NetApp FAS Series Reviews

NetApp has allowed us to get all of our storage onto one platform across various facilities, and it's eased the management of that storage.

It's enabled us to allow admins across the IT organization to more easily manage their own subset of data within our organization.

NetApp has allowed us to streamline internal operations. It makes it very easy for us to provision storage when we need it. So when storage needs come up, being on this product, it's typically very easy for us to meet those needs without needing to make large changes to our environment.

We're pretty much just using the solution's hardware. We're using FAS systems. We're not really leveraging the cloud services yet. At this point, it's mostly the on-prem hardware and the product ecosystem that we're leveraging.

A big upside is being able to restore from previous snapshots. With this product, we have good snapshot availability and good snapshot retention. On lesser storage platforms, we didn't have the ability to so easily go back to previous versions of our data. That's a big reason that the solution is beneficial to us as an organization.

There is some learning curve that goes into it. It's been a bit of a journey for us to to learn how to leverage everything. That's not a knock against the product; it's just sort of a learning curve so that it does take a little bit of time to introduce it to an environment. It's not like you can just know how to use it right away.

A big problem with physical appliances is that updating them can be a bit burdensome. It can take a lot of labor time. I would like to see the ONTAP platform become a little more hands-off with upgrades.

We're considering expanding. We're not committed to it yet. We're weighing our options and considering expanding our usage. It can help us manage our data more effectively and get our data better governed, which will prepare us for the future. It could also help us get to the cloud. AI is coming and it could help us there.

We've used Dell's storage offerings, which are not as mature, even though they add storage. We've used Synology as well. NetApp is in a class above those two offerings. When we acquired these products, it was a bit more of commodity hardware. As we've integrated into that ecosystem, we are beginning to try to leverage some more of what the product offers.

It offers a level of compatibility, protocol offerings, and management options that other products lack.

Cost is a big factor in our decision-making process. When we're buying storage, the first thing we look at is how much we're paying per gigabyte. Cost has been the driving factor when choosing this solution. It might not be the cheapest option; however, when you see the value you're getting from it, then it begins to be more cost-effective.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a really good product. It's a really powerful product, which makes it an eight.

We've had this product prior to the whole AI surge that's going on right now. And at this point, we haven't really changed our environment to react to that yet. We may do it in the future. 

For future investments, our goals will focus on performance needs and increasing workloads. Cybersecurity will be prioritized. It's our biggest priority. Safeguarding the data is the first job that we all have as data administrators. Having good cybersecurity, and hopefully, with the help of this product, will allow us to more confidently go down new innovation journeys and try new things. A lot of times, when you want to innovate, you need to consider first how it will impact your security. If we have good visibility on our cybersecurity, it'll allow us to innovate more effectively.

We use it for VMware ESXi, CEFS for shared user storage, and we use it for backup of all of these.

NetApp significantly improved our data management. The deduplication and compression give us more possibilities. We have some disk databases, and this model gives us the ability to improve disk space utilization.

At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature. 

The unified storage is a good thing for us because it simplifies administration. It offers the ability to manage different protocols on the same device. We can manage everything through the same interface, and we have a good experience with this at the moment.

We have some experience with older equipment end-of-life. For example, when warranty support stops or updates stop – it can be frustrating. 

Not all clients can buy a new filer every year or two, and NetApp ending support a bit quickly can be a concern.

Moreover, we've looked at new models and performed some price comparisons. There doesn't seem to be a large difference in price between different models within the FAS series. It would be good if there was a larger price variance between models.

I have three to four years of experience with this product.

We have one FAS now, and we want to buy another. We're looking at the models AFF A400 and A150.

We have a FAS and an AFF. We want to change this configuration.

The product does improve our performance. It is scalable enough.  

For scalability, we've found that even if you have a three-year-old service... the way NetApp works, we must buy new equipment every five or six years. 

It's as if there's planned obsolescence... we don't have the option to upgrade the solution over a long period. 

So, for scalability, I'd give it an eight out of ten. There was one instance where we needed to add disks, but the filer was full. We ran out of space to physically add them.

We had to buy extra equipment to support adding more disks to the filer when it reached maximum capacity.

We have used Synology storage. And we have some Dell equipment, but we don't use those the same way as a FAS – they are just for optional features. 

We did research a while ago, and found that the best solutions at the time were EMC and NetApp. We saw some Dell options, but EMC and NetApp were superior based on our research. That's how we decided to try NetApp.

For installation, we are usually accompanied by a specialist, so we don't experience difficulties in that area.

We actually have partners who assist us with the installation process.

Generally, maintenance is easy. We have some challenges with backup right now. Currently, we talk a lot about ransomware protection. We want to secure ourselves against this. With our current model, the FAS2200, we cannot upgrade to get the latest security features because we have an older filer replicating it.

This blocks us from obtaining those new protections against ransomware. So, our only choice is to replace the hardware and buy a new filer. This is a difficulty for us at the moment.

I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

We have a contract and pay a one-time purchase price. We're currently evaluating the AFF A150... that's approximately (FRF)106,164. 

I would recommend using this product. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are a big unstructured file data storage company. We use NetApp solutions like AFF for our unstructured data. NetApp is primarily for provisioning storage and maintaining unstructured data.

We love NetApp. We haven't had any significant issues, and it's a great technology. They are going in the right direction. NetApp has helped us serve data to customers through NetApp. We host multiple applications. One of them is next-generation sequencing (NGS), which is one of the critical operating platforms or applications, and NetApp has been instrumental in this.

The NetApp solution has streamlined our operations, incredibly improving the time it takes to deliver to businesses. Their cloud offerings are great. You can spin up the NetApp instance within a few minutes, reducing the total time it takes to offer service to the customer.

We plan to expand usage in the future. Our renewals are coming up next year, so we hope we'll have the greatest systems installed at our site. Our future investments will prioritize data storage, optimization, and cybersecurity. 

We are not doing AI now, but we look forward to it. From the ransomware perspective, it's excellent that NetApp offers a guarantee when you sign up for that feature.

NetApp's cloud-based FAS has been a massive help for unstructured data. 

NetApp could improve costs while making the solution more straightforward to use and deploy. 

We have Dell EMC Unity arrays. NetApp offers better reliability and cost of ownership for unstructured data. 

I rate NetApp eight out of 10. If they could bring total costs down and make it easier to deploy the on-prem systems quicker, I would give it a 10. 

We use the solution for multipurpose VMs.

The replication feature protects us from data loss.

The plan is to go with all SSDs and use MDM, rather than sticking with traditional disk drives. The goal is to have all SSDs for better maintenance speed, which is essential for applications that need to work.

I have been using NetApp FAS Series for seven years.

The product is highly stable.

1,000 users are using this solution.

We do not need support from NetApp directly because we have a group person  who maintain the solution.

With NetApp, we can set up replication between NetApp to protect storage in case of failure. It was an opportunity to configure between setups.

The solution is not so difficult to implement. We have experienced people working with such equipment. It takes few days to complete.

The pricing depends on the disks we choose. We got quite a good price compared to Huawei Dorado because we compared the prices between NetApp SSD and Dorado, and the price was quite similar.

We use this solution. I configured and updated it. Of course, I was also a user of applications that store data on that storage.

We already have an SSD solution. So, rather than planning to go with an SSD solution, we are focusing on expanding it. If a company wants to deploy something new, it should choose a product with SSD, and NVMe disks. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We have a variety of things. We have, like, user home drives. We have just a lot of human-managed unstructured data. We also have a data store for an AWS system, which is an automated workflow system. We store millions, if not actually billions of images. We've got stuff all over the place, but we also host storage for Linux and Unix servers that have NFS mounts for multiple applications. So it's a hodgepodge of a lot of different things.

A lot of it is just the ability to dedupe the data and compress the data because we had some users that are trying to move out into the cloud, into AWS and Azure, and they're starting to realize that their data footprint out there, say in S3, for example, is much greater because it doesn't have the native ability to compress and dedupe data like NetApp does. NetApp is very efficient. For the most part, we love NetApp.

The SnapMirror is a good tool because, as long as you're going NetApp to NetApp, it's ultimately the fastest way to move data. We replicate everything to another site for disaster recovery. 

We like the SnapMirror technology or Snapshot technology that allows us to recover directly off the NAS rather than backing it up to a secondary device. 

Just the ease of management, and it's very highly scalable. We've got one cluster that has about one and a quarter petabytes of data, and then we replicate that to an off-site. So altogether, we've got over three petabytes of data. And if it wasn't compressed and deduped like it is, we probably have more like eight or nine petabytes of data. So it does a really good job with that.

AFF is obviously the faster model because our AFFs are all flash, and they're a lot faster.

There is an area of improvement in support. So when we do have a problem, we always want it resolved right away, and sometimes it takes a few days to resolve things.

So, the response time could be a bit faster.

We have a long-running history with the NetApp FAS. I started in 2006. 

There are rarely any issues related to lagging, crashing, or downtime. Most of the time, there might be performance issues, but more often than not, these are related to factors external to our systems, such as network issues. 

From a pure reliability standpoint, these systems can remain operational for extended periods. I recall instances where they've been up for about a year and a half without requiring a reboot.

We could potentially scale up to 52 nodes. However, our most extensive deployment right now consists of 6 nodes.

For the most part, the customer support is pretty good. When compared to other vendors, we have frustrations now and again. However, that's just because a lot of their support model has moved overseas, and so it's a different experience.

Thecustomer service and support are decent, but there is room for improvement. 

Neutral

At the filer level, we began with NetApp and FAS. When I joined in 2006, we were already using FAS. Around 2011, we started incorporating the AFS or all-flash systems.

As long as you're following a documented process, the initial setup is pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of steps. There are multiple things you have to do – setting up SnapMirror, configuring schedules, setting up snapshots and their schedules, and establishing all the mirroring required for disaster recovery. 

So there's a significant number of steps, but I wouldn't say it's overly complicated.

We did it where we set our own up. And then lately, because our team has shrunk, but our storage hasn't, we usually have our third-party vendor come in. 

As part of the procurement process, we select to have them do professional services that come up and do our installation. Or we'll do a hybrid, like the last one we just did, where they did all the on-site work and then got to a point where it was turned over to us to administer, like all the fine-tuning.

We have a hybrid setup. Some clusters are in our data center, while others are in both Azure and AWS. We've also deployed the newer FSx systems in AWS due to cost considerations. Our internal customers are looking for more cheaper storage, and FSx fits that bill better than CVO.

We deploy systems on an as-needed basis. Our big clusters, ranging from about a petabyte to a petabyte and a half, can take a couple of months from receiving the equipment to completing the process. Most of that time is spent replicating data. However, if we're adding to an existing cluster, that's a more seamless process and can be done in around three weeks.

Our team handled the deployment. We have a group of four individuals responsible for handling these deployments.

There's occasional maintenance. An interesting aspect is that our Windows team conducts monthly patching. As for us, we mostly focus on code releases. 

NetApp has been providing around two code releases annually for many years. We tend to do a major code release once a year, which is quite significant given the numerous customers on our clusters. The actual upgrade process, handled by us, takes around three and a half hours for the largest setup with multiple virtuals.

The pricing ultimately depends on the capacity and the controller. It varies. We have systems that cost around 50,000 for the lease term, while others range into the million-dollar territory. It all hinges on the capacity and the controller specifications you opt for.

I am a NetApp administrator. We are looking for a data classification and data governance tool, and we've already got some in-house, but we're just looking at multiple products. So I'm literally just doing research.

However, we do have a vendor, and they are going to put together a demo for us.

We support AFF NetApp. So AFF and SaaS systems. And we also have CIFS, and we do have a little bit of FAS and AWS. So we're a NetApp shop.

Make sure you undergo some training before diving in, as it's a lot different experience than just managing a Windows server. Windows servers are pretty intuitive and easy to manage. 

NetApp systems are somewhat more complex, though not excessively so. If you're transitioning from a Windows server environment to NetApp, get training or education; otherwise, you might struggle with this solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. When other service providers attempt to sell us products during proof-of-concept trials, they usually don't measure up.

We use the solution to store all kinds of data. It's an efficient way to store data in a centralized place instead of trying to store it in individual locations.

The solution's most valuable feature is its absolute reliability. We have used a MetroCluster setup that duplicates all data and system pieces, ensuring absolute redundancy.

The solution’s pricing is expensive.

I have been using NetApp FAS Series for 15 years.

The initial setup of NetApp FAS Series is not very easy. The last time we did an upgrade, it took around three days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a seven out of ten.

NetApp FAS Series is a reasonably high-priced solution, partially because we select the configuration that duplicates the entire system. However, our management decided that it was worth the cost.

The two biggest things we look at are the solution's reliability and the support of the vendor. Excellent technical support and very good reliability are the solution's primary focuses.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems. The high throughput, averaging 1.5 gigabits per second, also ensures that users can connect and work without encountering issues.

NetApp FAS Series follows a portfolio-based security system that allows us to manage folders and specify which files can be uploaded. For example, we can configure folders to only accept file types like MP3, MP4, or MKV. This ensures that only permitted file types are uploaded to the designated folders, enhancing our security measures.

The product should include an audit log feature. 

I have been using the product for 15 years. 

Upgrading the data size is easy with the product. My company has 300 users. 

We open a case whenever we encounter issues. 

Positive

NetApp FAS Series' pricing is competitive. 

The product can be integrated with the cloud. It's compatible with various cloud storage layers like Amazon S3. Whether you're working with Amazon or Azure, it supports cloud connectivity. You can configure parameters so that data not accessed for over one month can be automatically moved to the cloud.

We manage our systems separately. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

The new FAS series is a good fit for some customers. We have good performance and capacity, even though it is full flash.

Once, I've been in a program, but they stopped supporting protocols like HTTP, STP, and that kind of stuff. All of the DIP supports at the beginning were kind of support when it was just Python and just five storage. And it happened a few times that the customer required the STP and HTTP protocol for storage. And I was surprised I couldn't do it anymore with NetApp. So, it would be beneficial for them to support both kinds of protocols.

The only little black points that I would put on top of NetApp FAS Series.

There is room for improvement in deployment and configuration processes. The thing with ONTAP is that we have a lot of layers, from the raw disks to the volumes we present to servers and configure. There are quite a lot of things to configure. Probably NetApp should ease the way to install that.

In NetApp products, such as ONTAP and FAS, a solid understanding of storage is still necessary to handle configurations in larger systems. It's not the same with Pure Storage or  Huawei. Even someone less familiar with storage could manage it, making it more accessible.

I have been working with the FAS Series for years. I started with NetApp in 2001. 

At that time, there was no SAN on the NetApp products. Moreover, I have certification in different versions. 

I am satisfied with the performance.

We have lots of competitors, so I have to address the storage needs of our prospects and customers. And while sometimes we are not chosen by NetApp. 

So if we want to try to get the deal when someone else is answering with NetApp, I have to go with WAP, potentially Huawei, and then sometimes Pure Storage. Most of the time, if I don't sell some NetApp, it's Huawei.

Huawei is a little bit easier to use than NetApp. Then it can be really very aggressive about the costs. So sometimes we have some customers that really don't look so much at the technical points and the performance or the function generality and want some cost. So, sometimes, it's a bit easier with NetApp.

Then, we offer solutions with business continuity similar to what Huawei provides—network clusters and related solutions, making the offerings closely aligned.

If I compare it to new storage vendors like Pure Storage, Pure Storage is just on pure under Flash array; it's just SAN. So, it's easy to deploy SAN on just the SAN environment. 

NetApp is a little bit easier to install and deploy than, for example, Huawei storage, Dorado, and stuff like that. That's the same kind of deployment tools. Very easy, very fast, like Pure Storage.

This is because NetApp has developed its deployment tools to be very easy to use, similar to those of Pure Storage, a newer storage vendor.

With the possibilities of making some DNS continuity into the cloud and stuff like that, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.