NetApp ONTAP Reviews

My use cases right now are to provision enterprise storage to any end user in an enterprise.

As an architect, I design things using NetApp ONTAP, and I see benefits overall since it integrates into many more ecosystems in IT than any other product. The amount of development it does towards public cloud integration is huge, so that's a welcome move.

What I appreciate the most about the product is its resiliency; it is very robust, and most of the time, a good configuration does wonders. 

One area where they could improve NetApp ONTAP is their ability to migrate to and from different enterprise storage. I love NetApp ONTAP, however, as businesses get narrower in mainstream IT, I don't see a great future for NetApp as dedicated storage; it needs to find its way into public clouds.

I have been using it for close to four years now.

Stability depends upon the use case. The way we have set up systems, they have fared well with no question about data responsibility, however, we have seen issues beyond NetApp ONTAP that have led to problems we were unable to diagnose.

They are great at scalability. The whole configuration that is set up is always ready to be scalable, which has been my experience working with that product.

NetApp ONTAP has improved significantly since a decade ago, growing towards one platform support for all types of products. I would rate their support as getting better at delivering services than they were a decade ago. On a scale from one to ten, I would give the support an eight.

Positive

I have implemented other products beyond NetApp ONTAP which have cost at least two to three times less and are still able to deliver enterprise-grade solutions.

The initial deployment was very simple for me. Our setup took less than a day. That timeline makes sense, provided that you have all the logistics arranged and the network setup. We were to consume and have storage ready to use within 24 hours.

There isn't really any maintenance needed, unless there's integration into other systems. The compatibility matters a lot. If I use ONTAP, I need to confirm what is the protocol that supports it currently. And I have to validate if that protocol is supported in the next version of NetApp. That demands a bit of maintenance on my side.

For the deployment, on our side, I was alone handling the setup, however, from the NetApp ONTAP team, professional services did all the work for me.

Regarding pricing, if I am an enterprise, there's something called a license agreement that happens between platinum customers and NetApp ONTAP, where they offer the best pricing. 

However, as a new enterprise wanting to start with NetApp ONTAP, I might not get all the benefits, and NetApp ONTAP might be losing out on those types of customers.

We're an ONTAP enterprise customer.

NetApp ONTAP does not really require maintenance on my end, but I do find that the integration to other IT systems, such as virtualization or databases, and the compatibility of such configurations matter significantly. 

If I have to use NetApp ONTAP, I need to confirm the supported protocol and validate if that protocol is supported in the next version of NetApp ONTAP, which demands some maintenance from my side. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

We're a software development firm, so we use it internally. We have two NetApp ONTAP systems at the office, and we have a DR site where we replicate everything. For client purposes, we are using CVO in the cloud to host our clients on it, using our software.

We saw the benefits of NetApp ONTAP almost immediately. Snapshots are amazing. The auto-grow on the volumes and SnapMirror are also notable features. There are so many things that make it a good product.

There are more than one features that I appreciate, but what I appreciate the most about it is the ease of management of the volumes.

There's a feature called multi-tenant approval. Currently, it's one size fits all. I cannot specify that one person is allowed to work on certain volumes, a second person on different volumes, and a third one on everything. It's all or nothing, so I would prefer it to be more precise regarding who could do what on which volume.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP since approximately 2008.

We encountered a downtime once for about two or three minutes, but it didn't crash; it was my fault due to a misconfiguration.

Scalability is quite easy. You just add nodes and grow your cluster, and it's good.

The quality of the support is quite fast; I have never had an issue that was not resolved. Our issues were more about how to do specific tasks or what's the best way to accomplish something. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have never used any alternatives to NetApp ONTAP. I have seen others, but why we selected NetApp ONTAP was that it was better.

It's quite easy. If it's physical, the time depends on the size of your environment, but when we used CVO in the cloud, it was up and running within the same day. The learning curve is not that long. It's quite easy, but it also depends on your experience.

It does not require any maintenance after the deployment. The first NetApp ONTAP that we had, after maybe six or seven years, had some drives that were spinning, not SSD. When one of them failed, we placed a service call and received the disk the next morning. We just swapped the disk, and everything got rebuilt by itself. The new system we got two years ago is all SSD, and so far, nothing has broken. Everything's running smoothly.

For its deployment, one person is enough. You do not need a team.

At first, it's expensive. Once you start using it, it's not that expensive. When you see all the benefits, it's acceptable. It could always be better, but you get what you pay for.

My advice for new users is to take the time to learn and have a good plan for what you need to do. It's so easy to use, and you can do many things with it, so there's no secret to success. You just plan whatever you need to do, and you go forward.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

We manage our data systems with NetApp ONTAP through either the command-line interface or the graphical user interface.

We implemented ONTAP because it provides a unified management interface for all storage, simplifying administration by using the same language for both SAN and NAS environments.

NetApp ONTAP is user-friendly.

The auto-completion feature now simplifies ONTAP management by streamlining command-line operations. When entering commands via the CLI, auto-completion suggests relevant options, improving efficiency and reducing errors. This enhanced functionality has proven effective in managing various storage environments, consistently delivering the expected performance.

We have tested ONTAP in several environments, and its performance has met our expectations.

ONTAP reduces human error by providing helpful auto-completion features, eliminating the need to memorize all commands.

ONTAP helps improve our cost savings because NetApp products are competitively priced compared to IBM and Dell.

We realized the benefits of ONTAP immediately.

Our organization is short-staffed, and ONTAP's ease of storage management is well-suited to our small team.

ONTAP's GUI does not encompass all the features available in the CLI. Some functions can only be executed through the CLI.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for about eight years.

I would rate the stability of ONTAP eight and a half out of ten. There are bugs from time to time, especially in new versions. If we upgrade, there might be issues with some features, but it is generally stable.

Our previous product faced scalability limitations requiring a complete replacement. However, recent systems, particularly the new NetApp systems, demonstrate significantly improved scalability compared to their predecessors.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Our company used various storage solutions from vendors like Dell, IBM, and Hitachi. However, NetApp ONTAP stands out due to its consistent core functionality, even with feature updates, maintaining simplicity compared to other complex solutions.

The complexity and duration of a NetApp ONTAP deployment depend significantly on the chosen approach. Building a new ONTAP environment from scratch typically takes around two weeks, while migrating an existing storage infrastructure from another vendor to ONTAP can increase the deployment time to two months due to the added complexities of data transfer, compatibility considerations, and potential application downtime.

In my experience of almost 25 years, ONTAP was less time-consuming than most other products I've worked with.

NetApp ONTAP is moderately priced. The tag price is more competitive for the value we get.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP nine out of ten.

We have NetApp ONTAP deployed in multiple locations with 2,500 users.

NetApp ONTAP requires maintenance for upgrades, adding features, and replacing failed disks.

I will recommend ONTAP. It is advisable to consider a proof of concept.

Like NetApp Private Storage, I use the solution for file storage and data source. We use it daily when managing our storage and NetApp's operating system. We log in to it to check the status of the storage. We use it to store all our assets, like the web app, web applications, database applications, Oracle and SQL databases, and VMD.

SnapMirror is good for disaster recovery. We use that currently. Their SAN storage is great. We manage our storage via SAN. We do not currently use NAS because we still use Windows File Servers.

NetApp ONTAP has similar areas of improvement as NetApp Private Storage regarding decreasing the error rate, improving the GUI, technical support and stability, and reducing the price.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for five years.

I rate the solution's stability a six out of ten. Though NetApp should run 24x7, 365 days a year, we have had five downtimes in a year.

NetApp ONTAP is scalable. They have two types of scalability, "scale up" and "scale out." With "scale up," you can get up to petabytes of data if you have the money to buy those servers and add them to the system. And "scale out" also, you can buy additional controllers, up to 12 nodes, which is pretty good when you are a big company. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

NetApp is one of our organization's main storage systems. Every application is scattered on all of our NetApp devices. Applications won't run without it because they need to pull data from NetApp ONTAP.

I have used Synology and HP before. My current company uses NetApp ONTAP, though I learned to use NetApp at my last job.

I rate the initial setup an eight or nine out of ten because it was easy. Maybe it was easy because I worked as a NetApp engineer before, so I know how to do it properly. It's easy because I used to deploy a NetApp product four times a month in my previous company. My organization deploys the product to end users, companies that buy the solution from us. Most recently, it took us a day to deploy this solution. Steps involved in deploying the solution included rock and stock, cabling zoning, and then provisioning of storage to the data stores.

We needed two people to deploy the solution, with one person as an assistant. The assistant will come from the vendor, who sometimes sends two people for deployment. The vendor asks for all the needed details before they go there, and if provided already, it will be easy from there because we'll just input everything. Rock and stock only take 20 minutes, and connecting cables takes 30 minutes.

I am the only storage engineer maintaining the solution in our company for now. My colleague also checks when I'm not on duty, and they need to check when the monitoring team provides information that some of our LUNs or volumes are highly utilized already. Depending on the ship, one expert can do it for the whole company.

The solution is quite pricey compared to other solutions. Additional costs exist if you want a license for a feature like SnapMirror. Other vendors do not do that anymore. When you buy their storage, it comes with these features, so this is a problem with NetApp because you need to buy everything before you can use it.

ONTAP is the operating system that comes with NetApp, and ONTAP is installed on the hardware they provide.

Don't use versions 9.8 to 9.11. Those versions have everything removed. They made the administrators' lives harder when they removed some of the functionalities in the GUI, the dashboard. Everything was good when we were using ONTAP clusters 9.0 to 9.7. You could click and do whatever you wanted there. For example, you could add ECB. When the higher version came out, 9.8, they removed a lot. You then needed to research how to do it via CLI. You needed to be an expert to do whatever you wanted to do. I have not seen 9.11 yet, but I hope they have fixed the GUI already. I rate the solution between an eight out of ten because of the price and the downtime.

We manage all of our storage with it. In terms of the version, we're in the process of going to the newest version. It's probably 9.12.

Resiliency is the big one for us.

Its ease of use, for the most part, through the interfaces is valuable.

It's very expensive.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability. It's being used by the entire organization of about 400 people and probably 300 or 400 systems.

We have plans to increase its usage. I just bought up a whole bunch of new equipment.

I'd rate them a 10 out of 10. If possible, I'd rate them even higher.

I didn't use any other solution previously.

It was largely handled by NetApp themselves with me watching. So, it was pretty simple for me. For the actual software or system deployment itself, there was one person.

We have seen an ROI.

It's very expensive.

I'd advise others to go for it if they can afford it. It's very expensive, but I like it because of the support and because of its ability to just work without me having to touch it very often.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

My usual use cases for NetApp ONTAP include configuring both SAN and NAS services for mail systems, web hosting systems, and also cloud services.

NetApp ONTAP has impacted the way I do business and serve my customers by being a very smart solution. By using the same appliances and thus the same disks, I can switch the volumes between different services. I can also migrate the volumes and clone volumes from one service to another in case we need to integrate more services.

NetApp ONTAP has addressed key challenges for my business, particularly responding to customer needs in terms of speed and capacity. The network traffic in NetApp appliances is very fast, and we can also count on the promptness of the support service in case of damaged or broken disks.

NetApp ONTAP has helped streamline our internal operations and adapt to changing market conditions by offering automated solutions with SnapMirror. It allows me to quickly replicate volumes and services from one site to another.

Aggregating more disk technologies into one has been beneficial. It enabled us to have a single cluster of several storage systems that were previously independent. It was able to integrate them into just one cluster with one pane of glass. We now have a single GUI or control center to provision storage content. We can do that with a click of a mouse or through the command line.

The specific feature of NetApp ONTAP that I have found most valuable is SnapMirror. The feature that allows me to replicate volumes from one site to another and the possibility to reuse all the storage appliances by aggregating them into one cluster are also valuable. For instance, I can do some storage tiering and move volumes from SAS to SATA or from SATA to SAS disks, effectively tiering storage content from one technology to a better solution by choosing the capacity and speed.

In terms of areas where NetApp ONTAP could be improved or enhanced, I believe they should improve the volume replication, specifically the synchronous replication in a block-based SAN environment. It should be more resilient to network outages since I noticed that it suffers a lot from network gaps at the moment.

I have been working with NetApp ONTAP since 2012.

Their technical support is excellent. However, the support from India is a little rigid. They tend to work with a checklist and are not very smart and flexible when it comes to specific issues. The generic level 1 engineers have a very basic knowledge of storage.

Positive

I believe NetApp ONTAP offers the best return on investment among all storage vendors, due to the possibility of doing a technological refresh, such as changing a motherboard instead of the whole storage while keeping the same disks and chassis.

Before choosing NetApp ONTAP, I considered competing companies like Dell Technologies, particularly their Dell Compellent appliances. However, we experienced many service outages when deploying highly accessed services. NetApp proved to be the best solution in terms of cost, service accessibility, and service continuity.

The NetApp ONTAP capabilities that differentiated it from other solutions I evaluated include the ability for a single NetApp storage to offer both NAS and SAN services with the same reliable infrastructure. In contrast, Dell Technologies only concentrates on SAN services and block-oriented services.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of artificial intelligence have influenced my technology decisions. NetApp ONTAP offers many cybersecurity solutions. There is a solution that we haven't released yet or haven't put into production, but it is present, and we can surely count on it when we need it.

The goals for my next technology investments regarding NetApp ONTAP don't depend on me since I'm not making any decisions for the future. However, I see that NetApp ONTAP is open to any technologies, and they do this very well.

We definitely have plans to expand how we use NetApp ONTAP in the future. We plan to expand the infrastructure for mail, cloud, and web hosting services. We can do a technological refresh very quickly.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

ONTAP is Netapp's data management solution for on-premise and cloud datastores.

ONTAP itself hasn't really "improved [our] organization", but the Netapp IP that we leverage THROUGH ONTAP is a cornerstone for our data management and our disaster recovery/business continuity programs.

The solution is extremely stable and easily scalable.  The snapshot capabilities protect against data loss due to corruption and human error, the snapmirror replication methodology provides efficient disaster recovery, and the data compression/deduplication technologies provide amazing storage efficiency.  Add to that the seamless management of hierarchical and object storage on-premise and in the cloud and you have a compelling solution for broad data management under a single platform.

The ONTAP UI is constantly evolving, and it is always a work in progress.  Several management constructs (e.g. disk aggregates) have been removed from ONTAP and relegated to the command line only, seemingly to streamline the UI.  It would be nice if future releases would allow us to turn the features we actually use back on.

Since 2005.

Rock solid and bulletproof.

It's scalable. You can have many, many nodes in a cluster. You can have multiple clusters as well. It can scale up or out.

Overall, my experience with Netapp support has been excellent.  Like all large tech providers, they have had occasional lags in their support services, but I have had very few major problems, and I have never had an issue that they could not or would not resolve.

Positive

Many years ago, we were an EMC shop, but we moved to Netapp in 2005, and have never seen a reason to leave the Netapp platform since.

The initial complexity really depends on the architecture required to support each customer's data needs.  That said, once the systems have been set up, ongoing maintenance is very straightforward.

We absolutely used a vendor team, and I would recommend that most Netapp customers do so.

We've never really calculated the ROI, but the value of Netapp's compression and deduplication technology should not be underestimated and will become all the more important as we increasingly move workloads to and from public clouds.

Great enterprise-grade IP is never inexpensive, but Netapp successfully delivers a lot of value for the money.  Netapp offers its data management solutions in an ala carte fashion which makes licensing a bit nebulous, but there are valid arguments on both sides.

Find a good channel partner.  If you are in a very large shop with plenty of storage experts, then you might go it alone.  For the rest of us, having a capable partner to help with architectural and technical considerations is a total game changer.

We use it for both our all-flash FAS and traditional FAS systems. We have a relatively large FAS 9,000 cluster.

It's easy to manage and has a good CLI, API, and GUI. It also has good role-based access control, allowing me to grant specific commands to users without full administrator privileges. It's a mature product that works well.

ONTAP encompasses the entire operating system, including the file system layout on the backend is valuable for me. 

There is room for improvement in areas related to hardware constraints—for example, more storage efficiency, especially in terms of deduplication. You don't have a global database for deduplication like some competing systems do. So, you can benefit from storage efficiency when you have a large-scale data system.

Another area of improvement is pricing. Pricing can be complex to decipher. It's not just about ONTAP; it involves hardware costs and capacity licenses.

There are some somewhat obscure features like managing QTree's and other relatively obscure things. So, I would like to see more clarity on that front.

I have been using this solution for eight years. The previous cluster data was also on top of ONTAP, but just an older version, called ONTAP 9.

Currently, we use version 9.12. 

I have seen an ROI. It's extremely reliable, very easy to manage. I've been able to reduce the number of people I have managing the storage systems because of the software.

Our pricing with discounts is reasonable, but it may vary for others. If you're paying rack rate, it might be a different situation. But I think with our discount level, the pricing is reasonable.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.