NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The most valuable feature of OCI is the ability to correlate a lot of different data sources together. It's very difficult to get a picture from just looking at the storage view. The fact that it allows you pull in your VMware information and the like, and see it all together, helps when you have an incident. You can correlate all that data together, and that's very valuable.

It's improved the organization in that, when people complained about an issue in the past, we had to go to all these different systems to look at the performance data; going into vSphere, going into SolarWinds. This ties it all together in one place so that we can get to the root of the problem more quickly. That makes the business happy because then we're not churning on trying to figure out what caused their performance problem.

I think there's still a piece of it that's external, the Java interface. I think that's all starting to get integrated into the whole HTML5, and once it's all integrated together, I think that's probably going to be better. I'm looking forward to that.

I think one of the weaknesses is pulling in systems outside of virtual environments, of physical hosts, and the like. I think it's something they're working on from what I've heard. But being able to look at some other things outside of what we typically monitor - we have some physical AIX environments. They can look into it a little bit but there's more that I can see being done in some of those outside-systems for virtualization. For virtualization and NetApp it's great, but for pulling in other sources where we're using NetApp storage, we're looking to get a little bit more data out of it.

I think in the most current versions it's been improved considerably. We did have some hiccups in some of the earlier versions with data collection getting missed sometimes, but I think it's definitely been improving over time and getting better and better.

With the latest version of OCI which we just installed, we haven't been seeing any of that anymore, we're not seeing any data collection issues, so it's been much, much better. The experience is better, the UI is getting better, it's all slowly getting better.

I don't know if I can say too much about that. We have a very specific size, we're medium size. I can't see us scaling up very fast, but from what I've seen, it seems like it should be able to.

I haven't personally used tech support for OCI but I have colleagues who have. I don't think they have any complaints about it.

We had used some solutions in the past, SolarWinds, just looking at vSphere monitoring, and we didn't have any one solution that pulled it all together. While SolarWinds is pretty good, the polling intervals are quite long, so if you want to get to a real fine-grained time period, where you want to look at a problem and have all these different systems, we really need something that would have like BI capabilities to get more data into it.

I think it was pretty straightforward. I think it was very quick to pull in data sources from all the different things that we monitor. I don't remember having any hiccups or trouble getting all the data in and getting it set up.

We were looking at - I believe it's now Brocade - but it was Riverbed that had a solution, and that had some dynamic performance monitoring. But I think OCI probably just made sense because we're using NetApp and vSphere most heavily, and it seemed to tie into it the best, of everything that we looked at.

When we select a vendor, we look for somebody who is innovating in whatever their marketplace is, and that has a good forward thinking strategy. Somebody who is leveraging good interface technologies, because interface is super important when you're just trying to get in and get something quick; somebody who is using HTML5 and that has fast response time, that's really important to us.

I gave it an eight out of 10 for some of the reasons I said before. The interface isn't fully tied together, there's still some pieces that are outside of the web interface. But, with all the other improvements, I can't complain too much about the actual functionality, setting up dashboards and looking at the performance data.

I would just day be aware of everything that you're looking to monitor, to see if it makes sense to use it. If you have a lot of systems that don't fit into the OCI infrastructure, then you might want to look around a little bit more. But if you're using NetApp specifically, and you're looking at a lot of the technologies that integrate closely with OCI, I think it's a good fit. But really, the best thing to do is to look at something that fits the technology that you have.

The ease of use, because we don't have much time to learn all the new things.

The things we're able to derive, we're able to use that and figure out what the next steps would be that bring value to the company, or our organization. We get strategic insights and plan ahead.

Perhaps integration with other platforms; any other monitoring, other kinds of storage platforms.

It's OK so far. I don't think we push it to the limit of what it can do, so I think it's been pretty stable for us. It's been pretty good so far.

We haven't really found time to upgrade it, so we've been pretty happy with where we're at. I forget what version we're at. But so far it's been OK.

Like I said, we don't push it too much. We're using it for a few things and that's pretty much it.

We don't look at it from that perspective. We don't have a lot of devices that we monitor. So we don't need it from that perspective.

I think one colleague has used it once, maybe twice, that's it. I, personally, have not.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criterion for us is how easy is it to work with them. Our group is very small. We really don't have time to do a lot of back and forth with the vendors. It's either they want to deal with us or they don't, period. If they want work with us, we go ahead. If not, then we move on.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, again, we're not pushing it as much as we probably could and should. I think if we got down to knowing the nitty-gritty of it, we'd probably like it a lot more. But like I said, we just don't have time to use it that much.

If I were to advise a colleague at a different company who is looking at OCI and other similar solutions, I would say know the functions or features you want to use. Outside of that, do what we did not do, really try to get to know the product and do a deep dive into it.

The ability to collect data from every other manufacturer like NetApp, HPE 3PAR - all the different storage products.

I can get the overall usage, performance and, later, we see all the details across the board.

I think there was an issue with the actual usage of some of the storage, so that could be a little bit more detail we can get in to.

Also helpful would be cloud integration or even assessment in going towards, "Will this footprint be viable to move to the cloud?" That's an option we are thinking would help.

Pretty good so far. We've collected a whole bunch of stuff and we are looking to go forward and assess what we really need in terms of storage, because it is helping us on that one.

We have not had a chance to do that at this point. We have a certain set of systems and we are using it for so far.

Yes, we have used tech support, and they are excellent. We have engineers set up for us and we have dedicated SEs, so they come and help us out instantaneously.

We had individual siloed applications, utilities. 3PAR had one and VMAX had one, NetApp had one, so we had DFM etc. Each of those had each feature and function. Not as detailed as OCI.

At this point in time we are trying to consolidate our storage infrastructure. So this is a pretty good way to do it because they cross multi platforms and the like.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

It was very simple, they gave us preparation for the user IDs and the like and we were able to put that in and it came in, right through. It took some time to come up with the data, the initial data and that was it, it was done.

The option there was HPE OneView. We were looking at it but I think NetApp came out much more detailed.

When selecting a vendor to work, the most important criteria for me are

• response time
• knowledgeable staff
• detailed reports

and those all worked out pretty well.

It has given us a lot more information than what we could have done ourselves, or with other products.

Look at the product. I mean it has got a lot of features, functionalities, which individual products by the individual manufacturers do not give you. It has an overview of the whole estate, in effect.

As it crosses multi vendors, it's not difficult to put features to or from administration staff, so I think I am good with what we have today.

It's a good, single place to go to see the storage performance on all of our clusters.

It's able to simplify looking at performance on all of our clusters, all of the nodes, all the volumes, in one place, without having to log into each individual storage array and look at it.

Right now it monitors our entire datacenter, all the different Pure Storage as well as NetApp. It does multiple vendors. Its only drawbacks are it's expensive and the upgrades are somewhat difficult.

It would be better if they could simplify the upgrade process. It's long and tedious. You have to be careful, or you could shoot yourself in the foot.

We've had it for about three or four years and it's very stable, no issues.

You license it for whatever you need. It can scale out whatever you need to monitor.

We've added additional licensing to it. It's licensed by the amount of storage that you use, so we've purchased additional licensing.

It's very good. The guys are sharp, they know the product very well and get back with you in a quick amount of time.

We've had no issues whatsoever with escalating.

It was complex, and that's why we brought in Professional Services to get it up and running for us.

The product is very involved. There are a number of different modules so it takes a little bit of a learning curve to get up to speed on it.

Primarily we use it for chargeback, but we also get some performance out of it as well.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria for us are

• dependability
• honesty
• good integrity
• reliability.

I'd say go for it. OCI is a good product if you can afford it.

Being able to immediately look at my data. See the sizing, where I'm at on different virtual machines.

Also, the most important thing, is IOPS. We have people - we support their applications - that are all the time complaining about slowness. So we can go in and say, "Oh, you need to moved over to this node or this node". OCI is perfect for that.

OCI has grown a lot over the last few years and we didn't realize until a few weeks ago, when we had our workshop, how powerful it really is, that it can actually automate and move stuff around for you in some ways.

The biggest thing though, is just being able to get a visual, overall view of your environment to see if this node is being hammered or if this storage is filling up really fast. Just being able see it at a glance, when I come in in the morning, I'm drinking my coffee and say, "Oh, this place is about to fill up I need to move this." That's key. That makes sure there are no "gotchas."

In addition, I get emails - I guarantee I have emails right now from OCI - that say, "Hey, we had a node that got over subscribed." Then, "Oh, its cleared now," that kind of thing. That's really nice because I'm never surprised, in the middle of the night if I get a call, I can look down at my email and say, "Oh, yeah there's a reason you're calling me, because that node is down or we're having issues with that."

We do a lot of databases within that app and we had a problem with a lot of our databases running slowly. Once we got OCI, we started seeing where the IOPS were really failing us. We actually found that we had built some machines too big.

Everything's got to be scaled to size and we actually found that out by making some of the machines smaller; and some of them did better on SATA instead of SaaS. But all that we found from OCI. It helped us improve the application side for what we call our customer, basically another Navy employee who is running, say, a database for time clocks. They would say, "I'm having people that are complaining, when people are punching in they're not able to go to work because it's not coming back as fast."

So we were able to improve those kind of speeds and help people service our Navy personnel faster, better, and more efficiently.

Maybe a little bit more graphical interface. Right now - and this is going to sound really weird - but whatever the biggest server is, the one that is utilizing the most storage space, instead of showing me that server and how much storage space, it just shows it to you in a big font. Literally in a big font. That's it. So if your server is named Max and you've got another server named Sue, and Max is taking up most of your space, all it's going to show is just Max is big, Sue is little. That's is really weird, because I really want to see more than that. You can click on Max, drill down in and see the stuff. But I would rather, on my front interface, say, "Oh, gosh, Max is using 10 terabytes. Sue is only using one. She's fixing to choke. Let me move some of this over."

You can build those out, but initially when you bring up the dashboard, that was one thing they couldn't take away. They couldn't change that. It just looks kind of kludgy. I'd like it to look a lot more clean when I first login.

It would help if it could be a little more user friendly at the beginning. Show me a little bit more that I need to see, that I find more relevant, without me having to build out templates. Maybe even have a drop-down that says you've already got the data there. But it would be a lot easier if I could just build the template out myself and, right now, I don't feel like we're comfortable doing that. We had to bring somebody in to do it.

I've never ever had a problem with OCI. It's never gone down, it's never crashed. As far as stability, we've never taxed it. It's a workhorse.

Again, it's a workhorse. When we started out, we had a very small virtual environment, maybe a 100-150 servers. We're up to about 700 now. OCI has just kept growing with it. It's been able to keep up. It's never once said, "Oh, I can't handle that many."

About the only thing we run into a problem with is licensing, sometimes. You may get too many things talking to it and they'll say, "Hey, you didn't really pay for that many licenses." But, at the end of the day NetApp will do whatever it takes to keep you up and running. They're not going to shut you down. So scalability is awesome.

I have used it for OCI. We had a couple of issues when we were setting it up, from the database perspective. We called into help desk. We opened a ticket with OCI. They actually sent a guy out to help us with it, which was amazing. To not charge us for Professional Services, but send a technician onsite to help us fix it was awesome.

I can't say enough about NetApp support. They're fantastic.

Our sales guy that came in, a wonderful guy, told us OCI was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He has an SE, he and I just hit it off. It was really his interpretation of OCI that sold us on it. It was the SE more so than the sales guy. It was more or less just a one-on-one with that guy that made me understand that it's not a lot of bull, that it was the real deal. So that's what sold us on it.

I was involved in the initial setup.

OCI, three and a half years ago was in its infancy, or for us it was. According to the guys who built it, they had a lot of problems at the beginning. There were a lot of templates that we needed within OCI that we didn't get. When we would go into OCI, we weren't seeing a lot of the data that we needed to see. It went on and on and on. They sent the same technician out every time and he just didn't seem to quite grasp what we needed.

About a year ago, they sent another technician out. He sat down with us. We drew out everything we wanted. Bada-bing bada-boom, literally within just a few hours he had all the templates impemented.

But a lot of it, as he said, was because it's a lot easier now to implement OCI than it was back then. Back then it was a lot more hands-on, command line stuff. Now, it's a drag and drop type of deal. If I want to see the IOPS on a server I can drag it over, drop it, and then it works. Whereas before, you had to build a template out for some of the stuff.

Our initial experience with OCI wasn't good. But, we stayed with it. Eventually it became something we use every day. We love it, we absolutely love it.

We didn't know that there was anything else out there. Balance was their predecessor. We used the heck out of Balance. Balance was free but it became an unsupported product. OCI we bought, but we couldn't, like I said, at the beginning, get OCI working. So we were relying a lot on Balance. One day they pulled the rug out from under Balance and said, "We're done." That's when we really started looking at OCI hot and heavy.

When I look at a vendor, generally I look to see if I feel like I'm being fed a lot of bull or are they really talking to me. I look for a vendor that genuinely takes interest in what we're doing and sells you something you need. That was one of the things that impressed us about our sales guy. When he came in, we were looking at a much bigger NetApp environment. He told us,"I would love to sell you that, but you don't need it." It's those kind of people. When you come in and you actually tell me what you think I need and I say, "Oh, but I want to buy this widget," and it's real expensive, and they say, "But you don't need it," that's when I know you're trying to help me out, size it up, make it more functional for me.

But also, I want to make sure I can grow with it. So, I look for honesty in a vendor, if that's the right word. But you usually have to sit and talk to him for a while before you finally figure out if they're here just selling me a load or they're actually telling me what I need to hear.

If you'd asked me three years ago, I would have given it a one out of 10. Today I give an eight. I love it. They need to change the GUI interface at the very beginning, but I love it. I think it's a great product. I'm completely turned around. I'm 100% on board with OCI now.

I would say that if you've got a large virtual environment with a NetApp storage - OCI is written by NetApp - it would almost be silly to look elsewhere. You can look at other storage solutions like EMC, but if you're pure NetApp like we are, there is no other tool like OCI. It does everything. It has all the hooks because the people that built the product are the people that make OCI. It's going to do more for you than an EMC or something like that.

The fact that it gives us a way to report usage for the arrays that we have, issues that we have.

It's a reporting tool so we can see where we get issues with latency, and we can see issues with port saturation, and it shows us each of our clients.

Personally, some of the older things that HPE created originally, you could dig a little bit deeper into each client in certain ways that OCI doesn't quite do.

With HPE we could look at very specific port-to-port on there, per array that we have. Whereas the OCI, you can still do that but the way it's done is a little bit... When I look at a host, I can't look at the entire host. I can only look at different LUNS on that host and that can be a problem sometimes.

A year and a half now.

Stability is good. No issues with OCI.

It's got some things that are good and we still use some other reporting tools to mix in with it, but it is good overall.

I have not used it.

I was not involved.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria are what's easiest, what's quickest to train on and that way we can get into all of the different engineers' hands and get them up to speed fastest on it.

Functionally we're able to use it to troubleshoot pretty quickly. So it's come on and it's replaced a lot of the HPE tools that we were using before. What would make it a 10 out of 10 for me are some of the niche things that we would want to see, so that it could do some of the troubleshooting even a little bit better and a little bit faster.

For troubleshooting, for the way we use it, it's good. And for a large environment, it seems to have been integrated in pretty well.

The ability to have insight into how our systems are being used.

The benefit is that it is not just the storage itself. It also covers our switches. It is multi-vendor, therefore we are not just talking about NetApp. We also have the ability to report on VMs, which is pretty important nowadays, because almost all our systems are VMs.

The ability to better manage the graphs and the dashboards: Resizing them, positioning them, and the ability to publish them outside of OCI to websites or SharePoint.

Sold differently, the user interface (UI) would be easier. At times, it seems a little bit slow. We find when it draws data that there is a lag.

The reporting tool is very cumbersome, and it is difficult to create reports out of it. That is the most complicated part of the tool and how to use it.

I have been using it for six months.

We suffer a little bit from stability. At each batching cycle, we find some services that needs to be restarted. It has its moments. Even restarting the services does not help with the restart. I think there is work to do there to improve it.

It is fairly scalable. We have not hit the limits yet, but we believe that it will be fairly easy to scale.

We have used the tech support. Unfortunately, every time we try to get a technician specialized in the solution, it seems like we always go to the wrong department or wrong area. There needs to be improvement to direct our calls to the right place, so we can talk to the right person.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was fairly complex. Due to what this tool is capable of, I think that is expected.

It is a great tool.

This is a very good tool to see everything on an overview: Where and what are the devices, how much storage you are using, how much Apple storage, and with what connectivity is being used.

You will get a total view of your storage.

Because we can use it financially, we use it for inventory purpose. You can use it, not only for reporting, but you can identify connectivity and storage issues. You can pull performance reports.

We are a consulting company and we use it for various purposes.

• Email notifications
• Data store recoveries
• Moving into the cloud.

They should include more of these type of things.

We have used this solution for the last six years.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is nice, for all scales.

We use the tech support. They are good.

We are able to get through, and they will follow up for anything they are not able to give us the solution to immediately. They will work with internally among themselves, then they will get back to us.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, except for a firewall issue.

The flexibility to use it.

It simplified the administration of our storages and environment.

The product is not easy to learn from the materials provided. We still have questions regarding it.

I have been using it for about three years.

I executed/deployed it the first time alone. When I need support, I ask for it.

The stability is very good. We have not had a problem yet.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is good. They solve the problems/issues that we have.

It gives us the ability to report on all our storage environment. It gives us a way to monitor, visualize, and pinpoint problems.

We can focus on and project usage growth. We can also monitor and measure performance of all the stores. We can compare, use it for capacity planning, forecasting, present usage.

We can also compare performance over several years. Compare different products from different vendors and see how they perform against each other. There are many things that you can do with it.

It gives us a lot of data that, years ago, we didn't have. We can present that in order to prepare, when we're going to buy new equipment. We know, when we create a lifecycle, how long it's going to last, the current equipment, and what are we going to replace it with.

We use it for troubleshooting and to identify the root cause of problems. We also use it for proof of concept and comparisons.

We're in telecommunications and media. I would say OCI is uniquely valuable to us because it give us the data and it provides a more visual a way of evaluating our current storage environment.

I would like to see more performance features on the flash storage and also on the backup appliances.

Also the ability to analyze NAS, NFS and CIFS protocols and cloud protocols.

At least four years.

It is stable. It is mature. I have had issues, but I have resolved most of them myself.

On the reporting piece, sometimes I get a corruption in the database, but since we protect it and back it up constantly, we can always go back to before the damage is done.

I have upgraded, maybe four times, different versions. The very first upgrade was not that easy to do because we had an old version and then it required being in a different version to upgrade automatically. But after we did that first one, they've been easy.

Tech support is real good.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because of the features that it lacks and the stability, although that is getting better. It's still an eight but it's getting better.