NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use it for enterprise storage. We use data ONTAP to solution and enterprise storage for our core data centers. We use a lot of SnapVault and SnapMirror features for disaster recovery and daily backups to meet SLAs.

From a service level of perspective, we can restore it from a snapshot in a very short period of time. Whereas, traditional backups from some of our larger databases could take many hours to recover.

We use this solution for our mission critical applications, like SAP.

• Snapshots
• SnapCenter
• The ability to take an instant point and time capture of an application's consistent backup.

The PowerShell scripting capabilities right now are all over the place as far as which rich operating systems are supported. They all support Windows, but the HCI product with the SolidFire integration also supports PowerShell on Mac and Linux. It would be nice if the rest of the NetApp APIs caught up with PowerShell on other operating systems besides Windows. Because we're deploying more non-Windows operating systems, it would be helpful if we would be able to use that utility.

We have not been able to save space by using this product.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is a bit of a question. If we're only doing file-based storage, scalability is fantastic. If we are doing block-based storage through iSCSI or Fibre Channel, there are some significant limitations in the number of volumes and clients that you can put on a single data ONTAP cluster.

Technical support is very good.

We knew that we need to invest in a new solution after we did a total data center architecture. This is the product that we sought afterwards. We chose NetApp because it was the best fit for its price performance.

We started out in 7-Mode and evolved into cDOT. The initial 7-Mode deployment was very straightforward. Migrating 7-Mode to cDOT was much less straightforward.

We worked directly with NetApp for deployment, and our experience was good.

The solution has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage by doing an OPEX agreement with NetApp, we are paying based on utilization. Instead of fronting 30 petabytes worth of storage, we are paying for what we're using.

NVMe over Fabrics is a very interesting proposition. However, it's probably always going to be in a leap frog position with NVMe over traditional Fibre Channel infrastructure. Because if you look at a lot of the research data running NVMe over an Ethernet-based fabric, as the fabric gets congested, the total amount of footprint goes down significantly. Whereas the footprint is very consistent for the Fibre Channel fabric from start to finish, no matter how congested it becomes, and you're still capable of pushing it at reasonable speeds very close to the theoretical maximum.

With the Ethernet fabric, you also have to take into account that you only get the best speeds for NVMe over Fabrics if it's a dedicated storage Ethernet environment, and more than 90 percent of the people implementing it are going to share it with other things because they don't want to have a separate Ethernet infrastructure just for storage. If they were going to do that, they would have stuck with Fibre Channel. Theoretically, it has an off a lot of promise, but practically, not so much.

We do not use this solution for machine learning, AI, or real-time analytics at this time, but we are investigating them.

Make sure that you test it with your own data set. No one else's test will look remotely like what you will use it for.

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 are capable of implementing, migrating, and the configuration information of NetApp. We have 7-Mode and C-mode ONTAP operating systems from NetApp. 7-Mode, which is out of date and has expired from NetApp's vendor. They have created their own kernel for ONTAP, a cluster Data ONTAP. For the time being, they are only doing and providing the ONTAP cluster data, ONTAP to the customer. Customers who are using the 7-Mode data, 7-Mode ONTAP are systems that have not yet been upgraded. Whatever previous series hardware they are using, is incompatible with the C mode cluster data ONTAP. As a result, they are constantly taking care of and having to refresh their customers and providing the solution to the migratory or existing data to the new Data ONTAP system.

I've implemented many customized enterprise levels, and I've also done many migrations. Basically, storage that is currently in use, as well as a SAN protocol and how we are using it for all of our heterogeneous environments, such as VMware, Windows, Linux, and Unix. 

NetApp ONTAP is an operating system, similar to Windows, which we use for accessing the Windows client.

NetApp is storage similar to EMC. EMC is one of the storage vendors; they provide EMC, such as Dell EMC, Synology, Dell, and IBM. NetApp is one of the market's leading providers of SAN and NAS protocols to end users, as well as critical business solutions.

Currently, with NetApp application scenarios you can see that if you have a high,  business-critical application, it will require high IOPs to access this application from one of the storage options listed. Assume you're using an SAP HANA, or any other high IOPs utilization application, such as SAP, HANA, or any other tool. In these cases, NetApp has a solution. They have hardware such as an all-flash disc, which means they can use all-flash storage in between this solution fulfillment. If you have a hundred users logging in at the same time, you are using a business-critical application, it should not include any database applications such as Oracle Database. In such cases, they provide the SAN-based solution from NetApp and meet your NetApp storage requirements.

NetApp storage is also a hybrid solution. The cloud is essentially in the market right now, but no one is moving all of this data to the cloud.

If the primary data center is unavailable, you can deploy your data from the cloud vendor. This type of solution can also be obtained from NetApp storage.

With NetApp ONTAP your storage requirement is met. If you provide a solution to any of our customers, we will first take the accessories. We will collect the necessary requirements from the customers, just as we will conduct the assessment from the customer's end.

NetApp has a variety of hardware and solutions available there. Based on that, they can provide a low-level and high-level diagram and inform customers. If you want to use such a solution, such as a hardware solution and a software solution like this, you can, you can implement it at the customer, and you can use it. Like VMware, we can use it in most NetApp players, most of whom are in hardware and network storage. From a storage standpoint, NetApp is the number one partner and the number one equipment manufacturer.

If you wanted to configure the QAs policies right now, I believe you should be technical as well. If you are not aware of such devices and technology, you will not understand.

We will assess the existing infrastructure. If they want to improve the existing storage, not just for NetApp, it will be based on what is currently available and being used.

Existing IOPs will not be compatible with your current user, regardless of who is concurrently connected to the storage.

We'll assess the existing infrastructure, and if they're ready to buy any new hardware, any new solution, we'll add any additional access they'll give solid-state drives. And we will improve the performance. We will increase the number of drives and the overall memory utilization. As a result, the end-user cannot determine the exact utilization of the speed and your IOPs. we'll put it to use. 

If there is a bottleneck in the network as well, we will find out exactly what assessment is now, and we will make decisions based on that assessment. Based on the assessment, we will make recommendations for improvement and provide guidelines for exactly what we need to do.

In terms of the storage, if you implemented the storage one time and if you provided the volumes, you also provided the opportunity to learn. If you provided dials and QS policies, the client and user are not required, and they are not asking for the extension and all of these things. If you configure a quota type of information, or if some of the users are requesting data for a hundred UPR changes before the particular data, particular folder, in this case, we can do the automation involved there.

Until we get the automatic resize working properly, if a threshold is reached out to a specific percentage, such as just 90 percent, or an aggregated breach is 90 percent. This is the kind of data that the automation process can provide.

That is the fundamental thing in our NetApp storage right now. One of the things that are happening now is that a new requirement has arisen from the end-user, such as the desire to create new volumes of new LAN and present them to a specific physical host, a virtual host, a Windows host, or a Linux host. We have to create this information, this script, and just fill it in their format.

NetApp is currently providing monitoring tools. Assume you have multiple clusters in your organization, a large number of containers, and a large number of countries if you are currently using your storage. There's no need to log in to each cluster and storage separately, there is a centralized monitoring and management tool where you can simply log it into one single signup control.

It's as simple as a single click. If you wanted to manage these jobs and run the one-sum script, you didn't have to log in to each and every cluster and storage; instead, you just needed to log in once. With a single click, you can access your own information via someone else's system and manage their command tools from the network, which they have developed.

They could make the access a bit easier.

Every cluster and storage must be done manually the first time,  during the implementation and deployment phases. If it is deployed completely, you won't have to do anything manually. You must perform online on all of these automation and all of these centralized, single controls.

They need centralized controls. 

Not every organization is small, and they are using multiple locations. They are utilizing a number of DRaaS solutions. If your primary data center is down, is it due to any of these hardware or natural environment, natural disasters, human beings, or mistakes now? You don't have to worry about this in these cases. Simply click the activate button on the DR site, and your data will be deployed from the DR storage. There's nothing to be concerned about. It's simple.

You can migrate your existing data right now. As a result, the feature is now being used everywhere, and what everyone is looking for, is on a cloud right now. For example, your ONTAP system manager, cloud-only the features that are combined with that cloud. If you open your NetApp ONTAP system manager control, it will combine the cloud volumes and you can simply map your three-bucket location, three-bucket credential, and jump in your data going to the cloud.

You can either give it a second copy on the cloud network or use cloud data ONTAP. If you've wired your data to the cloud, ONTAP, AWS, Azure, or Google. So it can simply create a duplicate copy on the cloud player as well.

My primary expertise is in NetApp ONTAP. I have been using NetApp ONTAP, implementing and providing solutions for the last seven years.

The most recent version is used at my client's location. 

We had an 18, 20 cluster on NetApp that was a near DR solution, primary solution, secondary solution, such as a DR solution, or a long retention archive backup solution with disc level backup.

They have also implemented and improved the solution with a cloud vendor, such as Azure Data ONAP, AWS Data ONAP, or Google Data ONAP, all of which are major players that are partnering with NetApp to provide a cloud-based solution.

In terms of performance and reliability, NetApp ONTAP is fantastic. If you look at it, and if you go with NetApp now, everything you will get as compared to other storage, NetApp is extremely stable and reliable storage.

In comparison to IBM and Dell EMC. As a result, NetApp is a fantastic tool in my opinion. If you have to do anything, it will be simple, and you will not have to worry about your NetApp data. If you think about it, there are disasters over there, and my data will be lost or something like that, but there is nothing to worry about.

We have a scale-out and scale its solution based on the type of information and solution you are currently deploying. NetApp is deployed in many locations. If you deploy the current solution, we can do it as a scale-out and scaling kind of device. Based on that, we can expand the other data size and use it for environmental purposes.

We never contact them, but if we need assistance, such as a hardware solution or a hardware replacement, we must contact them because we do not provide the hardware. They are now providing the hardware. But, if you look at the software part of the picture, I don't want to reach out to NetApp. I'm very capable of doing it every time, both for storage and for the NetApp ONTAP system.

We work with VMware, Storage, and Nutanix NCI solutions.

Actually, complex means that everyone is an expert in a specific device or a specific product. No. How can we say it is complex, or how can we say it is simple?

From my perspective, I'll say it's simple for me, but if you're looking for the first time, no, it will appear to be quite difficult. 

From my perspective, it's simple, because I've been working with NetApp for over seven years and am familiar with its operations, and migration. Based on that, I can tell you that it is easy for me.

If you want to set up primary and secondary storage now, you only have a few days. This is a production idea type of solution. It will only take three to four days. But everything should be in its proper place. We can simply order it. But if you say that, we don't have the space, we don't have the cooling power systems, and we don't have the power supply, it will take a long time to deploy. However, if you want to deploy the storage, and if everything is already in place, it will most likely take four to five days for both site location storage.

It is a perpetual license. You are not required to purchase on a monthly or yearly basis. Whenever you purchase any type of solution software license, it should be a perpetual license that is valid for a lifetime. 

When you purchase NetApp for the first time they will provide you with the standard license, or a premium license, and even a standard bundle solution license. If you choose the premium bundle, each license will come with only that bundle.

They are offering the protocol device license for sale. If you want to use a CIP protocol, you must purchase the CIP. If you want to use the NFS protocol, you must purchase the NPS license if you want to use DFC, VME, or FCoE. If you only buy the bundle license now, each license will come in that bundle's bundle package.

NetApp storage is my primary skill; I am an L3 or L4 on NetApp.

I'm building the NetApp from scratch based on what others need, and which one must be used, However, NetApp currently has a pre-deployed ONTAP version, that includes a pre-deployed ONTAP version in NetApp storage. They are assigning devices and hard discs to each of the controllers. They cannot have an operating system based on that request. They have been deployed. Aside from that, we will need to connect to your laptop using this console cable, serial console cable. We simply need to assign that to the serial console.

If you configure the management IP, we can put it in their networks and take the RDP or partition from your network. That is any location on your network. From there, we can simply configure the cluster. We can set these up with the data aggregate, volumes, learn and share, Q3 and quota. If they wanted to learn about the AFC solution, we simply need to configure the fiber channel cables and connect them to the SAN network and cable. If you wanted to create the zoning, analyze, and provide to a physical virtual.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

My primary use case for ONTAP is for VMware. We also use it for exchange and file storage.

ONTAP's improving my organization by allowing us to automate. The ability to automate day to day tasks, when using NetApp storage, frees up more time for forecasting, troubleshooting, and more planning.

The primary features that are most important to me, currently for ONTAP, are stability, first and foremost, and the ability to automate. ONTAP offers me PowerShell cmdlets and I can use Ansible via API to automate our day to day tasks. Previously, it was all the other software like, SnapManager, and Snapshotting, which a lot of other vendors didn't have.

I would like to see them have a continued focus on stability because there's so much software involved that it'd be really nice to just continue to have developers focus on that. It's the most important thing in the end, and other than that, I think they're working on a lot of the stuff that I personally am looking for, as well as more Ansible modules, and PowerShell modules.

Some of their products have been really good for us, on certain versions. We've run into a bunch of verts, though. That's NetApp's word for their bugs. Stability has been the main complaint that I've had with the product. Because it's so feature-rich and has so much software related to it, it does come with a decent amount of bugs so we do a lot of upgrades to patch bugs.

Scalability, for us, has been pretty good with ONTAP, since they went from 7-mode to ONTAP. Now that we can cluster environments, and have multiple nodes in the cluster, we've been able to scale to the point that our organization requires, as far as the capacity and performance.

We don't go directly to NetApp, but when we do interface with NetApp directly, we've had a pretty good support experience. There have been times where it's been difficult, depending on who's on staff at that time, and how long it takes to escalate. Recently, we've worked with our account reps, to nail down how to escalate immediately, and since we did that, we've had a lot better experience.

We knew we needed a new solution because I've always worked with NetApp, although we had another solution with a different company, and it came down to feature set. The solution we had didn't have SnapMirror, Snap plug-ins, and integration with VMware at the time, and  SRM. At that point, it was the feature set that made us switch over to ONTAP. At my current company, it's more of deciding to stay with the technology, and that's because of the existing feature set and ability to automate with it.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. That's where the reseller provides a lot of value. They have access to NetApp tools. NetApp would also have access to that, but we tell them the requirements, and what we're looking for, and what we're using it for. They come up with config, we look over it, maybe make some changes, go back and forth, and then, come up with the final config. We've had a good experience with that.

We used Datalink, and it's been okay. Mixed reviews with that. Delay in escalation is the only complaint there. Otherwise, they do provide additional stuff that NetApp wouldn't provide out of the box such as architecture and design help. In that aspect, it's been really great, but for support, it's kind of been easier just to go direct.

We've seen return on investment for ONTAP specifically on the performance recently. Where we had our file storage solution sitting on a hybrid storage solution and we were having continuous performance issues, as our workloads went up we were able to put in an 8300 all-flash array. Since we've put that in, we've been under one-millisecond latency, and that's allowed us to not have delays in some of our EDI transactions. Our end customer integrates and interfaces with that technology. Fewer outages equal more business, more profit, more revenue, and immediate ROI. We've been really happy with the new All Flash hardware solutions.

I would rate ONTAP as an eight. From 7-mode, they've come a long way, and I really like the features that they include. I'll give it an eight and not a ten because we run into a lot of bugs which have resulted in some issues, like outages, so I have to dock it there. As far as feature set and automation go it's a great product.

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'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 have an SAP HANA migration project going on. We bought NetApp a couple of years back, and our first solution was to migrate the data to the HANA boxes.

In terms of mission-critical applications, the first phase of migrating the legacy systems was to migrate all the mission- and business-critical applications to the new platform. The customer has a lot of legacy applications. Most of the mission-critical applications have been moved. The only mission-critical application that is left is the website application that the customer uses. Once that is done, all of the mission-critical applications will be in NetApp.

The customer we have been working for has a lot of legacy products, a lot of legacy hardware and software. Their current path is towards SAP, and the back-end databases are always HANA. There has been a very big improvement in the performance.

There has also been a big improvement in the user experience. Earlier, it would take something like 14 seconds for a page to load. Now, that has improved to about six seconds or seven seconds. That's a big difference from the user's perspective. The ultimate aim, when all the legacy has been migrated to the new platform, is to have a two or three-second wait time for a page to load. We are gradually moving towards that. So overall, performance has improved a lot.

It also has helped us reduce our overall cost of storage. We migrated all our former SAN environment to NAS storage, and that has reduced the OpEx cost a lot.

The most valuable feature is the throughput. You tend to get to your data very quickly. That's why we decided, eventually, to move into NetApp, because of the speed.

Also, as a support engineer, this solution is easy to use, compared with SAN storage.

We have been talking to them about the monitoring tools and performance improvement tools which would enhance it a bit.

In a session, here at NetApp Insight 2018, I heard that OCI, which is one of the tools that is becoming more robust, will include more things that the host team can understand and make use of. So things that we're looking for are getting added.

We had initial hiccups. Initially, we thought it was because of the way the knowledge was transitioned from the earlier support team to the new support team. We even doubted why we migrated. Later on, we learned it had to do with configuring it in the right way. Once you have everything set up properly, you should see the performance and stability that you hoped for. We are on the right track.

We have not had to scale the product because the procurements are done when we migrate from one application to another. We haven't had to scale much. We will probably experience scaling in the coming days.

NetApp technical support is really good. They help a lot with all our questions. They know that we are new customers. NetApp has always been there. You raise a ticket and they respond right away.

We were having trouble during the initial phases of the project and NetApp was there to help us out with the data migration. The initial phases of data migration had a lot of challenges, especially because we had a lot of legacy data involved. NetApp helped us a lot in getting it done.

It was never straightforward. Even NetApp struggled a bit, because the environment was so complex, because of its legacy nature. We were migrating from a very old architecture to a newer SAP-based system.

The first year was not a great time, between a lot of email exchanges, a lot of escalations, etc. It's helping a lot that we're growing in confidence and the support team now knows our architecture behind the scenes. To an extent, the good thing about it is that the engineers have been the same most of the time. When we raise a ticket, they already know the background and how to work it out.

It's been a journey. I believe in another one or two years, it will be a stable environment. But the initial days were really complex.

We had consultants on the job. It was very good. They helped a lot. It was like a partnership between Tata and NetApp to do the migration from the old SAN environment. Consultants were in-house, onsite, to help, and they are really helpful.

Especially for this customer, NetApp was the only option.

I suggest involving NetApp in your solutioning, so that they better know what to propose and what procurements need to be done in the initial stages. Otherwise, you are looking at wasting a lot of time, the kind where you are in the middle of a project, and you realize, "Oh, this is not what I want, I want to be able to scale up more," or something like that. You have to involve them as consultants at the initial stage so that the right things are bought. Their involvement is very important in terms of the architecting, especially if you are building up a new environment.

We don't use the solution for machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, or other kinds of ground-breaking applications for storage.

We have the lowest version. We still have to do a couple of upgrades to have the latest OCI at the ONTAP level. I would rate what we have now as a six out of ten but that is probably going to climb in the next year or so; it will probably be a better number.

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.