NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

We rely on NetApp Coud Volumes ONTAP for a wide range of purposes, including VMware, SQL, Oracle, and file storage. It serves as our go-to storage solution for almost every use case.

The transition to the AFF storage solution significantly improved our organization by reducing our physical footprint. We went from a FAS system with two controllers and twenty drive shelves to just four controllers and two drive shelves with the AFF. This led to substantial reductions in power consumption and space requirements in our data center.

The most valuable feature is its exceptional performance and storage efficiency. This efficiency translates to significant cost savings for us.

There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges.

I have been using it for ten years.

We've experienced a few minor issues with stability, but we haven't encountered any significant outages.

Scalability has been a trouble-free experience. When we decided to increase our storage capacity by incorporating an additional drive shelf, the engineer collaborated with us, and the expansion process was executed smoothly, ensuring there was no downtime or interference with our production operations.

We rarely encounter performance issues, and we prefer to handle most of our troubleshooting internally. Our experience with tier-one support from NetApp has been somewhat lacking, and it varies depending on the support representative. We aim to resolve issues ourselves whenever possible, despite paying for support. On an overall scale of one to ten, I would rate the support as average.

Neutral

Over the years, we've tried various storage solutions like Nessus, Nimble, and IBM. However, about a year ago, we made the switch to NetApp, and we've been quite satisfied with their performance and have remained loyal to their products ever since.

The initial setup has been quite straightforward.

Cost reduction has been a significant benefit. We've been able to lower our expenses by minimizing the number of devices and drive shelves needed. Instead of having twenty drive shelves, we now only require two. This reduction in hardware has had a positive impact on power consumption, cooling, and maintenance costs, leading to overall cost savings.

We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use the solution on premises for files and in AWS for the target.

We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our organization's data footprint in the cloud. The data-tiering helps a lot. I would say improving data tiering to S3 reduces our footprint by about 90-95%, which is huge. That is instead of just sitting on EBS, which is expensive storage.

The solution's Snapshot copies and thin clones is a really fast and easy method for recovery.

I think the challenge now is more in terms of keeping an air gap. The notion that it is in the cloud, easy to break, etc. The challenge now is mostly about the air gap and how we can protect that in the cloud.

So far, it has been very stable. We haven't had any downtime or other stability issues.

This product is very easy to scale.

Most of the time they're very timely. Sometimes you just need to wait, which is okay because those times are not critical issues. When we do have to wait, the response time is usually a day or two, but that's fine with that level of criticality.

I've used NetApp for many years. It's something that I know is very stable and reliable. Recommending it to the current company was an easy pass. When I joined the company we were using a different vendor. It was an EMC solution for file, but we moved to NetApp. NetApp has more storage efficiency, the Snapshot feature, and better performance when you have multiple snapshots.

It's very straightforward to set up. It was very easy and fast.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It was very easy and there was almost nothing to do. It's just a click of a button.

We used NetApp Build Engineer to deploy. We had a good experience with them.

Definitely check out this file solution. We are using that and the cloud solution. It's something you need to see in your environment if you are not using it yet.

NetApp is nine out of ten. If we address the air gap concern, it would be a ten.

We use it mostly for distributed files. For example, one of our customers is in construction. So they have centralized NetApp storage and set up replication with the Cloud volume ONTAP. Several branch users access the Cloud instance. And whatever work that they do on the Civeo instant gets replicated to the client's data center on the on-premise NetApp storage. And they use GFC with Seavio for a seamless experience.

So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the license consumption and also the consumption of the underlying cloud storage. 

So one of the clients had an on-premise 100 terabytes. When that same data went to CVO, he was able to reduce it to somewhere around 20/25 dB. So he was able to reduce using DTO compression, the consumption of this underlying cloud storage. And, obviously, with the licenses, now you need only 25 terabytes instead of 100 terabytes.

There's not much scope for improvement. I think the solution is more restricted with the underlying cloud. The performance of the single instances depends on the performance of the underlying cloud resource. 

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

NetApp is stable. 

NetApp is scalable. 

The technical support team is wonderful.

Positive

It is easy because Blue XP makes it very easy. Just a few clicks. It's a little bit tricky for customers who are very new to Cloud. While they are the traditional customers who use their data center, if they are not well versed with cloud, they might face challenges in setting it up because that's more dependent on public cloud vendor, not the NetApp.Sometimes the internal support renewal is an issue because the NetApp system sees it as an expired license. So when you try to renew it, it is not reflected in the NetApp portal. So the flow of the support could be improved.

For enterprise customers, it's a very cost effective. But in the SMB segment, yeah, pricing is a little bit challenge for your time.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten. 

We use CVO for NFS data storage, NFS sharing, and SMP sharing.

CVO helped us migrate to the cloud. We were already using the same software on-prem. We just migrated it to the cloud, so it helped us with that. 

The workload migration was outstanding. It was seamless. We have on-premise CVO within BlueXP. We just drag and drop the on-premise workload to the cloud workload. It just migrated and cut over. That was it. The time required depends on the volume size. Our largest volume took us three-and-a-half weeks. It takes some time to migrate the data from on-prem to the cloud. 

We have on-prem NetApp AFF, and we're looking into using NetApp Data Sense or Blue XP Data Sense for the backup servers as well. Everything integrates perfectly. We have some on-prem workloads that run on NetApp, and CVO on a cloud. We can migrate between the two if needed.

Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise. 

I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI.

I have used CVO for four years.

CVO is highly stable, and the performance has met our expectations. It does exactly what it needs to do.

Scaling CVO is straightforward. It's super easy to grow the cloud environment compared to the on-prem solution. It's easier to scale.

I've had no issues with NetApp support so far. It's been excellent.

We had the on-premise version of ONTAP. We also have a Nutanix array for our hypervisor. 

I've set up four NetApp CVOs. They all took around five minutes to set up. It's super easy.

The licensing is good. They make it easy for you. You go to the sizing site. It's a bar that you drag and drop.

I rate NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP nine out of 10. If you're a fan of the on-prem version, you'll like CVO on the cloud. 

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.

Neutral

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.

We are using it for storing files, to get high-performance access to files. We are also using NetApp for DR. We copy the information to the same system in other regions.

The solution's high-availability features are cost-effective for us because we are able to use the cloud benefits to reduce the cost of DR. For example, if we have it in one region, we can copy the data to another region. They keep it powered off and then they power it on for a few minutes, copy the data, send the data again, and shut it down again. That reduces the costs by approximately 80 percent.

Similarly, the data protection provided by the solution's disaster recovery technology is cost-effective and simple.

We're using Cloud Manager to automate some of the management. We use it for bringing the DR environment up and down as well as for scheduling data synchronization between different regions, worldwide. It's almost impossible to do that manually. Compared to an engineer doing it manually, it's about 90 percent faster. That's specifically for this kind of operation. In reality, the automation is enabling such capabilities. It's not actually reducing the time taken. If it didn't exist, we would never do it. That's even better than saving time.

Overall, NetApp has standardized and certified file services, both on-prem and in the cloud, corporate-wide. In addition, by using the automation, it has provided us cost-effective DR and management. In the cloud it has enabled us to provide tailor-made storage solutions for each of our cloud customers. The storage efficiency has reduced our storage footprint because we are offloading all the data to the storage account. So it has reduced the cost of corporate storage. And the data-tiering has also saved us money.

What is most valuable is that the system is the same as what we use on-prem. So the guys who are responsible here for managing NetApp feel comfortable with it& and that they have enough knowledge to manage the system in the cloud. We are able to& keep the same standards that we have on-prem in the cloud.

The usability is& great. We don't have any issues with it.

We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us.

The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data. So we do that once, at night, to another region and then shut down the destination. It's good because it's using Cloud Manager and its automation, but I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud.

We have been using it for about half a year in production; longer when we include the PoC.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any issues.

We still haven't needed to scale up, but I think the scalability is good.

We are using it for a system which stores files and parts of databases, but the system is used by hundreds of customers. NetApp is not used directly by them, rather through the system. We may plan to increase NetApp according to the usage of the system but we still have no specific plans.

We are using NetApp engineers and they are great.

Before NetApp we used a home-grown server in the cloud, a Linux server with a big disk. It was less simple to manage.

We're also using Avere, a storage solution that was purchased by Microsoft a month or two ago. It's mainly responsible for real-time data synchronization between on-prem and the cloud environment. It's different than NetApp which doesn't provide the kind of synchronization solution that Avere does. It's two-way, real-time data synchronization between the Oracle storage solutions which we have on-prem and the Avere solution that we have in Azure. NetApp does not help with such requirements.

The initial setup was very simple. It was quite easy to set up the environment in just one day. We started with a small implementation and then added more and more parts of the solution. We started with just one desktop and then added additional ones and then added tiering.

It required a small number of staff members. That's all we needed because it was pretty simple. We did a few sessions online and one or two onsite, for the entire solution. For our specific case it requires almost no maintenance. It only requires management to expand the disk capacity or perform the management operations, per-request. Generally we wouldn't require an increase to our storage team to manage the solution.

We used a NetApp engineer to help us.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer. The DR environment is billed by the hour and paid to Azure directly and NetApp is paid on a yearly license.

We checked Dell EMC and HPE but we chose NetApp. The Storage team made the decision. One of the main reasons they chose NetApp was the existence of NetApp on-prem and the knowledge of it the team had. We are familiar with NetApp and the products are good, so we decided to extend the success to the cloud as well.

Implement it. Do not think about it. It's very simple and very useful.

The main use case of ONTAP is for users to utilize SharePoint. From there, they need to access data where there are specific applications as well as an individual shared folder.

It is being used for application purposes as well as for individual user purposes.

We are using the latest version.

This isn't an isolated solution. We must have NetApp to support our faster access on a file protocol. We found the same solution on Azure is just as helpful when compared to the on-premise solution.

The solution provides us unified storage, no matter what kind of data we have. If we take a normal storage account in the public cloud, then it may not be active in terms of identity level. However, using NetApp, we can leverage the identity management control integrating with our AD. From there, we can gain the computer user's access and maintain the user side entity for who is accessing what.

On-premises, we are using the same NetApp. We find the solution in Azure to be more reliable and tailorable in NetApp with the same NetApp features because it gives us the most updated NetApp solution.

If you have a larger amount of data than normal in the cloud, it is easy to provision and maintain. Waiting for the delivery of the controller, the configuration of enclosures, etc., all this stuff is eliminated compared to using on-premise.

Eight months.

From my months' experience, I haven't seen a single point of failure within the ONTAP, except for Azure maintenance.

Scalability is a very good feature. If our data reaches 90 percent (or some threshold level), it automatically increases the storage within ONTAP without our intervention.

The solution helps us control storage costs. It is scalable. If we need more storage, then we can opt for a monthly or yearly option.

The technical support is good.

Once you register with NetApp Cloud Central, people will get in touch with you who can assist you with deploying your solution.

This is the first time that we are using this type of a solution in the cloud.

The initial setup is straightforward, but I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution.

Deployment time depends on the client. On average, deploying the entire solution can take about a day (eight hours), if there are no issues.

For a standard storage implementation project, we need to have some shared storage for the client's application as well as the user groups and shared files that they have been using. To leverage this, we've been using this solution.

You need to go through the NetApp website and go through the documents regarding deploying ONTAP. If you experience any difficulties, there is a technical team to help you.

Some of the sales managers and other team members helped me setup the environment. They explained to me how the pay as you go and BYOL models work. If you need to the BYOL model to work, they will use some temporary licenses for a 30-day evaluation. They are there for you from beginning to end if you need assistance.

Because we went with the BYOL instead of pay as you go, we haven't seen ROI.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save. If you use traditional cloud providers, then you cannot manage unified lists. For that, you would need to follow a set of rules and some other stuff. You also need to have more people managing the entire environment. Whereas, NetApp provides a single point solution. 

They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy. 

Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have. We would like NetApp to come up with a solution for this. For example, a customer may think, "Let's use this solution." Later, he realizes that, "This is our solution and I have this budget for the year. If we can pay upfront for one year, then we can reduced the amount we pay." This is currently not possible if we select the pay as you go model.

Your OCCM should always be the same as your ONTAP, e.g., suppose you have deployed one ONTAP, then due to some reason, you deleted it and also OCCM. Then, the next time that you want to deploy another OCCM and ONTAP, that same license won't work because the license is based on the OCCM serial ID.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We only evaluated ONTAP.

NetApp is an industry leader as well as we have experienced with NetApp on-premise. That is the reason we chose NetApp as a reliable partner.

We don't use the solution’s cloud resource performance monitoring.

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

We're trying to see whether it's a good fit to move our secondary storage to the cloud, which would then be in competition with ONTAP Cloud Volumes. However, ONTAP gives us a bit more flexibility. If it's cost-effective, good enough performance, and has all the tools we need, we will continue with it. So far it looks great.

ONTAP made us less reliant on in-house hardware. It has already changed the way we're looking at our investments, purchasing plans, and budgeting for the next three to five years. We are shifting more into the cloud OpEx rather than keeping our expenses on the hardware side. That is already a good outlook.

We're just using AWS for now, but the consistency of storage management between our own program and the cloud seems to be great.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our company's data footprint in the cloud. I don't have the numbers in my head. By using compression in the cloud and deduplication, it's something that definitely reduces all the data, probably by more than 20%. That is in comparison to using native cloud source storage solutions.

In terms of our company's cloud costs, we're still seeing about the same amount of money spent. However, it's shifting towards the OpEx part and that gives us the flexibility to scale up and down versus the investment that you have to do upfront in the beginning. It's the shift that we're interested in rather than the total amount at the moment. In the future, we might expect that the cost of the cloud solution will drop. Therefore in the future, we may also see the total costs go down.

For us, the value comes from the solution's flexibility, speed, and hopefully cost savings in the long term.

I would like this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider.

The stability is perfect. We have had no problems. On-premises was also good, so I'm not worried about this.

The solution is definitely scalable on the cloud. On the cloud, you can scale almost infinitely. You don't have to worry about reaching any limits, so that's definitely very good. Also in performance levels, you can have underlying storage in the cloud allowing you to change the IOPS, or performance at latency on the fly. That is something you cannot do very easily on-premises.

Their technical support is great. We're using a partner in the Netherlands for support and we have a great relationship with them.

I first encountered NetApp at Insight 2018 Barcelona. I was there and talked to NetApp.

I found the initial setup straightforward. Cloud Manager is point and click, which makes deployment pretty easy.

We involved NetApp a little bit but it was to look at the product. It's so simple to use that we were able to do it mostly ourselves without a lot of help.

Take a look at it, try it yourself. It's one month for free, with no licensing costs from NetApp. Try it out. It doesn't cost anything but some of your time. It's pretty simple to run and see how it works.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because the multi-cloud has to be in three layers.