do too much maintenance. Compared to other products, it doesn't need so much babysitting. It's easy to set up and it works. It does the things it is expected to do.

In addition, it provides unified storage no matter what kind of data you have. It has multi-protocol support. It does shares and it does block, so it's a one-stop solution that can fit all of your needs. You don't need multiple solutions for your different types of data.

The most valuable features are that it's 

• reliable
• simple 
• performs well.

It also helps to keep control of storage costs.

The only issue I can think of is metrics, but I think they have improved that in the newer versions already. There should be an easy place to see all your metrics.

I've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for more than 10 years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues since setting it up. It all depends upon the disk. The faster it is, the better the performance.

It is a very scalable solution. We are looking at how we can grow in the cloud and it can definitely scale in the cloud.

The support is good in general but the initial, frontline support could be improved. Because I have already been using the product for so long, when I call support I would rather talk to somebody who is a little bit more advanced or senior, rather than talking to the first-level support. Usually, it takes some time to reach out to their senior support. The advanced support is good. The frontline support can still be improved.

Positive

We've used Dell EMC in the past. We switched because NetApp definitely provides us with multi-protocol support and it is a one-stop solution.

It's fairly easy to set up. For a new SAN it takes a couple of hours to get the setup done. The additional configurations take another three or four hours. You can get the whole thing, a new system, set up within a day so that it is ready to go to testing.

Our implementation strategy is that we use CIFS shares and NFS shares in our environment. We also have block storage for SQL and Oracle. That has been our general plan all along. We separate these protocols by virtual servers. Once the necessary cabling is done, it's a matter of setting up the network interfaces for each, provisioning some storage, and testing things out. Overall, it's fairly straightforward.

I strongly recommend the solution. The biggest advantage is that it works as expected. There's less maintenance so you don't need too many people to support it and you save money in the long run.

We store our user documentation repository in NetApp. We are serving multiple divisions, and there are use cases grouped by divisions, by user access rights, et cetera. We also have specific requirements for the backups and restores.

The main use case for us in going with Cloud Volumes ONTAP was to ensure the IOPS or performance. There are other solutions available that are probably more cost-effective than NetApp, but given the criticality of our application, the performance expectations, and the availability, those were the factors that helped us to zero in on the NetApp solution.

In terms of administration, the portal which provides the dashboard view is an excellent tool for operations. It gives you volume divisions, usage rates, which division is using how much data, and more. The operations portal is fantastic for the support team.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides unified storage, no matter what kind of data you have. In terms of our data, it's mainly Word and PDF files, but we have a specific use case where applications are using XML files for document management.

The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases.

We started using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP in production in April of this year. But we had been working with the NetApp team before that, from October of 2020, to get the configuration right in the test environment. Overall, we have been using it for about one year and two months.

There has been just one incident since we started using it, in which a node refresh needed to be done. The stability is pretty good with only one incident in 14 months. We're pretty happy with that.

We have been pretty impressed with the scalability because when we started, we had to immediately onboard two more divisions and it was pretty straightforward, once we had the base setup going. We were able to scale it up pretty quickly and we were able to do it on our own.

We are using Cloud Volumes ONTAP daily. Our departments are copying the files on it and sharing them. It's a part of their daily work.

At the project level, we are not looking to expand our usage of NetApp, but at the organizational level, there are plans. They are looking at additional use cases that can be  onboarded to NetApp.

After we deployed we had a couple of queries in terms of optimizing uses. We raised a support ticket and the help was available within a couple of hours. They had people on a call supporting us.

We're pretty happy with the support we're getting and with our account manager. Everyone is prompt in responding, so we're quite happy.

Positive

We used a typical Windows file share. Then, when we moved to the cloud, we worked with Azure Files. But in terms of performance and stability, we found that NetApp was way ahead of the other solutions.

Overall, the setup process was excellent. It was pretty straightforward but we also had NetApp engineers available and dedicated to us on a call when we were setting it up. To help us get going, there was tremendous support available, which was good.

The setup time was about six hours and there were about two hours during which we had conference calls with the NetApp team. 

The NetApp team was very helpful. The engineers worked with us to understand our use cases and advised us on the configurations. They weren't just checking what we were doing but were contributing to the overall setup. That was a good experience.

It's too early to comment on ROI because we're just a little more than one year into a five-year business case. We'll probably see a return in the third or fourth year.

The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing.

We looked at Azure Files and the Amazon EFS file system.

The pros for NetApp were definitely the stability, performance, and availability, out-of-the-box. Even Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be set up in HA. With Azure as well as AWS, you have to have your own custom solutions on top of them. Another advantage with NetApp is the admin portal which has a very good dashboard. Because it gives a good view of usage in real time, decisions become easier for the business.

The only challenging part that we faced with NetApp was that it would have been good to have a sandbox available for a PoC scenario. Without it, what we had to do was get a trial license and set it up. With Azure and AWS, you go directly to the console and just provision it. With NetApp, we had that initial period where we had to set it up on a trial license for a month, and when that was getting close to expiring, we had to extend it.

First and foremost, test the use cases where you need availability and performance as the key drivers for a solution. In those scenarios, NetApp is way ahead compared to what the competitors offer. But given the cost of the other solutions, there has to be a three- to five-year view if you are going to go with NetApp. You will not see a return on your investment after six months or one year.

I'm happy with the way it is handling our use cases and meeting our performance requirements.

We are using it for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in AWS. I believe we're using the latest version.

We were able to move our VDI environment into AWS. It has been a big performance boost. It has helped our customers all around the globe access virtual desktop.

Upgrades are much easier in terms of upgrading ONTAP. It is so much easier with CVO.

It provides unified storage and gives us better access to our data. We're able to manage it. I don't really see that any different than the on-prem solution, but it does give us the ability to manage access and permissions.

CVO enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used management options provided by AWS. That's because we're more familiar with ONTAP. So, it is not like we had to change how we manage storage. That was the big thing, and it has an easier user interface. Managing AWS storage is also pretty easy, but to me, the easiest thing was the fact that we're familiar with ONTAP.

I do like the cloud manager. It is a nice way of managing our environment. It definitely is a nice tool to do basic ONTAP tasks such as setting up backups, creating volumes, and managing permissions.

I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships. 

I like the backup feature because it is all SaaS, and it is easy to set up. My data is encrypted in transit. 

The compliance feature is also good, but we haven't used it yet. From what I've seen in the demos, it is really a nice feature. I like the fact that we can analyze our data. We can do data analysis with artificial intelligence and categorize data. 

They definitely need to stay more on top of security vulnerabilities. Our security team is constantly finding Java vulnerabilities and SQL vulnerabilities. Our security team always wants the latest security update, and it takes a while for NetApp to stay up to speed with that. That would be my biggest complaint.

We have been using this solution for two years.

I haven't had a problem yet.

We have not had a scalability issue, so it scales easily. We are using about 20 terabytes. We have about 200 people who are using it on a day-to-day basis. They are mostly from the finance team.

We have plans to increase its usage. We are investigating it. It is all based on the business.

I've had many support cases. Sometimes, it takes a while for them to give me a solution that works. Sometimes, they give me a solution that works, but it depends on the problem. I would rate their support a seven out of 10.

We were using NetApp, so we were using NetApp arrays. The main reason for switching was that we wanted to move our VDI environment into AWS. So, the main reason was to use the NetApp in AWS. One of the reasons why we went with Cloud Volumes ONTAP was that it was easy to migrate our on-prem solution into AWS because of SnapMirror.

We worked with Amazon FSx for a little bit, but it wasn't really ready yet. It was just released, so we decided to stick with CVO.

It was straightforward, but we were mandated to use Terraform. So, I had to create a Terraform code, but it was easy to set it up. It takes a couple of hours to just set it up if you know what you're doing, but planning, designing the application, and everything else took about three months.

We had an on-prem solution running on arrays, and we wanted to move our VDI infrastructure into AWS. In terms of the implementation strategy, first of all, we wanted to figure out the kind of array and what can we do in terms of ONTAP to make it work. We had to set up a PoC and get some test users and a VPC in place. We had to get security rules and security in place. So, there was a lot of stuff just besides ONTAP. Obviously, we needed to get the whole cloud infrastructure in place to support the VDI users, and CVO was just one part of this project.

I did it myself.

Our users are happy, so I guess that's a good return on our investment.

It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees.

My advice would be to go for it. It is a great product. It is a great piece of software. NetApp is cutting edge when it comes to software in the cloud. I don't really have any warnings.

I don't know if we're saving more money by putting in more data. It does have tiers, and I guess there is data reduction that does help us save more money. We're using cloud on CVO, and we take advantage of reduction capabilities that do help us. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

It is managing services in our production environment that are in Azure. It provides file shares, both NFS and CIFS, that are used by other applications that are also in Azure.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is part of the production environment of our company so the entire company, over 5,000 employees globally, is touching it somehow. It's a part of an application that has data that resides on it and they may consume that application.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is great because of the storage efficiencies that it provides. When you look at the cost of running Azure native storage versus the cost of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you end up saving money with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That's a big win because cost is a huge factor when putting workloads in the cloud. We had a cost estimate survey done, a comparison between the two, and I believe that Cloud Volumes ONTAP saves us close to 30 percent compared to the Azure native costs.

Azure pricing is done in a type of a tier. Once you exceed a certain amount of storage, your cost goes down. So the more data you store, the more you're going to end up saving.

The storage efficiencies from the NetApp platform allow you to do inline deduplication and compaction of data. All of this adds up to using less of the disk in Azure, which adds up to savings.

We have two nodes of the NetApp in Azure, which means we have some fault tolerance. That is helpful because Azure just updates stuff when they want to and you're not always able to stop them or schedule it at a later time. Having two CVO nodes is helpful to keep the business up when Azure is doing their maintenance.

The solution provides unified storage no matter what kind of data you have. We were already using the NetApp platform on our on-premise environments, so it's something we're already familiar with in terms of how to manage permissions on different types of volumes, whether it's an NFS export or a CIFS share. We're able to utilize iSCSI data stores if we need to attach a volume directly to a VM. It allows us to continue to do what we're already familiar with in the NetApp environment. Now we can do them in Azure as well.

It enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used the management options provided by the native cloud service. With CVO, all of your data shares and volumes are on the one NetApp platform. Whether you are adjusting share permissions on an NFS export or a CIFS share, you can do it all from within the NetApp management interface. That's much easier than the Azure native, where you may have to go to two or three different screens to do the same stuff.

The storage efficiencies are something that you don't get on native.

Also, because of the NetApp product, we're able to use the SnapMirror function and SnapMirror data from our on-prem environment into Azure. That is super-helpful. SnapMirror allows you to take data that exists on one NetApp, on a physical NetApp storage platform, and copy it over to another NetApp storage platform. It's a solid, proven technology, so we don't worry about whether data is getting lost or corrupted during the SnapMirror. We are also able to throttle back the speed of the SnapMirror to help our network team that is paying for a data circuit. We're still able to copy data into Azure, but we can manage the transfer cost because we can throttle back the SnapMirror. It's just very solid and reliable. It works.

And all of us IT nerds are already familiar with the NetApp platform so there was not a major learning curve to start using it in Azure.

NetApp also has something called Active IQ Unified Manager, and it gives us performance monitoring of the CVO from an external source. There are several people on my team that utilize the CVO and we each have a personal preference for how we look at data. The Active IQ Unified Manager is a product you can get from NetApp because, once you license your CVO, you are entitled to other tools. CVO does have resource performance monitoring built in, but we primarily utilize the Active IQ Unified Manager.

Beyond that, it provides all the great stuff that the NetApp platform can do, but it's just in the cloud.

I think this is more of a limitation of how it operates in Azure, but the solution is affected by this limitation. There's something about how the different availability zones, the different regions, operate in Azure. It's very difficult to set up complete fault tolerance using multiple CVO nodes and have one node in one region and one node in another region. This is not something that I have dug into myself. I am hearing about this from other IT nerds.

We've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for two years.

We had issues with Azure when they did maintenance on the nodes. They just do their maintenance and it's up to us, the customer, to make sure that our applications are up and data is flowing. When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly.

We have had tickets open with NetApp to have them look into it and try and resolve it. They've made improvements in some ways, but it's still not 100 percent automated for everything to return back. That's an ongoing thing we have to keep an eye on.

It is definitely scalable. You can add more disk to grow your capacity and you have the ability to add more nodes. There's a limit to how many nodes you can add, but you can definitely scale up.

Tech support is good. A lot of it depends on the technician that you get, but if you're not happy with one technician, you can request that it be escalated or you can request that it just be handled by another technician. They're very eager to help and resolve issues.

We had some issues with permissions and with getting the networking correct. But we had a lot of support from NetApp as well as from Azure. As a result, I would not say the setup was straightforward, but we got the help and the support we needed and you can't ask for more than that.

I've always found NetApp support to be accurate and good with their communications. Rolling out this product in Azure, and working with the IT nerds in our company and with Azure nerds, occasionally it does add another layer of who has to be communicated with and who has to do stuff. But my experience with NetApp is that they are responsive and very determined to get situations resolved.

It took us about a week to get everything ironed out and get both nodes functional.

We had done a PoC with a smaller instance of the CVO and the PoC was pretty straightforward. Once we rolled out the production CVO that has two nodes, that's when it was more complicated. We had a plan for getting it deployed and to decide at what point we would say, "Okay, now it's ready for prime time. Now it's ready to be put into production."

For admin of the solution we have less than 10 people, and they're all storage administrator analysts like me.

Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it.

Make sure that you can stay operational when Azure is doing their maintenance. Make sure you fully understand how the failover and the give-back process works, so that you can deal with your maintenance.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is where we host our NAS storage on which we keep our files, et cetera. We have three clusters of CVO, each serving close to 300 terabytes of data. We have our SQL backup workloads and the application data residing in it. We are using the tiering policy, which pushes the inactive data down to cold storage to help save on costs.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is all cloud-based and we have our workloads on Azure.

At one point we were paying close to $80,000 a month for cloud resources, and now it's down to $25,000 to $30,000 after using the tiering.

Also, using Unified Manager we are able to resolve issues before they have an impact. For example, there were conditions where bulk operations were happening against a particular volume, and our business was also writing the data. We caught it using Unified Manager. The IOPS were low and there was a high latency, close to 1,500 milliseconds. We had a look at exactly what operations were happening and, before the user even reported it, we reached out to the team that was doing the bulk operations to stop whatever process they were running. That's just one example. We have had a lot of occasions where the tool has been really handy when it comes to proactive monitoring. 

And it's not only for proactive monitoring. The same tool is also used for a lot of root cause analysis.

The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature. With the pay-as-you-go plan, we can choose between standard and premium storage, but we use only premium for high performance. High IOPS and low latencies are the main features of the premium storage. With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high.

NetApp also has something called SnapMirror replications and that's how we replicate our data from production to the DR site, for our BCP. It has pretty solid solutioning for the replications so the SnapMirrors are pretty handy when it comes to BCPs.

In terms of cloud resource monitoring, we use Unified Manager and it's pretty cool. It has both Excel-based metrics as well as graphical representations, which give us a clear idea of which particular file systems have performance problems. We can go over the statistical information and it comes in very handy. At the same time, it has an alerting mechanism where any sort of conditions can be configured and alerts are then sent to your mailbox or your mobile SMS.

It definitely needs improvement with respect to clustering and with respect to more collaborative integrations with Azure. Right now, we have very limited functionalities with Azure, except for storage. If CVO could be integrated with Azure that would help. When there is any sort of maintenance happening in the cloud, it disrupts the service in Cloud Volumes ONTAP. 

If those could be rectified, that would be really good news because it would reduce the administrative overhead my team and I are facing.

I have been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for close to two years now.

It is stable, at least with respect to Azure, which is what we use.

NetApp is scalable. When we initially started with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it had a hard limit of 378 terabytes as its maximum capacity per cluster. Beyond that you couldn't expand. So we had to spin up another cluster. When that was almost full we had to get a third cluster. But I believe that in the recent build of CVO they have introduced the ability to stack one license on top of another cluster, so you can have infinite data per cluster. So there were challenges, particularly with vertical scalability before, but that has now been fixed in the recent release.

In terms of increasing our usage in the future, we definitely will if required. It gives us the flexibility to perform automations and it has its own encryption tools. Right now, we are using it for one particular region in Europe, but we do have plans to get it out to other regions as well, but that's not going to happen immediately.

We have used their technical support on a lot of occasions and they have been pretty helpful. I'm completely satisfied with the resolutions they have come up with. We have created more than a hundred tickets in the last two years. Those were all submitted initially, when we had an older version of CVO, but now we hardly create tickets with support because our team has the ability to administer it.

We had ONTAP before CVO. We also used Dell Isilon and SoftNAS before we migrated to CVO. We switched because we found that SoftNAS was not stable enough to handle the workloads. We often had problems with the applications.

The initial setup of Cloud Volumes ONTAP is pretty straightforward. We didn't have any sort of difficulties getting it spun up. It was also pretty quick. We had everything needed in Azure. It hardly took us three to four hours to have the entire environment set up and ready.

We did some architectural planning for setting this up and we got all the approvals and licenses well in advance, before we actually configured it.

When it comes to maintenance, it depends on what kind of coverage an organization wants. We are a team of four who administer NetApp clusters alongside the cloud resources. We have roughly 2,000 users.

We worked only with NetApp. We had one architect and one contractor from Professional Services.

Now that we have started using tiering, we could still actually save more costs, but we haven't gone to that specific area. We know it is definitely going to affect the performance if we keep all the data in the cloud tier. That's why we haven't. But Cloud Volumes ONTAP has the flexibility to dump all the data to the cloud tier to save every penny possible.

We have an annual license renewal for all the clusters. The license comes with annual training and with some Professional Services time. We have used all of those. I'm not sure if that's standard or it's an agreement between our organization and NetApp, but that's what we get as a part of our licensing.

The money you can save with CVO depends on what type of configuration an organization needs. They can also push all the data down to the cold tier. The pricing model for the Azure Cool Blob offering is pretty low compared to the premium or the standard. The cost of cold storage would probably be 10 cents per GB.

Very few of the cloud service solution providers have that tiering option. Tiering results in a lot of savings.

NetApp, on the whole, is a whole different tool for me. Two years back, when I started, when I had my hands on it for the first time, I found it pretty interesting. I would note its simplicity. It's simple and, at the same, time very powerful and able to handle any sort of storage workloads.

NetApp is really cool. If your organization is looking for cost savings, NetApp is the way to go.

Overall, I would rate CVO a nine out of 10. We had a lot of problems with NetApp, but those were in the very early stages. And NetApp always promises to upgrade their products and they actually listen to the customer's problems. We have raised a couple of defects with NetApp, and they have always been supportive, getting these resolved as soon as possible. 

The NetApp organization, on the whole, is pretty good. They're coming up with go-to-market products like Azure NetApp Files, etc., which is actually the beta version of Azure Sites.

We use Cloud Volumes ONTAP to back up ONTAP Select instances from our plants and distribution centers to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Azure. We store a backup solution for all or most sites.

In terms of how this solution has improved my organization, we use a third-party backup solution, like Spectrum Protect from IBM to backup finances. That's not the best way to do it. Our choice was to move from that technology straight to using the same technology for backup, which is essentially NetApp. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is NetApp. It's the same technology which is where the efficiency really is. It's much more efficient than using a third-party solution.

It provides unified storage no matter what kind of data we have. Right now, it's just backing up Volumes but NetApp is a unified solution. In our case, it's really for file storage, NFS or CIFS.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to keep more backup. We can keep more backup because of the cost of storage in Azure versus what we have in our data center. This is also completely off-site from our data centers. We have two data centers close to each other, but this actually keeps us as an offsite copy too because it's far enough away. It does keep control of our storage costs from a previous backup technology because it's kept in Azure and it's cloud-based storage. It's not our on-premise storage, it's kind of a hybrid cloud solution.

We're saving around 20% on storage. 

It is the same technology that we run on our sites. All of the backup functions and recovery are similar. It's the exact same process. From a learning experience, it's the same. If you learn ONTAP itself, then you can do Cloud Volumes ONTAP without an issue.

The main feature of it is what we call "native backup technology." We're not using somebody else's technology backup, we're using NetApp. 

The other important part to us is the Cloud Manager. It gives us a single pane of glass to look at the environment. Everything is remote right now but we will be backing up some on-premise very shortly.

Lastly, the API and web services are fairly good. That is an important feature too. We write some code to do different things. We have code that runs to make sure that everything is being backed up as we say it is and we try to also detect places where we may have missed a backup.

I'm very happy with the solution, the only thing that needs improvement is the web services API. It could be a little bit more straightforward. That's my only issue with it. It can get pretty complex. 

I have been using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for a year. 

So far, we haven't had any downtime. 

It scales well. We can add to the license. We have a 100 terabyte license right now, but we can add to it very quickly.

There is very low maintenance because once you deploy it, you run your scripts and you can see what failed and not many things fail. So, it's pretty quick.

We did contact their support initially during the initial install. It was our cloud technical support. We had a resource from them. They were excellent. 

We switched to CVO because of the efficiency and architectural consistency because it uses the same technology. NetApp to NetApp is not trying to go to somebody else.

We were backing up Spectrum Protect and we were using SimpliVity backup at one time on the license, but essentially those weren't solutions and we moved totally away from that.

The initial setup was straightforward. You log onto their marketplace and deploy the Cloud Manager. Then it will deploy the actual CVO itself. It's pretty much a point and click. You have to set up some things ahead of time, like your Azure connections if you don't have them. Those can be more complex, but the actual solution itself was fairly straightforward.

There are prerequisites that have to be done like networking to Azure to your cloud and making sure that you have firewall rules in place. Those are more site-specific, like customer-specific issues. It's not really related to CVO directly.

It took about three months to deploy all the sites which are just for North America. This is also deployed within our company and in Asia. We have about 24 sites and we have a 100% adoption rate. 

We did the deployment ourselves. 

We never really got down to the TCO. We just know that it was at least 20% better. The only reason we would pick it and change everything is that it was cheaper and consistent with our architecture. 

We don't think it's that expensive when compared to what we were paying for the previous vendor. This is less expensive. Pricing is good. 

My main advice is to get your cloud technical support online. Make sure you have all the prerequisites properly done and you understand how to deploy the Cloud Manager. That's really the main thing.

Anytime we want to deploy new sites, we have to get the network people involved for firewalls because in our case, we're coming from Azure, which is where the CVO is, back into our company's network. The security protection is the most important lesson that you've got to get right. The security of your connections is important. 

I would rate NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP a ten out of ten. 

The primary use case is to use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for unstructured data storage, both for Windows and Linux-based machines. We use both from an NAS functionality perspective, along with SMB and NFS file shares/exports, for storing unstructured data.

The solution enabled us to deliver on our cloud-first strategy. It also provided us some savings and consolidation capabilities from a volume perspective where we can run with less management. We can run higher volumes of unstructured data and store higher volumes of unstructured data as compared to other solutions.

• The data tiering capability
• Deduplication
• Compression

The data efficiencies are valuable, If we want to combine compression and deduplication.

It is valuable to us that it runs natively in Azure. 

Using this solution, we are also in control of our backups. In regards to disaster recovery, we don't have to rely on Azure or Microsoft to fail anything over. We are in control of backups and replication (or disaster recovery). 

With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically.

The solution provides us unified storage as long as it's unstructured data that can be accessed through a file share. We are in control of the portability of the data. We are not locked into Azure with this product. For example, if we wanted to go to AWS, there is that capability. If we wanted to pull this data or solution back to on-premises, there's that capability. Therefore, there is some flexibility in the control of the data versus being locked into a non-proprietary solution, e.g., just within Azure.

If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful. 

The ease of data migration between devices could be improved somewhat. There is already some flexibility which is better than just migrating the data. However, that could potentially be further improved.

Including the evaluation period, it has been over two years.

The stability of this solution has been great. A couple of interruptions that we had were not really related to the product. They were more related to Azure, where we had a couple of issues with actual Azure hosts which run the virtual storage device and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

There is a team of four people who are in the role of managing and administrating the devices. There are thousands of people who access it.

There is room for growth. We are just in the process of migrating an on-premise system. That will probably service 10,000 users. We started out using it mainly for unstructured data which would be less frequently used or Azure-native. Now, we are at the process of expansion. After using the product for a year and a half, we are comfortable migrating on-premises into our system.

NetApp technical support is good. They are receptive and want to make sure that you succeed in using their product. Overall, their Professional Services, setup, and support for the past couple of years, in comparison to other large companies that I have used in the past (like Microsoft, IBM, or Dell EMC support), has been as good or better than their peers. 

We have used the NetApp solution on-premise with one of our outsourcing providers. We have used NetApp before in Canada. In the US, we used the Dell EMC NAS solution. So, we have had some experience with NetApp as our company has used NetApp in the past for years, but those solutions were not entirely cloud-based. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is unique in that it runs the same familiar operating system that you would run on the on-premise NetApp system with some differences and specifics to Azure. There are a lot of synergies, but basically it's the same operating system. A lot of the things work the same as they would using the on-premise NAS. Currently, we use the solution in Asia and North America.

The initial setup is well-documented, so it's fairly straightforward. There are all these aspects where you need to have some understanding of what you want to achieve in the end. You also need to have in mind a final design of what the requirements are. Based on that, the initial setup is well-documented and not overly difficult.

Our initial deployment was a year and a half ago when things were fairly new for NetApp. Our environment was fairly complex because we needed an antivirus integration along with different things, so the initial setup took about two to three weeks. Then, setup of subsequent Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices, as we expanded the solution, would take one to three days. We followed the same steps that we established in the original deployment, and in some cases with a few improvements, incorporating lessons learned.

We knew what capacity we required. We knew that we wanted to configure backups and deploy disaster recovery. We also knew that we wanted antivirus scanning and integration as well as malware protection on the system. Therefore, we identified the requirements, then worked initially with NetApp Professional Services to deploy the solution.

In the past, we were working with outsourcers on-premise. Even compared to just standard Azure or other solutions available, this solution has allowed for probably 50 percent, or in some cases, higher storage savings.

From a scale or scalability perspective, the more data you store, then the more you can save. For example, the more data you can tear down from SSDs (from premium storage down to Azure Blob), then the more you're going to save. Scale certainly matters because as the more data you store, then the higher savings you can achieve. 

There are storage efficiencies built into the product. The tiering helps with keeping the storage costs under control, i.e., the tiering from primary storage to Blob storage or object storage helps. Also, the storage efficiencies, deduplication, and compression help to keep storage costs under control. Depending on what solution you are coming off of, a 50 percent savings in storage costs is achievable.

Some flexibility around the licensing model would help. The product is licensed based on capacity. Basically, the largest capacity license that you can buy is 368 terabytes. At this point, NetApp is addressing some people's concerns around this. 

I can stack licenses, e.g., two, three, or more 368 terabyte licenses can be stacked. However, I would like to see some more flexibility because you can't remove disks that you added from Azure. You would need to delete a whole disk group. When you have highly utilized Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems, you can get into a situation where you can't remove disks. This is something that I run into, so you need some flexibility with the licensing. 

NetApp could perhaps allow temporary bursts of capacity on the 368 terabytes. For example, if I'm rearranging my disk groups or disk aggregates, then I could add to the existing capacity and move my data around within the system to optimize capacity, costs, and performance. After that, I could migrate off the set of disks that the appliance is using currently, move data around, and delete the original source, but still stay under the 368 terabyte capacity. However, to do that data movement, a couple of sets of disks have to be assigned. At the same time, you might temporarily exceed that 368 terabyte limit. Therefore, that is something that could potentially be improved. 

I understand why there is a cutoff. Because if you're licensed for 368 terabytes, you should be using 368 terabytes. However, keeping in line with the elastic nature of cloud and flexibility of the cloud, some bursting of that 368 terabyte license capacity should be allowed. I think that would a good idea.

We looked at Azure Files and just regular file servers in Azure. We also looked at a couple of other not well-known vendors who are in the cloud, like SoftNAS. Basically, when we were exploring options in the cloud over two years ago. Now, when we started kind of the journey of trying to see what was available in the cloud over two years ago, nobody had the capabilities of NetApp. To date, I don't find that there is real competition for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP at the scale that they're doing it at. 

While I have been aware of Cloud Volumes ONTAP for probably over three years, it wasn't at the scale or refinement that we needed then. That's partly why we didn't go with that solution earlier. However, it met our requirements by the time we got on it.

The solution provides more granularity and feature-rich options than if we used management options provided by the native cloud service, like Azure.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

We mostly use it for disaster recovery.

We are using Cloud Volumes only for our NAS storage, not FAS, which includes Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware.

We are remotely able to manage data.

We have performance monitoring, but there is not much load. Sometimes, we use it to trace performance when there are performance-related issues. We will then log a case based on what needs to be checked, like a network issue.

The flexible volumes are its most valuable features because we can increase and decrease the volumes. 

There is unified storage, which provides flexibility. It is set up perfectly for performance and provisioning. We are able to monitor everything using a separate application. It provides error and critical warnings that allow us to take immediate action through ONTAP. We are able to manage everything, log a case, and follow up with the support team, who can fix it. That is how it is unified.

We can take a Snapshot. We created a snapshot policy for the cloud, non-cloud, and test so there are three policies. We take Snapshots daily and weekly. This hardly takes any of our attention.

It is very comfortable to learn and work with when managing everything, e.g., with upgrades and maintenance. We can do everything perfectly. 

They don't provide training documentation where we can learn about the back-end architecture and how it works. I have needed this type of documentation for Cloud Manager, its AWS integration, and managing the on-premise back-end. We would also like to learn about future enhancements from documentation.

I joined Baxter International six months ago. That is how long that I have been using the solution.

It is stable compared to other storage solutions. 

It provides a stable storage for flexibility. Everything is perfect and works quickly.

We upgraded last month. I am not a fan of the upgrade to 9.7.

Everything is fine with the scalability.

We have more than 10,000 people using the solution on the cloud. 

The company has more than seven filers and controllers each. 

There are four people managing Baxter International's storage in India and the UK. Two people manage this device, a senior technical associate and myself.

The tech support is wonderful. They provide support in a timely fashion. They have provided support to us on knowledge base related issues, fixing them without any problems.

Types of issues we have logged:

• Time sink.
• Getting a warning alert about not being able to connect to Cloud Manager when we log into it. The support has provided links, but this particular issue is not fixed yet.

We are currently in the process of deploying the new NetApp box and are unable to deploy it. We are getting some errors. We are working the the network team to fix this.

I still need to learn about SnapMirror with the new migration.

The operations team did the setup.

I am not aware if it saves money on storage. This is managed by senior people.

I have used IBM and Hitachi.

The product is secure.

Cloud Manager also works quickly.

I would rate Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a nine (out of 10).