NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use it for storing unstructured data.

It is able to store a lot of data, and we can manage it with fewer people.

• Snapshot
• Availability
• Performance

Generally, their products are good when they come out of the gate. However, what would be good is when we uncover new issues, if those could be addressed quickly. 

We would like to see SnapMirror encryption in the next release and have better access to feature development.

It is generally very stable.

Technical support has gone down in my perspective. When getting to the root cause of issues, they need to respond faster. Also, they need to respond quicker to bug fixes.

There have been some changes internally at NetApp. Currently, we are moving to a different level of support which will hopefully fix our issues with it.

We use NetApp products. If we switch products, it is because the product does not perform or is not keeping up with its competitors in terms of cost.

We did the deployment ourselves. Deployments are easy, but NetApp could make it easier.

Return on investment has been good.

There are specific workloads where some vendors provide better value, but in general, NetApp has done a far better on price than other vendors.

We have used Hitachi and Dell EMC, but we use NetApp the most.

It is a good, market-leading product.

Definitely ONTAP. The command line. It's super easy to use.

The ONTAP is so easy to use. I can do my tasks pretty easily on there. If someone needs something quickly I can give them what they need pretty quickly.

The one thing I would really like to see - I don't know if they offer this or not. I know EMC has got really good: their SRDF replication is really good for keeping consistency with your backups, or the other side.

NetApp is crash consistent. I don't know the quality of the EMC one but that one seems to work really well. EMC is primarily block storage anyway so that is what it is build for.

It's pretty stable. There have been some random crashes we have had though, from a couple weird things.

There always seems to be some random bug in the code. If there is a random bug in the code, it seems like we have so many of these storage arrays that one of them is going to experience a crash from it. We have had a couple like that, zombie deletes, causing the controller to panic. We have had a couple weird things like that.

Never really implemented one but it seemed to be pretty easy to scale out. If you have the money to buy one, to scale it out is nothing crazy.

We have an in-house resource and usually, if there is something going wrong, he is the one that will handle it and give it direction. If we ever call it in we always get the front-line people and typically we don't need the front-line people. When we need support we need someone specialized, like a certain protocol or a certain aspect. Usually, that's kind of annoying, when we call in it's getting front-line people and it is an extra 30 minutes just to get to where we need to go, really.

No, ever since I have been here at Centene, we have been using NetApp.

I know NetApp and EMC are at the top, but other than that we don't really have any. I haven't seen much for any other vendor, like Nimble or like a couple of others, we don't really deal with those.

We use it for datastores, and do a little bit of SAN on it too. We use it for both, block and file storage.

My impression of NetApp as avendor of high performance SAN storage is that it's not as good as EMC. I don't have any complaints, really. I primarily use NetApp. I only use the EMCs a little bit.

I am more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experience with AFF. The failover seems to work pretty well, they seem to be pretty reliable. If you have a lot of clusters, a cluster that's broke out, it works pretty well. If it fails or crashes, you still have to fix it but it still works.

Performance is pretty good. It's a little hard to compare because I'm not really on the OS side. I don't really delegate storage provision so I hardly ever get to see the other side of the systems.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria include is: can the vendor supply a solution that we need? If we need block storage, can they do block storage very well? If we need good replication, can they provide that? It just depends on what we need it for and if they can provide that solution the best. Our company doesn't have any really money constraint problems. It's more just about the solution than about the cost.

If someone was looking to buy one I would say: I love the ONTAP operating system. The support is pretty good. I would say the block side of NetApp is probably the weak point. It still does it well, but if you are doing file shares and datastores, you could use it for that. That is primarily what we use it for.

We are using the NetApp solution to host our tier-two storage workloads. We use it for virtualization and as a database for applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and Oracle.

With the NetApp Data ONTAP Cluster, we get some features that are particularly helpful. For example, we can always add to and remove nodes from the cluster. The ability to move volumes online from the storage side, from one aggregate to another aggregate, or from one node to another node, keeps up the performance which helps us a lot.

Especially with the all-flash arrays, we would like to see better storage efficiency and deduplication. In terms of manageability, it would be great if NetApp would add more native reporting tools into the dashboard so that we don't need to use the third-party tool for analyzing our environments or to generate any reports. This would be especially helpful for companies that need to generate some chargeback for the customers.

Vendors in the market are trying to simplify their technologies. They're working to make anything from the hardware and installation to the management of the array, simpler. And I think it would be great if NetApp worked to make the whole process simpler to help customers achieve their goals easier and faster. For example, NetApp could work to simplify tech refresh or migration. Some more reporting tool would be great as well.

It's been stable. We've been using NetApp for a long time and we've never really had any major issue with it.

Scalability is good. The older Data ONTAP 7-Mode scalibility was a bit challenging. Clustered ONTAP is scaled-up technology since you can always add the node to the cluster. 

We have been NetApp customers for a long time. For the most part, we're receiving good support. Sometimes there are situations in which we need help from our NetApp rep, SE, or someone who knows how to escalate the cases for faster support. But our overall experience with their support is good.

We always do our due diligence, whether it's a tech refresh or just moving on with another new project. We compare different technologies based on our requirements. Often when we have a chance, we also perform a PoC. We bring that technology into our data center and then we perform our tests on it. We have scorecards and then we go through every aspect based on our requirements, our customers, and project needs. Then we decide if it makes sense to move on with a new technology or product.

We used NetApp themselves as well as a company called Red8.

Instead of just considering the brand name, whether it's NetApp or any other vendor, my advice is always for a company to define their requirements. Once the requirements are identified, set the expectations and then consider NetApp as a possible solution because we have worked with it and have had a positive experience. If the data is consistent, my advice would be to move on with NetApp.

Our primary use case is file storage. We use it for SMB CIFs and Fibre Channel LUN for Hyper-V.

Our administrative effort is lower. 

DR is much easier now. It is essentially just flipping a few switches, then we have replicated data up in our DR data center. We have done the tests, and it works perfectly. We also have file services which are DR, where we flip another switch and all our files are in another easy place to locate. 

SnapMirror is a good solution, because we can take our production data and replicate it over to our DR data center with minimal administrative effort, which is huge.

I would like to see FlexGroup volumes come to parity in terms of software features with Flex volumes. It seems like FlexGroup volumes have massive scalability, but their features set is not the same as Flex volumes, so we are currently unable to use it. 

The stability is perfect. Even when we are doing upgrades to the ONTAP cluster, such as rolling upgrades where one node will take over the other cluster's volumes, we have zero downtime. 

Scalability is great. We are in current discussions to obtain another two nodes to our ONTAP cluster. So, two more nodes to our already two node cluster, and we don't expect any downtime. We have seen how much it can scale in terms of numbers, so we are happy with it.

Technical support is good. NetApp's solution engineers are good at architecting designs which are standard, but also future thinking. I've only opened a few tickets, and they've answered my questions each time. NetApp takes less than four hours to respond.

We once opened a ticket to have a technical support person online at two in the morning for a cluster upgrade. The technical lead was online and supportive, and nothing went wrong with the upgrade.

They have awesome technical guides and documentation.

The initial setup is straightforward, because getting a storage system installed is not the hardest thing. It takes some know how, but it's not an impossible task. 

When we do a controller upgrade from a FAS8200 to a FAS9000, I want somebody there to watch over the upgrade because something can go wrong, and I do want technical help. However, the cool thing is while we're apprehensive and know what can happen, it never has. We're too cautious.

Meridian and ePlus implemented our solution. We had no issues and found them to be knowledgeable.

We look at the other companies, like Dell EMC and Nutanix. We decided to go with NetApp because they are an industry leader. We also liked their SnapMirror and SnapVault features.

ONTAP is easy and works. It most likely has all the features you need, and then some. 

Each ONTAP upgrade has brought us new features, like rest encryption.

The new solution is crazy small and compact.

We use it to manage our NetApps.

We used to have to log in to each cluster per NetApp to view statistics on it or the logs, if something was wrong. But now we can use ONTAP to view all the clusters and it shows us if something is full of space or not.

The most valuable feature of the solution is to be able to view multiple clusters on one pane of glass.

I find it to be very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all since we started using it, two to three years ago.

It's very scalable. We're in the gaming industry. We had 12 casinos and now we have 26 casinos. You can just input all of the NetApps. There weren't any problems.

The technical support hasn't been that great. A couple of times we have had to call support and it took a long time to get somebody on the phone, it took a long time for someone to call us back. That's the only downside, the support.

This is a type of solution that we didn't have before. It was new to NetApp. We jumped on it right away, as soon as we learned that we could view multiple clusters on one web page.

It was straightforward. We just had to build a VM for the ONTAP and install the software on that. It was easy after that.

We installed it ourselves.

We can scale it better, having multiple clusters at once. It also saves us time. One of us can log in to check over all of our casinos at once, compared to having to log in, one at a time, to check a casino and see how its storage is going. It's a very good return on investment.

We mostly had NetApp in our infrastructure already. We really had to go with them based on that. The alternative was buying a whole new solution, software, storage, etc. We didn't really have a shortlist of other options.

Test it out, go with a PoC on it to see if it's what you need in your environment. If you have a majority of NetApp, I would say, “Go with it.” I would recommend it.

I would give ONTAP about an eight out of ten because it does everything we need it to do. The two points I took off were for customer service and technical support.

I have use this storage appliance, which they have on-premise. It is for taking backup off onsite data. This is a storage and NAS device.

Its typical use case is storing files and getting data, so it does its use case well.

When it accesses regular files, it does so as an NFS workload, which retrieves data quickly.

The initial UI integration could be quite a lot better.

I would like to have deduplication and SSD features in the product.

If you have huge data, you will see stability issues. Since we didn't have that data, our stability has been fine.

We previously haven't had a huge workload, so it scaled fine. Though, with our current use case, we will need something faster. E.g., if you have a huge scale, having SSD-based backup is better. 

We did not contact technical support, as the solution was working fine.

The integration and configuration are not straightforward. We had to read some documentation and receive support. A good UI may be helpful in resolving this.

We looked at various Dell EMC products at the time and considered using VMAX. We also looked at Nimble Storage. For some reason, we did not look at Pure Storage.

We chose NetApp because had some collaboration or a sales representative who approached us, then convinced us of the use case.

Based on the use case, it can be a good product.

We have just one application where we store data, and we haven't had problems with it.

We are a storage provider for a government entity. We serve data to profilers and other government entities.

ONTAP allows us to scale and grow as needed and also be flexible in the way we operate.

The most valuable features are:

• It's scalable.
• It's easy to failover and failback.
• There's no downtime.

They should make the storage arrays more easily tied to your accounts.

It's very stable, and definitely become more stable over time. When Clustered Data ONTAP first came out, there were quite a few bugs. However, with the latest releases, we have been pretty happy.

Scalability is good. We're happy with it.

It should be easier to put in tech support cases. For example, sometimes you have to call in for a bad disk. You have to stay on the phone for 20 minutes to speak to a person just to get a new disk. They should streamline the online support and chat. 

Most people wouldn't have this problem, but we have multiple site numbers we have to deal with. A lot of times it's just easier to go through the 20-minute conversation than trying to find for them the specific storage problem.

Over time, systems age and the amount of FAS that you could fit into a rack three years ago was a lot different than what you can now. We needed to find something flexible which allows us to customize solutions as we go.

NetApp is typically more complex than normal storage systems. I like it though. There's a lot more granularity and you can configure it the way you want it. 

We used Professional Services, and we do it on our own as well. So far, our experience with Professional Services has been great. We're still in the process. They give us guidance. We have our own way that we like to deploy, but it's nice to have their input and information. Just having them there to be able to bounce an idea off of is helpful.

We have seen ROI as we can fit a lot more storage in one rack.

We use multiple different vendors for different scenarios.

I'm pretty happy with ONTAP.

We use it to manage data in the cloud.

It has improved our mobility in managing our data anywhere and anytime.

Also, because it is deployed and managed from NetApp Cloud Manager as a software-only solution on Amazon EC2 compute instances, managing Amazon EBS storage enables customers to build a virtual storage solution directly on Amazon resources.

• Total control of data in the cloud
• Multiple consumption modes
• Rapid deployment

In addition, we have some databases hosted in this solution and are very impressed by the performance and speed of the solution.

The way you attach, move, migrate, and access LUNs is complicated, and if you do not know how to do it, it can be a great problem for your IT environment.

It can scale according to your IT needs.

There are two consumption methods: pay as you go and subscription. Pay as you go is purchased directly from your AWS account and is charged either on an hourly basis or annually. It is a little expensive but worth it.

Purchasing this solution through AWS Marketplace was secure. We purchased it there because we are AWS customers.

In terms of other products it works with in our environment, we have only tried it with database workloads in AWS.

I rate this solution at ten out of ten because NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a level of flexibility that allows you to pay for what you need, when you need it.