NetApp FAS Series Reviews

My customers use the solution for production servers, databases, and Oracle applications. I did not deploy Oracle. I deal with only the storage and server side of the product.

Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature. Whenever an application needs more IOPS, it will automatically be reserved for higher-performance storage like SSDs or SaaS-based hard disks.

The product should improve its user experience. The console should enable easy mapping to the storage volume and the server.

I have been using the solution for four years. I am still supporting my customers with the solution.

The tool is stable. The only problem we normally face is hard disk failure. However, since the product alerts the spare and redundancy, it is easy to manage. We also get support.

The product is scalable. Five or six of our customers are using the solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. It takes one to one and a half hours to deploy the solution, depending on whether new firmware is available whenever it is connected to the Internet.

To deploy the solution, we need connectivity. The IP addresses should be available before we do the configuration. We need one engineer to deploy and maintain the tool.

The solution’s cost is reasonable. However, the support cost is very high. Our customers ask for more discounts.

I handle many storages. NetApp FAS Series is recommended because of its stability, scalability, and easy administration.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

Enables us to handle business critical data with HA.

• NAS stability
• Simple customer support

Needs more SAN support.

No stability issues yet.

No scalability issues yet.

Eight out of 10.

Works on administration, not implementation.

Not overrated, though there are products available in market with comparatively lower costs.

Good for NAS and unified solutions.

It changed the way we do Disaster Recovery (DR) around NetApp replication.

• Cluster mode needs to be more ubiquitous.
• The process for going to cluster mode is expensive.

Unexpected costs and some systems were not compatible with cluster mode.

Yes, we encountered stability issues with the LDAP integration and with user logins on the web front-end.

Nope.

The customer service is awesome.

The technical support is great. The partner company (Bytes) has a close relationship with us.

The initial setup was straightforward, though there were a lot of hidden costs going to cluster mode and the amount of usable data was way lower than expected.

We used a vendor team, and they were excellent.

EMC.

Double up on the amount of storage that you expect to buy.

What impressed me the most about these systems are their excellent reliability, ease of administering (both in GUI and command line), and their very good documentation that is easy to access and understand. It provides very good storage, High Availability, and data protection by employing the use of two separate storage controllers that can take over each other's role as soon as any of them goes down. The technology has been improved even more after the introduction of the cluster cDot ONTAP OS.

NetApp systems are a good choice if you want a versatile unified system that's also capable of delivering performance. Our company has been using NetApp filers both as file sharing solutions (CIFS over LAN) and also as block storage (LUNs) for VMware ESXi hosts.

Since we switched to the newer 2552 models, we now benefit from better data protection and improved storage capacity thanks to the clustered Data ONTAP OS.

The thing we'd like to see the most is the possibility of pairing LAN/SAN ports from different nodes. Currently, the systems only provide pairing (and thus redundancy) only at same-node level. Also, it wouldn't hurt having this sort of cross-functionality when it comes to choosing disks for aggregate structures. Right now, you can't integrate in the same storage aggregate disks from different shelves.

I've had the chance to work a lot with NetApp FAS 2552 series and also have some experience with older models such as 2050, 2040, 3240 and 2240. I think it's a pretty reliable unified storage solution. The FAS 2552 model, especially, offers good performance and excellent reliability. My experience with similar storage systems is, currently, somewhat limited however.

My company has been using NetApp for a few years now, over four I think, and I have come into contact with this technology for over a year.

When it comes to deployment we had our share of issues. Some of these issues are to blame on the vendor's lack of experience with the new models and ONTAP versions, but sometimes the systems themselves were faulty.

The most recent issue we had involves a LAN card that couldn't be set on the correct bandwidth setting. In consequence, the vendor had to replace one of the node's motherboard.

There have been no issues with scaling it, other than during the actual deployment of new devices.

If you buy NetApp systems from third-party vendors, then you would be surprised that their technicians aren't exactly up to date with the latest ONTAP versions. NetApp releases new versions (with great improvements) so often that it's hard for some vendors to stay up to date with their technical knowledge base.

However, when it comes to technical support from NetApp directly, they tend to have a very competent team and the reaction time is pretty decent. Perhaps their biggest strong point in this chapter is their public knowledge base which helps you solve on your own most of issues you can encounter with configuring and administering.

All I can say is that if you take your time and study the NetApp documentation, you shouldn't have any issue, provided the initial setup was done properly by the vendor technician.

Initial setup is usually performed by NetApp or the third-party vendor from whom you purchased the devices. Our experience with third-party vendors isn't the best due to reasons stated above. All other configuration and administration is done in-house.

When it comes to software licensing, I think that NetApp promotes a very fair system. Basically you only pay for the features you need (eg.: Cluster Mode, SnapMirror, SnapVault, etc.).

The best advice I can offer is to try and purchase it directly from NetApp in order to have a better chance of having a successful initial configuration from the first try. Also, make sure you purchase the system with a General Availability OS version as Release Candidate ones tend to be bugged.

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.

Its flexibility: It will support anything; from Windows CIFS shares, to UNIX NFS shares, to block-level storage; on the same platform; on the same disks; with the same interface. It's not specific to one set or another set.

I'm not sure that I can comment. This is what we've always used, so I have nothing to compare it to.

It has a steep learning curve. Once you've reached the top of that curve, though, it's much easier to manage since it is all in the same system. You don't have a separate system to manage block-level storage or a separate system to manage other types of shares.

One of the issues that we have had with NetApp in upgrading over the years is that migrating data from one system to another is one-way only. If you have a new storage system that is going to replace an old storage system, where you're transitioning slowly from one to another, you can copy the data in one direction, but that same tool, which is typically used as a disaster recovery tool, can't be used to reset it back the other direction, as well. That level of backward compatibility would be very nice to have.

In the 20-some years I've been working with NetApp stuff, the system has caused one outage. Other than that, for any of the failure that it's had, the redundancy that is built into it, has handled the failure and left the systems up and the data available.

It is very scalable. It has gotten much more scalable. With every level, it's becoming more and more scalable.

Technical support directly from NetApp is usually very, very good. As compared to others, the expertise that the individual that you talk to on the phone is usually very good. You can talk directly to an engineer, if that's required. We’ve actually talked to hardware development people on occasion, when that has been required.

The support team is very knowledgeable and very accessible.

We invest in a new solution when the existing solution goes out of its initial support. We have been looking for new options for about six months now because the extended support is very, very expensive.

I was involved in migrations from one system to another system. The initial setup, the cabling, the hardware side of it is tedious.

Have NetApp come in and do the initial install of the physical system for you. It's definitely worth the time.

We are looking at Pure Storage. We have looked at and discarded an EMC option. That's why I recently attended a NetApp conference. We were looking to see the next level of the NetApp All-Flash FAS.

We rejected the EMC option because we had an EMC piece of gear in-house that had a failure. It continued to operate, like it's supposed to. The problem was that the part on the piece of EMC gear that failed could not be replaced without causing downtime. It might as well have just caused the downtime initially. We have migrated everything off of that. It was a stupid little thing. It wasn’t like the backplane failed; it was a stupid little thing. I would not recommend it, and we will probably never go with EMC again.

Take your time. It's a very dynamic market right now. Make sure that the information that you're getting on the system is for what's currently available and not for what they're expecting to have next quarter. Because, a lot of the next-quarter stuff is vapor, where they don't actually have it. They haven't gotten around to putting that in place, yet, and they promise and promise until they get money from you.

That's one of the reasons why we're holding off on making a decision until the gear is actually available.

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.

It is used as filer, for centralized file sharing. You use it, for example, for network drives from your Windows file.

Performance is very good. It's reasonably fast, probably not the fastest. 

What the customers, the end-users, like is they can rely on the Snapshot technology so they can do their restores themselves. 

• Ease of use
• Robust Snapshot functionality
• You can use it in two datacenters with SnapMirror-ing.

It has a very good implementation of the Active Directory services, so implementation into a Windows network is easy. 

One thing that was missing for quite some time was the support for flash, of solid state disks, that has now improved. Another issue is the price which, compared to competitors, is quite high. The reason for switching to a different manufacturer is mostly because of the high price that NetApp has for the product.

The stability is good.

For the use cases I have had so far, scalability has been sufficient. But I don't know where the limits are. If you go into hundreds of millions of objects, you will probably see limits. Also, performance-wise, it's probably not the fastest solution on the market. 

For the simple NetApp filer solution, we didn't have to use support. But for more complicated setups, MetroCluster for example, we had to call support.

I would rate technical support at eight out of 10. Support is responsive, and we could then solve our issues. It took some time. It's not the perfect support that you would get with, say, Pure or Nimble, where they collect telemetry data - they always know what's going on with the system. I think with NetApp that's not possible.

Reasons for choosing NetApp include that it's probably the most solid, robust, and easy-to-implement solution.

For file servers, one alternative is Microsoft using standard Microsoft Windows Servers. Another solution is Huawei OceanStor; with the latest, version 5, they support mouse functionality.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are to see that it has good market share already established, or that it has a robust roadmap with interesting products in the future, or that I have had a solid feeling with different products from same manufacturer.

If I were only rating the NetApp solution without considering the price, I would probably give it nine or 10 out of 10. If the rating includes the price, it's more like a seven.

If you're aiming for the easiest solution which will work, more or less, out-of-the-box and has lots of features, I would definitely recommend NetApp. If you're also bound by budget restraints, you should probably look at other vendors.