NetApp ONTAP Reviews

One use case is user files, when customers are trying to place their unstructured data and then access it remotely. A second case is is VDI. All the VDI uses have their home drives hosted in NetApp. In addition, we use NetApp for general-purpose, such as Unix applications, database archives, big data, when they need a lot of reads and fewer writes. That data comes into NAS. In our firm, we use it for tier-three and tier-four, which needs less than 20 millisecond response times. Those types of applications are deployed in NetApp.

In terms of VDI, pretty much every employee of our firm is a customer of our NAS infrastructure. Everybody's home drive is on NAS, so it's highly critical. Even a minimum outage would cause a lot of potential business risks to the firm. NetApp has come up with performance management devices to improve the performance. And it has all-flash and hybrid aggregates to improve performance in caching. It's really excellent.

As we scale more data, as we add more data into our data pool, we really need it for faster disk drives and quicker response times for our customers, to make sure they will get their data whenever they need it.

I love the replication technologies which keep a customer out of risk. At any time, we can do a seamless failover/failback, and have the latest data on it. 

The SnapVault is another excellent feature. It's used for remote disk-based backups so we don't need to depend on tape backups with their long restore times.

SnapLock is the feature we would like to see enhanced. As a bank, we store data for compliance for a long time: ten years, 15 years. The data would be locked. So they should enhance the SnapLock features. 

At the same time, the customers want a seamless failover and failback for SnapLock. As a bank, we want to look at the data availability, so every quarter we failover and failback. Today, we can failover but we can't failback. We'd like to be able to do both.

On average, the data that lives in the ONTAP hardware is there for four to six years and then it moves on to its end-of-support-life years. When it gets there, it tends to have a greater number of hardware breaks and failures. From a data perspective that's a big risk for us.

As part of tech refresh, we plan the data movement. One year before it gets to the end-of-support-life, we predominantly migrate it into a CDOT, or some other latest all-flash technology that NetApp provides us.

In CDOT, theoretically, you can have 24 nodes in a cluster, but we are careful about that. Right now, we have ten-node clusters. We feel CDOT provides scalability in terms of the virtual world. You can keep adding nodes, you can keep adding disk shelves, you can scale your volumes. And then you can virtually move your failover capabilities from node A to node B, whichever node you want. When you want to do maintenance, you can just virtually move your LIFs' interfaces to other nodes and then you can safely failover. That's great, amazing.

The only thing that they have to improve in NetApp is that they're still relying on padding each node in active-active in CDOT. That has to go away. They should look at the scalability on a platform level. The computer would have that one file system with multiple nodes on it. If even one node fails, any node in that cluster could take over the functionalities. But today, it absolutely relies on that active-active uncoupling it. That needs to be improved in such a way that it would be one namespace. If this node goes down, any node in the cluster should take over and run that environment. It should also have stability, high-availability, and data protection. It all happens today in the virtual world, but it has to happen in the physical layout as well.

Tech support is okay. We have given our feedback. What we have seen it evolve over a period of time. So far it's okay. It still has not reached a level I would call "great," but it's okay. It's going in the right direction.

We have performance issues and capacity issues, among other things. We don't get the right engineer, the right attention the first time, so it needs escalation. We need to raise the priority of the cases to make sure to grab NetApp's attention. Those situations have to be avoided. There needs to be a proactive solution instead of reactive.

We do see ROI from the capacity perspective, although I don't have data points at the moment.

I would rate ONTAP at eight out of ten. It's an industry standard. It pretty much supports all the protocols and it delivers what the customer needs. It's operating on the use case perspective. Instead of having thousands of features - what is the use of that if a customer only wants ten percent of it - NetApp is really focusing on the ten percent, and delivering what the customer really needs.

It would be a ten out of ten with cluster enhancement and support improvements. Those are things that they should improve. I hope in a couple of years, when I come to the next NetApp Insight conference, I'll be able to tell you it's a ten.

We use it for all our storage requirements.

We use it for mission-critical applications. A lot of our users don't want any downtime, they don't want any kind of failure or bottlenecks. They want low latency, they want fast I/O, they want fast throughput - and it delivers.

It has helped us reduce the overall cost of our storage. We were able to consolidate a lot of the storage that we had in the past into a much smaller footprint, using less rack space and power. It has been great for that.

We have saved space using ONTAP, in some cases it's 30 to 40 percent.

The most valuable features are the data deduplication, the inline compression/compaction, and the encryption as well, the security aspect of it.

Overall, for us, it's the stability, it has a solid infrastructure. It's easy to use, easy to rack and configure and start utilizing really quickly. It's been very stable, it works great, and it does everything we would want it to do.

I could see the GUI being a little bit more refined, the presentation layer being a little stronger, a little less sluggish.

We're happy with the stability and performance. They are very powerful machines.

The scalability is very good. It's much more than what we can imagine using.

Tech support is very good. They're great at following up, as well, with emails or calling you. It has been very good so far, very quick responses. It's easy to escalate and whenever we have had to order replacement parts, it's been very quick. No complaints at all.

We used a reseller for the deployment, OnX. Our experience with them was very good. They were very helpful. They really helped with the purchasing, refining our requirements to get them where we needed them to be. They have been very good.

We have considered other options but they either don't have the same kind of architecture that we're looking for or the performance isn't quite the same. We'd have to look at them a little more in some cases, part of our job is to see what the other vendors are up to. But, for now, we're quite happy with NetApp.

Go see a NetApp presentation or get a referral to a reseller for consultation. That would probably be the best way, because they can speak to the whole line of products. We're only familiar with some of their product line but they would be able to do a good job of showing all the products that NetApp has to offer.

In terms of NVMe over Fabrics, that's something we're going to see a lot of in the future. It's going to change storage. From now on, it's not going to be the same. When it comes to speed, compared to other Fiber Channel gear, there's nothing that compares, it's pretty amazingly fast. When it comes to NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fibre Channel infrastructure, the sky is the limit. It's pretty robust, it is a pretty amazing product, and the performance, especially with things like AI applications, will be pretty amazing.

We, as an organization, do not use ONTAP at the moment for machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics or those kinds of groundbreaking applications for storage, but it has a lot of potential. I'd like to use it for those kinds of scenarios, I'd like to see that happen.

We're definitely going forward, we're going to be growing with NetApp and with their products. They've improved a lot over the last couple releases, and I hope to continue to see that. There are a lot more features, advances in things like deduping and thin-provisioning. They're always improving their product.

I would rate ONTAP a nine out of ten at least. It's a very solid product, great architecture, great service and support, and very responsive.

We use it for cloud. We have a big VMware environment with CIFS, NFS, and other applications. Most of the data is on NetApp.

It has the ability to bring up disaster recovery quickly.

• High availability
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption

The toughest thing that we have right now is a cabling issue. There are so many that you need to connect.

I would like to see more S3 integration with other vendors, objects, or instruments. We are a big Dell EMC shop and would like to have this integration.

It is very stable. Given you have so many nodes in a cluster, the volumes, connections, and lifts can be moved anywhere within the cluster.

It is better than some of the other solutions that we have used. It is easy to expand nodes.

We are a premiere customer. When we call, we get someone on right away.

We have grown with NetApp. As they grow, we grow.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there is some complexity. 

We used professional services from NetApp for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression.

We have a mixture of NetApp and Dell EMC.

NetApp does NAS well and better than other vendors.

We use ONTAP for systems management, running and managing storage appliances.

ONTAP, for us, is underpinning all the software that sits on top of our hardware. We manufacture the infrastructure side of NetApp appliances. We use the capabilities of ONTAP for our customers. It's a case of implementation of that software and using that software to manage the storage arrays we're putting into our clients' environments. We also use it for PoCs. We'll deploy the software and demonstrate it for customers.

When you look at traditional, simplified storage, you would have a lot of manual command-line toolsets, you would have a lot of simple features and capabilities. With ONTAP and features like SnapMirror - the ability to have these more advanced capabilities - NetApp is leading that space. There are a lot of stats out there about what NetApp is doing around storage features and it's making it easier for our customers to consume rich storage features more easily.

The customers we work with absolutely use this solution for their mission-critical apps. For example, we have a university customer where NetApp underpins all their corporate systems. For them, that's mission-critical because they have to pay and manage, from an AP perspective, all of their internal customers. Without that system in place, without it being robust and reliable, they have no business, effectively, as a university. For them, it is absolutely mission-critical.

We have customers who have had ONTAP deployed for each of machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, and similar groundbreaking applications. Our university customer is a good example. From an SAP perspective, they have a lot of rich analytics being done on that platform. ONTAP provides the best value for them. How the system gets architected is key, ensuring they have the right solution in place to get the best performance. The fact that NetApp performance, in general, is better than a lot of the competitors anyway has helped the university immensely.

In terms of helping us reduce the overall cost of storage, efficiencies such as Flash Cache and Flash Pool allow us to make better use of slower, cheaper storage and have some faster storage sitting up front taking a lot of the caching and the reading. The way that has been optimized for the NetApp platform is better than the competitors. It has reduced our cost of storage because we're buying cheaper storage, for the bulk capacity, which is really effective.

Storage efficiencies in ONTAP have been fantastic. For things like Snapshot-ing, when you are rolling out multiple clones, having good storage efficiency is really key.

Valuable features are SnapVault, SnapMirror, all the capabilities around Snapshot-ing. 

Also, the ability to then spin up copies of data in other data centers, on other storage appliances, is the most valuable for us and the one that we see the most interest in from our customers.

I would like to see more in the public cloud space around things like object storage. A bit more granularity around how that gets deployed would be nice, but other than that I think they've got it nailed.

The trend is heading in that direction, where more and more customers want to deploy applications that leverage object storage. It would be nice to have a more seamless integration, although it's not bad at the moment.

ONTAP is now in its ninth version. It's the most robust software on a storage platform on the market at the moment. I don't think anyone else has the same capability with the same level of flexibility.

The fact that you can have large clusters, you can keep bolting on more and more nodes, more and more appliances, makes it a lot more flexible than a lot of other providers. Normally, with a traditional SAN, you put a big SAN in the corner, stick some stuff into it, and leave it alone. Compared to having to buy another SAN with a different workload, the fact that, with NetApp, you can cluster and spread workloads across, makes it more scalable.

From what limited exposure I've had personally, our local support is fantastic. In terms of the process of raising tickets, I've not heard of customers having issues with the support mechanisms that NetApp has in place.

What typically drives the solution is the outcome for the customer. The customer will naturally follow down the path of needing a particular feature set to achieve some sort of outcome. We work through that list and figure out what that looks like. ONTAP seems to tick more of the boxes than any other product.

For the average person, it might not be straightforward but, in my opinion, the setup is more straightforward when compared to other storage platforms. Active IQ and the tools you have access to are a lot better than the competitors'.

Typically we work directly with NetApp on all our installations. Our experience with them has been fantastic. Really good guys, really good to work with, extremely knowledgeable.

We haven't measured ROI, but I guarantee there would be some. The cost per IOP is different for every customer environment so I can't give a figure for that.

IBM, since we're a partner. The reason I would go with NetApp is their products are a higher enterprise-grade than the IBM products, which is saying something. IBM is more of a mid-market play. The NetApp stuff is a more holistic, feature-rich set. It has more capabilities. The price points are roughly similar compared to competing products. NetApp is just a richer experience.

Do your research. Undestand what NetApp can offer. Talk to local NetApp resources and you'll find out a lot. One of the challenges a lot of customers have is that they don't know what they don't know. The more you talk to people, the more you will understand. I would advise talking to the local resources first, see what they've got. They probably have a solution, as far as ONTAP is concerned, that would fit into your requirements, the outcomes you're looking for.

I sat in on a session about NVMe over Fabrics this morning here at NetApp Insight 2018. Reducing the latency, getting storage to the application as quickly as possible, is phenomenal. That becoming the new standard, instead of the old-school SCSI approach, is going to become the next big thing. The fact that they're reducing that controller piece in it, the latency drops so significantly - traditional Fiber Channel is missing out on an opportunity to improve performance.

In terms of using NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fiber Channel, the good thing is that if customers already have investment in Fiber Channel networks, they can still take advantage of new technology from a storage perspective, without having to worry about upgrading and forklifting in new, specific equipment for that particular purpose.

As a software set, from a storage perspective, I would rate NetApp at eight out of ten because the maturity of the product is so much greater than the competition. I don't think anybody else has the level of flexibility and feature sets that ONTAP has.

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.