NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use this storage device for databases, storing databases, and VMware. When it comes to databases ,we have Oracle, SQL, and mission-critical applications. Therefore, we need very good response times, and we get very good response times from NetApp All Flash systems.

Queries are being completed in less time. For example, we have seen a three times improvement when it comes to running a query. If query used to take an hour, now it takes 10 to 20 minutes.

• It does both file and block storage.
• The compression works well. We get a 3:1 ratio.

• We would like to be able to provide feedback immediately after receiving technical support.
• Make it a simpler. Our entire industry is moving towards simplicity or automation, we spend a lot of time doing storage allocation. It's too complex.
• Have integration with other storage providers. 
• I would like cloud integration where we can send data to the cloud. Engineers should be able to click on one button (integrated with their phones), and move the data from NetApp to cloud.

It's a stable product. So far, we have not seen any issues. It has worked as expected, meeting our expectations.

It scales up, so I don't see any issues with scaling the system.

When it comes to support, we usually go into NetApp chat and request help. Most of the time, our interaction with their support is nice and they are willing to help.

Sometimes, you have a team of people, where 10 or 15 people are working, and you are not going to get the same result from everyone. It happens when we call support sometimes that we do not get what we need, then we work with the manager.

ONTAP has helped us reduce the cost of storage by a lot. We were using IBM XIVs (hybrid system) and were paying high costs, except for the maintenance. Now, we are on all-flash and we pay less than what we used to pay.

ONTAP is an operating system, but we also wanted to invest in all-flash. We evaluated multiple products and we liked ONTAP's performance and its cost.

The initial setup is too complex. It should be one click. Anyone with basic knowledge of storage should be able to set it up. Instead, there are too many moving pieces. You have to do plaster configuration, north configuration, and port configuration, and these things should be fully automated. Customers should be answering a few questions and system should be ready for application on user portals.

The overall implementation was done by a reseller, IS. 

We see ROI, but I was expecting more. Right now, what happens is I have a team of 10 or 12 people, and the investment is going into managing them instead of doing something new.

Moving to all-flash from hybrid, we brought the response time down from 10 milliseconds to some milliseconds.

We evaluated Pure Storage and NetApp. Cost was a value factor in selecting NetApp.

We are in a testing phase at this moment for machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics . We have a team who is testing Docker on this.

In future, we will be using NVMe over Fabric. At the moment, we are still immature.

I have about 500 volumes that I manage, and I love it.

It's a good thing to have a reliable storage. Our whole business relies on it. Our two main mission-critical systems, which are EBS system (Oracle Financials) and Banner, which is our database for student services, are stored on NetApp. We need it to be reliable, efficient, and quick, which it is. 

They run on AIX and are stored on ONTAP.

My experience with NetApp is its very easy to learn and intuitive. I can figure out just about everything. 

I love the System Manager. I don't even need to remember commands. I love its ease of use.

I wish tech support would be better. I wish I could talk to somebody more easily and qualified, because this is way it is supposed to be. At the moment, you talk to an entry level people, and sometimes they know less than you. You waste two to three hours with them. Finally, they send you to a higher level person who  knows something. This is something many companies need to improve.

It is very reliable. We have not lost one byte of data. There was even an occasion about three months ago where one of my nodes went down. It was recovered and nobody even noticed.

I don't worry about stability. Even when a disc goes bad, I know it will replace itself. NetApp will send me an email, “We'll send you this tomorrow.”

Scalability is very good. Now that we have an AFF A300, it will be even better. You can add more to storage on live. Before, when we had the 3220s, you only had two nodes, so you had to buy another two nodes to scale. 

Sometimes, tech support is slow to answer. However, I'm seeing this as a trend in all companies, even IBM.

I've been using ONTAP for about ten years. I started with the 3140s, then went to the 3240s, and now, I just upgraded to the AFF A300. 

I went from an 8.17 node to 9.3 cluster nodes. This was a big change. I still have a lot of things to learn. For example, the migration was done using the 7-Mode migration tool, which was tough.

We used a reseller for NetApp for the deployment. They were good.

I have been able to save space using ONTAP, particularly now on the new system. By default, you get compression, deduping, etc. We have saved at least 20 percent in terms of space.

We received a super deal for our new machine, so we were happy with the price.

I did not consider anyone else. I love NetApp.

There are some new companies out there, but you take a chance on them. With mission-critical systems, you need a stable company. You cannot play around. NetApp systems will work when things go wrong.

My experience with ONTAP has been very good. It is very reliable.

I might use ONTAP for machine learning. AI. and real-time analytics in the future. Next year will be very interesting as we upgraded to an AFF A300, so that's a new ballgame. I wouldn't mind getting into the cloud.

I am not using NVMe yet. Maybe next year, I will venture into that. I am only using Fibre Channel and iSCSI right now.

I work for an oil and gas company. We go out to the field and get oil from the ground. The primary use case is for development and preparation for production. 

We're able to gather information, and put it all together to find out where the best place to drill would be. Also, speed. Our databases work a lot faster, probably 18 or 20 percent faster than previously. The speed has increased the performance. 

My colleagues get their information files without bringing down SQL.

It's very fast, NetApp is always dependable, so if we have an issue, they're very responsive.

The new release has a lot of features that will save us space and therefore, money. The inline deduplication and compression are really nice. 

They could lower prices so my management doesn't complain about cost. Other than that, I'm always happy with the releases. 

It's 100 percent. We've never had any issues with it. 

It's 100 percent. It's easy to add additional storage disks. 

I would rate tech support at nine-plus out of ten. It's not a ten because I have to wait when I call. I can wait for 20, 30 minutes before I get to somebody who can actually help me. Normally NetApp identifies the issue before I get out of bed and has a solution already planned. 

We were coming to end-of-life with our old solution, and this was the next generation that was available, so we would have upgraded regardless. This was the best option.

It was straightforward. It's built on previous NetApp operating systems. I understood it without knowing the new generation. 

We used NetApp Professional Services, and it was very good. I worked with them beforehand and gave them my plan. Any corrections were made beforehand. We've done it twice and it's been very good.

I know they have saved time, and time equals money. We also have more space in the data center. It's a smaller footprint by half a rack. That's a lot less money and a lot less cooling.

We looked at Dell EMC, but we would never go with them. They don't have good support and it's gotten worse over the years since Dell and EMC merged. Instead of two bad support systems, they have now combined it into one huge, bad support system. NetApp's technical support and proven stability are a lot better than them. We've been using NetApp for around 15 years and we've always had good results with it.

It's an advance from what we used before, and a lot faster. It doesn't take a lot of learning to start using it.

Take a look at NetApp and get the Professional Services involved. If you're coming from a different vendor, they'll be able to assist with getting the data moved over. That would be my main point.

We are a NetApp distributor. We offer assistance for banking solutions, energy companies, and companies that do retail.

We distribute Netapp as well as a variety of other products, like VMware, for example. We use all our products to provide our customers with a whole solution.

Efficiency. We have found that its efficiency has reduced the amount of storage that the customers need, while keeping the same amount of data. 

They constantly develop new features that provide the customers with ways they can better use the system.

Deployment guides. If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides.

It has almost 100% stability.

The solution is very scalable. We have found that the ability to add other nodes to the online cluster during production has been really useful for customers.

NetApp has very good technical support across all of their products. They have many ways to contact support and you receive support almost instantly.

The customers like the support as well. The customer has on-site support with a four-hour response. They always have support as they need it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to deploy.

I'm a presales engineer. The way that I help customers is by architecting their infrastructure which helps them to decide which is the best solution for them. I also help plan the future of their infrastructure, the way they're going to be expanding the systems or the way they're going to renew their systems.

With the efficiencies of NetApp, the customer is going to be able to reduce the amount of storage they need. This is the way that the customer assesses the amount of money they invest in the solution.

I think because of the integration with the other products we sell, like VMware, for example, that's why they have us use NetApp as a storage solution. We sell a lot of security products that have integration with NetApp and we also have integration with Microsoft and VMware which have integration with NetApp.

It's an excellent product. They always have new solutions for their customers. They also have good integration with other partners like Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle.

Compared with their competitors, NetApp has a good advantage with their new development and new functionalities. The new platforms are competitive with other storage solutions. NetApp has better integration with all their solutions. They have only one interface for all their products as well as the same operating system. It's really easy for the customer to handle and to administer the solution.

It is the easiest way to backup, restore data, and access data along with keep it secure. It has an easy interface to manage all the data.

It has made it easy to deal with the scalability in our organization along with the mass increase of data. We avoid loss of important data and can recover it completely. NetApp has made this challenge for us easy.

• Saving data and backing up it, up to the minute.
• 100% guarantee restoring data. 
• Saving money because of the dedupe technologies.
  

I would like more security against the malwares, spyware, and ransomware. I feel like ONTAP is a bit lacking in this area.

It is very stable. You can trust NetApp almost 100% that it will work fine. The disks are stable and our data is safe with NetApp.

If we want to change things in models, such as add, replace, and adjust to another client, it is very easy. This is a good thing.

They have very good tech support who always answers our questions and troubleshoots our issues. They're great. It is easy to escalate, and they have friendly people. They will help you all the time, every hour in a day.

NetApp was our first storage solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used Encore Technology Group. Our experience was not very good as they lost data, which was a critical mistake for us. They also did not respond in time.

Because of the dedupe technologies and Data ONTAP servers, we have saved 20% on hardware. This is a lot of money for us.

While it is going to cost a lot of money, their technologies is worth it.

We also considered HPE and IBM, but NetApp was the cheapest, friendliest, and most accessible.

It is friendly to use and manage. They are very good in backup and restoring 100% of things up to the minute. It's very easy for regular users. 

We are using it for the cloud and storage: NAS and SAN.

• SnapVault
  
• Snapshot
• Deduplication
• The replication progress
• It is easy to migrate data from one storage array to another storage array using SnapMirror technologies.
  

If they could come up with some more automation, this would be helpful.

I have never had an outage.

Scalability is good. You can expand the storage with disks, which is good.

I haven't had to contact technical support, but their support is 24/7 if I needed it.

We were previously using NetApp MetroClusters. We have tested in the lab, NetApp MetroClusters, and have run into issues. I have come up with tie breakers, which are like witnesses our virtual storage arrays. One storage fails and another storage array will be active all the time. In this case, if a tie breaker is down, NetApp doesn't know how to deal with the data. It gets confused. NetApp should come up with a solution for this, such as a physical witness.

It's very easy. It's not complex.

We used NetApp for the deployment. They know how to deal with issues and follow best practices. It's always better to have them install the storage.

With other vendors, we need to buy a separate license for a third-party storage, but with NetApp, you don't need to buy a license, as it will come up with the storage. 

I can recommend NetApp. If you need a solution, use NetApp.

We're using it for all of our enterprise architecture. So, we use everything from CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel LUNs, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and iSCSI. Therefore, we're pretty much using the gamut. We have a little bit of SAS storage tier, SATA storage tier, and SSD as well.

It makes our organization more efficient with more scale. We have the ability to tier off the storage and ensure storage is efficiently utilized so we can get rid of idle data and data that is not required. Then, we can show and prove what needs and should be used.

We do use this solution for mission-critical applications.

Its flexibility is its most valuable feature. It has the ability to mix with the different requirements that we have to provide, such as some I/O intensive services and a lot of archive services. It has the ability to tailor tiers according to what we need and put the right services in the right place.

One of the things that we were looking at being able to do a FlexGroup NFSv4. Right now, 9.4 goes up to NFSv3, but if we could get the NFSv4 solution on a 9.4, or a future release, that would be awesome.

Stability is great. We have a six-node cluster. We've done head swaps. We've had failures and the cluster has always stayed up and the data has always been available. We haven't lost any data either.

It is very easy to scale, so we started with a four-node cluster and added it to a six-node cluster. We've also done some other modifications in between.

This solution helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. Because idle data which was residing on high cost tiers, once we sifted the ONTAP, we were able to scale and place it where it should be, then offload the data which was unnecessary to different locations.

Technical support is awesome. We call them up, and they're there. We receive answers and get what we need right away. We have four hour delivery, as it's based on our contracts, but we do receive outstanding support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There was a guide of how everything goes together. Therefore, use the guide, put it together, and you're up and running.

During the initial install, we had a reseller who came in, helped us build it out, etc. They were awesome getting us up and running. Now, that it's up and running, even though they don't have access to our systems, but we can still call them and get assistance, look into different changes, opportunities to scale in or our, and upgrade as we need to.

We have been able to save space by using the solution.

Look into the product's reliability. You will definitely see an increase in your business performance if you use it.

We don't current employ any NVMe. We have SSD. We're looking at NVMe potentially on some of our higher IOP operations, but we don't deploy it right now.

We use SaaS and also have a Hadoop cluster which are backed up by ONTAP storage. These are for doing a lot of data analytics and analyzing different data streams. AI is soon to come.

Our primary use case is network-attached storage.

It's much easier and faster to deploy our storage with ONTAP than some of the other solutions that we have.

We use it for everything from payroll to home directories.

• Availability
• Resiliency
• Ease of use

It stays up. My people can easily manage it. It just works for us. It has been very stable. Upgrades have worked. We've had very minor to no real problems with it.

We would like to have additional cloud integration and the ability to Snapshot directly to Amazon. This would help us reduce costs, provide us additional disaster recovery, and give us a site that's not owned by us.

It has been very stable. Otherwise, we wouldn't have put our mission-critical applications on it.

We can do upgrades without taking it down. We have had nodes fail and people just kept working.

It has scaled really well for us. We started off with several nodes and are up to about 16 node clusters now.

Support has been great. We also have professional services in our offices, and our professional service guys have been awesome. They are super-fast in finding problems and fixing them.

We switched solutions because were at capacity as far as size. NetApp was also cheaper and easier for us to deploy.

The initial setup was very straightforward and simple. Put an IP on it, give it some passwords, and we configured from there with strips and other stuff.

We deployed with an in-house. The experience was great. We had enough experience in-house that it worked.

This solution has helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. We're part of the NetApp OnDemand, where we lease it. Also, it doesn't take as many people to administer the solution as some other products.

Because of its manageability, we have fewer people managing it.

Our short list was Dell EMC and NetApp. NetApp was more familiar to our people, and they came in cheaper per gigabyte.

It has been amazingly easy for us to use.

We hope will be using this solution for machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics in the future.

We are not using NVMe yet.