NetApp FAS Series Reviews

• Software features, such as being able to do snapshots and file system optimization
• High Availability -- components fail so this is a nice feature to have when failing over. There's no downtime, so we don’t lose data.

Good bang for the buck. Also, we use NFS generally, but FAS has the capability to use SAN, so it has a broad spectrum of use.

Tough for me to answer because I’m limited in my role, but the one thing I’d like to see most is more cohesiveness with a unified manager. I like the end product, but it’s not really all integrated and is convoluted with different managers. I would ike a single pane of glass, a single dashboard.

We see a lot of bugs in roll outs, and sometimes I think the first GA are late-beta deployments. My impression is they could have let it bake a little longer. But it could also be because of some of the environments it deploys in.

Snap Manager v3.3.1 is a little buggy and NetApp doesn’t offer training course on it. So it could be what I’ve been taught by other people, or it’s in fact buggy, but likely a little of both. Hopefully they made improvements on 3.4.

7-mode scales very well. I’m even more impressed with where they intend to go with cDOT, but it may be rolled out prematurely.

Tech support is usually pretty good, but occasionally there are some things that occur only on our site that tech support has issues.

Plan ahead and make sure you right-size it. How much head room do you really need? How many spindles are you going to attach? Are you really going to share workloads or do you want to separate some of those? We don’t segregate our infrastructure, which I don’t like, but all that costs money. But you should make sure that you have failover.

Snapshot, because so much of it is on our end-user storage, our users often delete things they’re not supposed to. Having snapshots to revert these deletes quickly and easily is very valuable.

Our greatest advantage with it is ease of use, flexibility, and reliability.

Knowing what’s coming down the pipe, NetApp is headed in the right direction. In their five year roadmap, it provides what I need it to do.

It's extraordinarily stable. We had one outage one-and-a-half years ago when batteries were bad, but that was a known defect on that particular model. However, that was our fault for knowing this was an issue. We've had two outages in 10 years due to something other than operator’s error.

Incredibly scalable. Not even touching what it could do. Between scale up and scale out, we’re not even close to reaching its highest potential. We have a four node NAS with the potential for 24 nodes.

It's fantastic.

Once you’ve done one, it seems very intuitive. However, the first time seems very complicated.

Of all storage technologies I work on, it’s the easiest to learn and one of the most powerful. But you need to spend your time taking classes before digging in too deep. Get educated.

NAS functions, as it's primarily used for all our file shares. We have other NAS devices, but this is easier.

Also, High Availability is a valuable feature.

Snapshots are good, especially the snap mirror, which we use for disaster recovery and backups. Also, we have a lot of data centers (seven primary centers) and we deploy at each of them.

I miss their old support structure. We used to be able to call up and get an answer pretty quickly, but now it’s more arduous.

It could be cleaner for dedupe, and I wish we could do dedupe for the entire system and not just a specific volume.

It's highly reliable, but has had the occasional bug. We install patches or shut off features.

Depends on how you’re scaling. If wide, it works well. Vertical scaling not so well because we’re primarily SMB. No matter how brief, people don’t like being offline (e.g. baby monitors).

I’ve worked with them for over 10 years. They used to be stellar, but in the last three to five years, not as reliable. The quality of information you get from them is less specialist, and they've not broken it up so that you get routed to a particular technology, it used to be one senior guy who knew everything.

There’s always networking issues, but not related to NetApp.

Other than tech support, it loses points because it could always be better.

It depends on what you’re implementing. Consider carefully what you want to do – for example, have enough vLANs because you don’t want to be adding more later.

• Dedupe
• Also, our customers look for fast connectivity and cost efficiency.
• It's TCP/IP vs. fiber channel, which tends to be more costly.

• Single unified-type architecture for block-and-file-type data storage
• Ease of use
• Being able to hand off things like snap shots directly to customers

They need to improve the go-to-market for all-flash and converged infrastructure. What is your goal-to-market vision, and when to get there? They’re too slow compared to others and what they’ve done in the past. They were the leader in dedupe, but now, it’s not such an innovative edge.

It lacks flexibility in failover and failback, so we cannot granularly failover pieces. It's not easy to move one piece over to the other side.

Also, from the overall workload standpoint, all protocols are handled in just one physical architecture. So if I'm running dedupe, fiber channel, and other protocols on the same CPU core, I can’t load-balance. I’ve seen issues specifically with EMP, one core is maxed out, and I can’t use the other cores to handle it.

Fairly solid 5-9 array. FAS is a solid architecture in 90% of the environments.

Scalability especially in SMB range has been well-received. So long as the environment is sized correctly, it’s been good.

I have had both good and bad experiences, depending on what tier I get to initially. Now it’s tiered, whereas it used to be one senior guy.

If historically you’re a NetApp customer, it’s not as complex as cluster mode. It requires a lot more complexity – command line is not so friendly for storage admins. I’d recommend also sticking with what you know.

• Snap mirror as it gives us a way to snap to our two disaster recovery sites to instantaneously bring up VMs
• Dedupe helps us to save a lot on OS files for VMs

It provides a relatively cost-effective solution, as we have all our virtual infrastructure on NetApp.

They should provide more specific how-to guides. For example, I want to implement Sharepoint, but how do I do that?

Upgrades are always hold-our-breath situations. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve heard horror stories. I’m also dead-ended.

It’s been good. We haven’t had a complete outage (other than when our network the went down). We’ve had some challenges with hardware, but this was done non-disruptively with failover.

We’re still on 7-mode, but it still scales fairly well as the 6240 is a hefty machine.

It's used for repairs. We got outside help with set up and to put processes in place. Once done, it was seamless.

Very straightforward. We’re using 7-mode, so nothing fancy, and I had no difficulties. There were a couple things I didn’t know, but our partner, DataLink, helped. Specifically, I didn’t understand the rate groups and when you expand aggregates, you have to do a full regroup, which wasted a lot of space. I had 16-disk rate groups, added five disks, and it unbalanced things.

Six to eight months ago, I would have said go for it, but now I’ve been getting a lot of doubts about the stability of NetApp itself as a company.

• Redundancy
• Snap technologies (snap mirror, snap shots)

The snap products allow the end-user to make restorations and perform offsite replications. Also, it gives us secure multi-tenancy.

Nothing that I can think of right now.

We've used it for seven in years.

It's pretty stable. We've only needed NetApp engineers to help with an issue once since we started using it.

Very scalable, haven’t reached its limits.

Generally goes well.

Very straightforward from rack stack to configuration.

With FAS and other NetApp tools, they make for a very intuitive solution. It's simple to manage, very scalable, one-stop shop and many native things that make it very powerful.

It’s a decently mature product that has a lot of documentation and standards and is something to be relied on.

Predictable behavior during failure. In terms of performance, if you have two machines, you know they’re going to perform the same.

It needs better built-in monitoring. We can’t afford Insight, and v6.2 seems like it's a purposefully inferior product to make people buy Insight, which is way too expensive.

It's not on Cisco’s stability level, but it’s a 96/100.

It’s scalable, but it could be easier. Just adding shelves might require additional cards and cabling, which can be difficult.

I’m happy with the support, as they’ve been able to solve whatever I throw at them.

It’s complex as there’s a lot of variables involved. Not for the weak-hearted, if you haven’t done it before.

It loses points because of failures.

• Uptime
• Performance
• High Availability
• Disaster Recovery
• NetApp as a company is doing well

• We can failover when needed.
• In my organization, a law firm, brand recognition is important, and NetApp provides that.
• It gives us continuous uptime.

Sometimes there are bugs with firmware upgrades.

Not with deployment, but, again, there are sometimes bugs when we perform upgrades.

It just works, and when some drives go into failure status, it’s just a prediction of drive failure, letting us know when to get the drives replaced.

It scales pretty well, and the limit is how much you want to spend on blades, shelves, controllers, etc.

It's pretty good, they're very knowledgable. With other vendors who outsource support, there's difficulty getting knowledgable first-tier support, but with NetApp, that’s different.

We had help in the installation, which made it straightforward. It was also complex because lots of planning was involved.

It loses points in upgrades from one version to another is not as smooth as it should be. Also, understand your requirements and see how it fits in.