NetApp FAS Series Reviews

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.

• High Availability
• Reliability

• Reliability
• Performance level
• Great history with it, and over the last two and a half years, it's been etter than others

Depending on the use case, it needs a service catalogue you can walk through without having to use SE.

It's been great, and there's been no issues.

With cDOT, it's very easy to scale out, and that's the reason we went with it in the first place.

It's been great, and any issues have been taken care of right away.

It was very straightforward and easy.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FAS. Also, go with vendor that buys reference architecture and follows the methodology.

Today we use it for replication of our transaction data, and for storing data, for which we use the snap mirror feature. Primary and disaster recovery storage centers are connected. Snap mirror backup software does block level copy from primary site to the disaster recovery.

We’re going onto the cDot platform, which is already an improvement. The controllers are faster so we have more processing efficiency.

We’ve been using it for the last six years.

Stability has been very good. As far as we’re concerned, we update our systems (firmware, OS) consistently, so we don’t face any problems in that regard.

We've had no problems scaling. Our business has grown two and half times in size over six years, and we’ve added more disks and shelves, as well as upgrading controllers. We’ve done it without any down time.

Quite good. Recently we deployed micro-clusters with cDot, the first bank in India to do it.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it, although we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with a combination of FAS and vSphere.

Configure it properly. Today we have HA with any data loss because we did it nicely, and took our time for the beginning. We got terrific support.

Being able to run any flavor of files and block storage. It's easier to manage, and we’re looking to phase out legacy systems and to go with FAS.

It's easy to manage regardless of how you’re utilizing platform. It’s a Swiss army knife of capabilities. Flexible platform and software features are added benefits (thin provisioning, compressioning, dedupe), which help with capacity utilization. Still get a lot of return even if going with best-practices application.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, with occasional issues that surface, but are quickly resolved. No one’s software is perfect.

It’s good, but you have to do a lot of homework to scale horizontally and vertically. You need to have sales and engineering to expend effort to do that homework.

We've frequently used it, and the quality will depend on which level of support you purchased. Premium support, I have no complaints as we get the right person who’s knoweldgable. Higher level guys take great deal of personal ownership over issues. I used their support as benchmark for our organization.

It's easy. The more planning you do, the easier it gets.

The monitoring is key, and you must keep track of what’s going on. Be sure to use auto-support and have strong monitoring scenario in place.

Management, for a person who’s not a storage administrator In a couple of weeks, you can get the basics of createing virtual storage, and carving out chairs and LUNS.

Doing more with less. I can do multiple protocols, storage efficiency, data protection tool, everything is in one solution/ecosystems. There aren't many vendors who can provide that without adding third party software and apps.

Our major issue with FAS was not having one pane of glass with all products attached to it. Other major issue is the free performance monitor doesn’t provide enough information. They want you to buy Insight, which is very expensive.

It's rock solid.

I love cluster ONTAP. Being able to scale out and being able to increase performance by adding more heads to a cluster and being able to do hybrid with regular storage on same platform is huge. You can move out easily too, they provide you the tools to do that, adding a lot of value.

Great, I cannot complain. They’re there with you until problem resolved.

It's straightforward setup. Depending on how you deploy, full SAN is complex, with NAS not so complex. You have to follow best practices when building out infrastructure. So, it’s not so different than deploying it with other vendors.

With storage, what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Call your NetApp rep and tell him you want to test the solution. Get it on the floor and beat the hell out of it. Do a very thorough Proof of Concept.

• Snapshot
• Snapmirror
• FlexClone

• Huge time savings
• Large storage space savings
• In the end—time and money

They should make it faster and cheaper, but it does what we need it to do.

Good overall. We’ve hit some bugs in the ONTAP code that’s caused it to crash. We’re just coming off of seven-mode, and I'm looking forward to the capabilities of CDOT.

It's highly scalable, especially with CDOT. We can scale out quickly.

It's very good, generally first tier are wiling to help us or get us to right person pretty quickly.

It was complicated. We were coming off an IBM system five years ago. We got help for everything from cabling, terminology, and we had to relearn how we reconfigured storage. We got help from both NetApp and our VAR.

Just do it. Chances are the functionality that comes with the ONTAP software will be better than other products at a similar price.

The flexibility to use in OpenStack with multiple data types, Cinder, Swift, etc.

Feasibility to use multiple protocols to talk to device, be it direct attached or Cinder/Swift, and the ability to use it as storage behind guest instances on cloud (commonly known as boot-from-disk).

When speaking with the NetApp CEO, we told him that we need better documentation for customers to understand automation of APIs. We want it all there and robust. Boot-from-disk allows me to use disk from Netapp, and understand how to set that up should be documented so I can teach my staff how to do that.

We've been using NetApp products for 15 years.

No issues encountered.

As we continue forward, we can add additional heads with same IOPS.

I've never had to call tech support, but we’ve had them call us to tell us we were about to have a problem.

It was very straightforward with OpenStack, very well-documented, and supported. I wasn’t an OpenStack admin when I started, so the ease of use was critical to me. Straight from the horizon dashboard from OpenStack and I was up and running in 15 minutes

1. Define use cases because we’ve come across where we didn’t do so correctly, and we had to go back and re-architect everything. This was our failure.
2. Really engage with NetApp to understand how you use the nuances of things like the APIs.

I think that the flexibility with the volume, resizing, and performance.

I think that our performance has definitely increased.

I think that they are upgrading the performance monitoring tool, which is the main thing I think needs improvement. From version to version they are changing, and you want to see things improve – I think we will continue to see more and more benefits.

We have been using it since 2013.

Pretty solid in terms of stability.

We haven’t really grown it but I see a roadmap, the only problem there may be cost. It’s not an expensive product per se, but because of budget issues. People sometimes don’t evaluate the cost correctly.

NetApp overall has been really good in terms of technical support.

Initial setup was hard a year ago, but now we just did another setup and everything was smooth. It’s gotten a lot better in the last year we’ve been using it.

If you are on the fence it’s been a very good product, you don’t want to build your own solution, you want to use the appliance for the flexibility. Overall performance has gotten a lot better.