NetApp ONTAP Reviews

As an automotive company, we are able to run some applications on NetApp ONTAP.

The MFS report is the best feature for us.

I believe that the next release should be a bit cheaper.

I have been using this solution for about ten years.

NetApp is very stable, this is why we went with this product.

This is a scalable solution.

Support is very good. They are available 24/7 and respond within four hours.

We used EMC in the past. It was good at the time, but it was crashing a lot. This is why we switched to NetApp.

The initial setup is straightforward as it is done by NetApp themselves and it does not require any maintenance on our side.

ONTAP is expensive, but most storage systems are now-a-days and everything is included with the license - there are no additional fees.

This is a stable environment that is easy to manage and good to work with - eight out of ten.

We basically use NetApp Storage as mass storage within our offering. We also use it for backup storage, storage for emails, and sometimes for archiving. Mostly it is actually general-purpose file storage. 

The solution has very good Snapshot features. Everybody goes to NetApp for Snapshot. Their Snapshots are very good. We use it for local backups. We also have a DR set up. We use Snapshot or SnapMirror for the DR applications. We also use Snapshot for backup purposes as well. Snapshot is the one thing I would say is actually the most useful feature for us.

NetApp is very stable.

They have all the latest features. 

Their support is good. 

The performance of the hardware is good. 

We're actually looking at a software-defined version of NetApp. They already have a software-defined product called ONTAP Select. NetApp's ONTAP version for the cloud is called the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. We are looking for the Cloud Volumes ONTAP, an on-premises option. Right now, the only option we have is the cloud and that's only available with AWS and Google. We already had some discussions with NetApp about it. It usually takes two or three months and a lot of money on a software-defined solution. If we gain access to it, we can run it on a virtual machine and it will still give all the features without having to buy their hardware.

The pricing could be lower.

The setup can be a bit complex, depending on the environment.

We have been using the product for a long time. I would say we've used it in total for 10 or so years, however, in different offerings. The names have changed and the company also changed quite a bit.

I've been working with the solution for ten years, and I've rarely had any issues. I consider the product to be extremely stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The solution can scale very, very easily.

Technical support is good. I don't have any issues with them. Most of my interactions are very, very good except for maybe one or two cases over the course of ten or so years. Mostly I find it very useful. They are very responsive and knowledgeable. 

The setup up is a bit complex within our environment. We actually tweak it to our requirements. The integration for backup purposes, for example, we use NetBackup. However, then the solution that we have is a bit complex for backups, especially if we want to actually do a Snapshot version only. We actually take full backups every day. Our solution is actually a bit tweaked for our real requirement. I would say it is actually not very complex. That said, it is not very easy either. It is somewhere in between. There is some level of complexity in our solution.

To apply and maintain the product you need a team, definitely. To deploy it, it depends on how you set up your environment. In our environment, one person can deploy it because we have most of the tasks automated. For us, it is not very difficult to deploy. however, then you also need the dependency. For example, to build a network, you are required to connect the device to the network, and then to set up the backup. You need a team as it requires some integration with the network, with the backup, and whatnot. There are many, many things to do.

In our environment, we only need two people. That is due to the level of automation we have. To operate it, you also need a team. How big the team is depending on the service level. You may have to have people in shifts. In our team, we have many people. It's a global offering at this stage. So we have a presence everywhere. That requires a huge team. There are maybe 10 plus members supporting it around the clock.

The cost is quite high. They need to work on making it a bit more affordable. We buy the equipment as a one-time purchase and then also purchase five years of support. It's a CapEx model.

We are service providers. We are offering something called a virtual private cloud. Our offering mainly the virtual private cloud. It is a cloud offering by DXC.

The product is basically a multi-tenant cloud. The cloud is hosted on our premises. We have data centers across the globe. Around 24 data centers in different regions. It's a global offering. We automated it and we have it set up for provisioning or portal enabled. It is not as good as Amazon or AWS, however, it is still a lot of cloud.

You can request a portal, however, then you cannot scale to that scale that Amazon currently is. That said, there are some customization possibilities. It is slightly cheaper than the hyperscaler cloud and that is why most customers prefer it. They find it really useful and cheaper than a public cloud offering, and it still has the same performance level.

I would recommend the product. I don't see any reason why you would have to look for a different vendor. The one thing that they can improve is the cost. That's pretty high. That is the only concern. Otherwise, they are very, very good in all other areas. Their hardware, software, their support, etc., are all good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We've been very happy with the product overall.

We use Data ONTAP to provide CIFS and NFS shares, as well as direct attached data stores for VMware.

Four years ago, upgrading a NetApp controller was a command line process which was very arduous. Today, because NetApp listened to their customers and improved their GUI, we can perform a firmware upgrade within minutes.

The most valuable features would be:

• CIFS environment sharing.
• The availability of NetApp to tie into the UCS FlexPod environment.
• Integrated monitoring with OnCommand.

I would like to see some sort of a free version of OnCommand: A stripped down version of OnCommand Unified Manager offering a bit better usage for enterprise users. We have found that it's very hard to get it without buying it outright. I wish they had a better marketing with the product. It's probably my biggest gripe with them. You really need OnCommand to do a lot of cool stuff with NetApp, and they make it hard to get.

It's not an all inclusive model. You have the option to purchase modules to make the entire ecosystem coherent. I would like the option to pay one price and get everything all inclusive, like OnCommand.

If you don't have a TAM or SAM, it can be difficult to get P1 cases.

We serve out data from a multitude of different properties through FlexPod environments, as well as a centralized data serving location in the Las Vegas area. We have had minimal downtime over the past five to ten years that we have been using the product.

Scalability has been less of an issue. 

Unfortunately, NetApp does forklift upgrades. This is probably the biggest negative that I have with NetApp as a whole. We found to upgrade a FlexPod environment, if we wanted to upgrade the UCS on the Cisco side, due to the interoperability matrix, sometimes we'll have to upgrade controller units. Basically, if we upgrade one part of our infrastructure, we have to upgrade another part. 

This affects our scalability. Instead of being able to simply add a couple of shelves, that controller may only be able to hold four shelves. However, we already have four shelves, so now we have to buy a new controller unit. Whereas, some of other companies, you can just add another controller unit and an HA pair, then you are off to the races with more shelves.

The technical support is good. We had a TAM for a long time. Now, we have a SAM, and working through them we found that our cases get risen in priority level whenever we need it. We haven't had to fight for quite some time to get P1. It is easy to escalate.

We were previously using DAS-JBODs, but this was in 2007. We pretty much followed everybody else when the industry went to NetApp. We have been using NetApp ever since it was 7-Mode.

The initial setup was straightforward after we used EVOLTECH as a third-party. We actually took the process over after watching them do it a couple times. It was that easy.

Upgrades are great. One of the best things about NetApp is that their products are so easy to upgrade now. That did not use to be the case.

We used EVOLTECH for the deployment. We were happy with them. They did the job that we asked them to do.

We have seen ROI.

We were considering Pure Storage and Dell EMC. NetApp won out with a far superior price point.

ONTAP has a lot of stuff that most people don't utilize it for. For example, the entire Snap Management package is an underutilized piece of software in our industry. 

Get it and use a lot of the features, then have your mind blown. The moment you start using it is when the magic happens. If you don't use it, then you don't know how awesome it is.

We use it with the All Flash FAS solution.

There are a lot of the reasons that we chose this solution. We are going the direction of automation in the cloud. It has flexibility and supportability around NetApp solutions and products.

For the All Flash FAS, it has lessened our performance issues. Our support for that is a lot easier for our patients to access.

The most valuable feature is the NVMe AFF.

The config could be a little easier. It's not entirely difficult, but it could be a somewhat easier. I have seen other vendors make it easier. 

We have other flash arrays which seem solid, but we trust NetApp to deliver us the best product.

One of the big benefits was the scalability. We wanted to grow as is. 

We have a lot of problems with this right now, so this product seems to help.

We have always had great technical support from NetApp on all their solutions. That's why I trust them against all our other vendors.

The initial setup is straightforward. Most of the information can be found outside of the config guide, either way the information is available.

We used a reseller for deployment, PEAK Resources. We have been using them for 15 years. They're awesome.

We chose NetApp for a lot of support reasons.

Other vendors did not seem to not be on the forefront with their solutions. Their roadmaps for the future were unclear, where NetApp's roadmap is solid. It seemed very specific for our needs.

We also looked at IBM, Pure Storage, Nutanix, and Pivot3. None of them met the mark. They were all short for a lot of reasons, but mainly it was the roadmaps. They were unclear and general, so we decided to go with NetApp.

Don't buy IBM.

NetApp solutions get rid of a lot of time spent on the operational side. This solution makes things easier for us on the operations side. 

NetApp seems to be very cognizant of what we need and where the future of technology is going with health care, in general.

One of the classic use cases is the high availability for both block and file. However, many different technologies within NetApp are of interest to our customers.

NetApp has a variety of different features and technologies on offer. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

It's a stable product.

The solution can scale well. 

The integration with other products, both security and third-party products such as Lenovo and others doing OEM solutions, that would be ideal. We'd like to have these with ONTAP on top. We'd like integrations with different types of backup solutions and so on. 

The price could be lower. 

We have a good sense of feature sets in the pipeline for the product and therefore are largely satisfied with both its capabilities and the roadmap. 

I've been using the solution for five years or so.

The stability is great. I'd rate it ten out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product scales very well. I'd rate it nine or ten out of ten. It expands easily. 

The solution works well for large or mid-size companies. 

Within our company, none of us is using NetApp storage as we are providing our customers with solutions.

From our portfolio, we're selling a lot of Dell EMC and NetApp. We're selling Huawei, and we're selling other storage space as well, such as some IBM. With that said, if you compare Dell EMC and NetApp, it's mostly based on the integration, technologies, and flexibility where we see NetApp being a better fit for many of our customers, yet not for all.

We have been working with NetApp a lot. Doing implementations is not a problem for us. 

95% of the time, clients can handle the initial setup. However, we primarily work with enterprise accounts, and those, even with a simple setup, can often lead to complex requirements.

The pricing is okay. I'd rate it three out of five in terms of affordability. It is not a cheap solution. However, it is quite stable and offers good value. 

We did evaluate this solution against other options. 

I'm actually a partner of Lenovo and NetApp. We're integrators. We set the solution up for our clients. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Based on my 20 years within the IT industry, NetApp is the best system out there. It is just not the cheapest. That said, looking at what it can do with Lenovo and other vendors make it a good option. 

We use it for on-premise storage.

For our organization, in terms of resiliency, it has gotten better over the years. It has also become more reliable.

• Availability
• Resiliency
• Recoverablity

I would like to see more evolution towards the cloud.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is very good. It enables us to use different product lines within the same operating system.

Technical support is good to very good.

We actually haven't switched. We've been using it for about 15 years. We've been with it for a long time.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We do all our deployments in-house.

We're always looking at different vendors, and we want to see fit-for-purpose. We want to make sure that we're using the right technology for the right job.

It has a good, safe implementation.

I gave this product an eight, because there is always room for improvement and to make things better.

We use it for VMware.

Clustered ONTAP makes it very easy to manage large amounts of data, measured in petabytes. One person can manage all that. In the old days, you could never do that.

We're using it as a virtualization platform, so not only are we buying NetApp SSD, we're also able to utilize our existing Dell EMC storage that still is under support.

I would like to see volume efficiency come closer to what Dell EMC can do with, for instance, their XtremIO platform.

Today, the stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is poor. The first line people that pick up the phone are, quite honestly, awful. Once you get to an escalation engineer they're extremely talented, but you have to pull teeth to get there.

My management was all about Dell EMC. With my experience with NetApp I just kept my mouth shut and asked technical questions and Dell EMC basically fell flat. They actually proposed a mid-tier solution that was, as they put it, a number of storage silos. And I said, "This is 2018. We have storage silos?"

So I was able to work with CDW and prove that the FlexArray would front-end the existing Unity's and 3PARs we have. CDW ended up coming to the table and they won the deal. They came in late but they won the deal. The NetApp people have never come to our office yet.

We did purchase Basic Install, so it was straightforward.

Dell EMC and Pure were on our shortlist. Dell EMC couldn't come with a reasonable solution. Pure is all-flash and we needed hybrid.

I would advise colleagues who are researching this type of solution to look at NetApp. We bought it for a couple reasons. One, it took advantage of our existing storage because we could front-end that storage. It also allowed us, through native replication, to set up a DR site, which we're working towards. And three, that DR site, in 2020, is going to the cloud. NetApp has a nice solution for that. And our production in 2022 may actually go to the cloud. So all that is already in place, no additional tools. You can use the same SnapMirror and SnapVault technology to get there. To me, it makes sense.

We bought our solution through CDW. They're excellent.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten. I think it's time for a hardware refresh. We ended up buying 8200s and they've been out on the market for quite a while. There is newer hardware that we were hoping to take advantage of but we needed the storage now.

The primary use case is to move from Fibre Channel to SolidFire.

We see it drastically improving our organization. We are trying to move away from Fibre Channel. SolidFire with iSCSI will change a lot going forward in the organization.

The vendor diagnostics, which allows for movement from one vendor to another vendor using the application technology that is available. It should be able to talk to any vendor, not just NetApp to NetApp. We should be able to replicate the data, so the next feature should not be vendor specific.

The solution is stable, and upcoming releases will make it more stable.

Right now, there are some limitations. However, what I am hearing is that future technologies will be more scalable than what we have now.

They have pretty good technical support. They have a different support model for the hypervisor customers, so I have been quite happy with the support until now.

The previous solutions that we have are both IP and Fibre Channel-based. We are moving away from Fibre Channel, so we wanted to look for a new solution which was IP-based.

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at multiple vendors.