NetApp FAS Series Reviews

• Redundancy
• Snap mirroring
• Home-drive capability, which looks at a user name and gives the correct rights to folder

• Rendundancy
• Security

We hold a lot of information for our customers, so the information has to be secure and reliable.

I'm not sure, because every time I’ve gone to them, they’ve said “yes, we can do that.”

I sleep well at night because of its redundancy. I hardly even know when it has a bad drive. The Call Home capability sends a message automatically if there's a bad drive to NetApp who then sends a new drive.

Amazing how scalable it is. As a comparison, we looked at EMC vBlock as well, and if you want to upgrade, you have to use a forklift. With FAS, you just put in new shelves or heads.

They’re extremely technical. Everyone I’ve talked to has been very knowledgeable, and I can’t say anything bad.

It was complex. There's a lot to do, but I had their assistance and went through everything step by step. So while complex, it was also simple.

One thing that burned me, is that it surprised me how much overhead it uses, like 30% right off the top. So don’t forget the overhead. It’s not usable space, but that percentage is coming down. It all has to do with deduplication.

It takes your standard IOPS in your drives and it gives you much greater performance out of that aggregate. You can run a smaller aggregate with SSDs in the flash pool, and it'll give you the IOPS of many more spindles. What it does is it brings your SATA disks aggregate up to the SAS speed, depending upon how many spindles you're running, and your SAS aggregates perform much better.

We had an IOPS problem earlier. We were running Citrix and we were having boot storms. Part of the problem was the aggregates that we had were too small. The boot storm would basically fill up the NVRAM. It was unable to write to disk because the disks were running full. The problem was solved by going to flash pools. It was great.

I have not given the FAS a perfect rating because the All Flash Array is probably going to beat it down, in terms of performance.

I would give it a perfect rating if there wasn’t any ceiling. When you have some systems and you increase your disk IOPS by adding either All Flash Array or you add a flash pool, sometimes you move the bottleneck; you move the bottleneck up to the CPU. We did have that problem briefly. That was solved by basically moving some of the workload. That happened one time and we fixed it.

By moving to cluster mode, it's going to be a lot easier to move the workload. We are moving in that direction. We're doing the first assessment and planning right now.

We do not have any stability problems, whatsoever.

NetApp aggregates are scalable. You can keep adding shelves.

Technical support is very good. I've never had a problem.

Usually the problem is being able to hear them in our data center. :)

I did not previously use a different solution. When I started working with the county, they already had the NetApp FAS.

Go with NetApp; I haven't had a problem with it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and, for technical support, being there.

• Clone – we updated to Dynamix AX 2012, and not a week has gone by that we haven’t fired up a clone to test a user, code, etc.
• Disaster Recovery suite of functions
• Quick backups that don’t impact system
• Refreshes test environments quickly

• Reliability – hardware performs well, we’ve never had problems
• Great support from Sirius
• We’re able to recover a file if we need to

We use mirroring a lot, and if it had snap manager for SQL included, we could do that from one location.

Rock solid. I’ve been at Wilson for three years and have also used it before at another company. We have a disk go out every once in a while, but no issue with FAS.

In the last growth, we went from a 3250 to an 8020. We’ve set it up to grow out easily by just adding trays.

Lately, a little slow to respond, but once you get someone, they’re very knowledgeable, although I haven’t had to use it a lot.

I was familiar with 3250’s from another company, so I knew how to use the software, but Sirius helped us. So in that regard, it was straightforward.

We have clusters, and can do non-distruptive upgrades with cDOT and can spin up VMs as needed. We have the flexibility to give people NAS storage.

With NAS storage in general, we can give people large amounts of storage for projects, and then remove it. For example, for SLS, they can spin up large amounts of storage to hold the output of modeling data, and when that’s done, they can delete it and move on. In that case, they don’t need the throughput.

We have thousands and thousands of file shares and we’re able to offer up to one terabyte of storage, and this gives us high compression and dedupe.

For cDOT in general, improvements could be made to the little things, such as the translation between 7-mode and cDOT. If there’s some kind of backward compatibility or translation of certain functions from one to the other, that would be an improvement.

It's very stable.

With cDOT, it's very good. It scales horizontally well, but not so well with 7-mode.

It’s top-notch support, very responsive and highly knowledgeable, very attentive to us as we have a monthly meeting with our TAM.

It's straightforward in 7-mode, but using cDOT, it's terrible.

I use NetApp FAS Series for servers. I have a lot of virtual servers connected through it using a Brocade switch.

I have found all the features useful in NetApp FAS Series.

I have been using NetApp FAS Series for approximately eight years.

The solution is highly stable.

NetApp FAS Series is stable in production storage and for the high-density volume services.

NetApp FAS Series is scalable.

We have approximately 500 users that use this solution in my organization.

We use NetApp FAS Series extensively in our organization and plan to upgrade it for SSD to be faster. We are running our production server on this storage and we use it every second of the day.

We are not able to connect to the support of NetApp from Sudan. We have to go through many agents for support, which makes it difficult.

We previously used NAS storage and it was not stable.

NetApp FAS Series is very expensive for us here in Sudan because we cannot purchase it from the vendor directly.

We have three or four people that do maintenance and support of NetApp FAS Series.

It is a one-time license charge for NetApp FAS Series to run and we pay annually for upgrades and support.

I rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

NAS part of standardized virtualization platform, ranging from size from 15TB on-site solution to more than 500TB twin core datacenter.

• Cost effective storage for all performance levels (including all-flash)
• Integrated snapshot and backup capability
• Many protocols
• Good service

• Integrated backup functionality (SnapVault and SnapMirror)
• Option to mirror synchronously

• Automation readiness
• API exposure
• Adaptive storage quality of service

• Reliability
• Snapshots
• Ease of tooling
• Integration with our systems
• It's multiprotocol

We are an online hotel reservations company, so if our website goes down we lose money at a very high rate per minute. It has been many years since we have had an outage due to storage because of FAS.

The performance needs to be improved. Due to the performance issues, we're moving to NetApp Flash FAS as it provides almost infinite performance.

We've used it for nine years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is excellent.

It's scaled well for us.

It takes a long time to resolve most cases. It requires an extensive amount of troubleshooting and tends to be very time consuming on our end in terms of collecting data for the engineers to work on.

It's straightforward. I'd say, though, that it's medium complexity because it is not done in one day.

We used a mixed team of in-house and vendor personnel.

I wouldn't know how to begin to calculate it.

That was a long time before I joined the company.

Do your research on clustered Data ONTAP as it is a very complicated product, much more complicated than the previous version.

The primary use case is for regular databases and file systems. So far it has been good. The performance is solid, it's robust, availability is solid.

We're able to keep data for a longer time because we are able to manage it well using the features that NetApp provides. It has also helped us to quickly deploy our test environment and finish all of our testing before we deploy on the customer side or the customer systems. It has really helped in our operations and our productivity.

One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. You can experience two disk failures and still be up. Another feature is the deduplication. It saves a lot of space. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage.

I want to see the system automatically tier; we call it auto-tiering. When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives.

The stability is solid. You can go over 3,000 days without a reboot or any downtime. It's so stable.

The scalability is also good. You can scale on the fly, just connect the cables. If you're adding a controller or you're adding big shelves, it's easy to move. It's excellent.

I'll give technical support a "good" rating because sometimes it's slow in getting people to respond, other times it's okay.

When I arrived at the company they were using NetApp, and we are still using NetApp.

When selecting a vendor, I first look at how robust the solution is that they're proposing, and how available they are to answer calls if there are any issues. This is very critical. The robustness of the solution and the availability of the vendor to attend to queries are important components of my selection criteria. After-sales support is also very key.

The initial configuration is very straightforward. You just cable up your system, power up, connect your power cables, connect to the console, boot up the system, do your system configuration, IP configuration, and all the other configurations, and the system is up and good to run.

If I were to advise someone researching NetApp FAS Storage or a similar solution, I would want to understand what they really want. I would advise them to go with NetApp because it's unified storage. It supports both NAS and SAN environments, so whether you're doing block storage or you're doing file storage, it is a good solution. Also, the operating system that it runs is called Data ONTAP, and is cloud-ready, so in the future the file storage that you have can be deployed to the cloud.

I rate this solution a 9.9 out of 10 because it's never failed me so I'm very comfortable with it.