NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use it for electronic design automation, build, and regression.

• The management stack
• Performance visibility tools
• Replications

The product already has more features than we can keep up with. 

I'm looking for a performance bump.

It is very stable.

It is good from a capacity perspective, but not as good as we need from a performance perspective, but I'm hopeful going forward. At the moment, we are always running out of CPU on the controllers, even the high-end solutions.

The technical support is very good.

cDOT is more complex than 7-Mode, but we're hoping that NetApp makes it simpler as time goes on.

We used a VAR for the deployment. We have a good relationship with them.

NetApp has been our workhorse solution for more than 20 years now. It's our main solution that we use. We have been using other vendors for the high performance stuff, but I'd like to see a future where NetApp is an option in this space again.

We use NetApp for its capacity, mid-range performance in the management stack, and its features set are unparalleled. We go to Dell EMC Isilon and Pure Storage FlashBlade for raw performance on things that we can't do on NetApp today.

I would give it an eight out of ten on its feature set, maturity, and global product availability.

Up and coming vendors can provide performance or specific features. However, compared to Hardware Universe, Unified Manager, and replication, along with spectrum, from the FAS2000 that we use out our small sites to FAS9000 that we use for big regressions, these other company don't have the breadth to the feature set that NetApp has today.

We use it as a file-based storage. We store a lot of unstructured and application data. Mostly data which needs to be shared across multiple mount points.

It gives us a location to store data across multiple mount points. It gives us functionality to provide Snapshots and backup outside of traditional backup solutions.

• It is easy to use. 
• It has been stable. 
• We haven't had any problems with it. 
• Getting support from our VAR and the vendor has been good.

The stability is great.

Being able to scale out at cost-effective capabilities doesn't compare to some of our other storage solutions, but it is coming along. NetApp ONTAP could improve its scalability.

The technical support is good.

We did not have another solution previously. 

We had specific use cases for file-based storage, and that's what drove us to NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used Datalink for the integration. They've been good.

Recently, we have seen ROI.

NetApp and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We mostly chose NetApp because of its functionality. 

• Do a proof of concept (PoC).
• Understanding the high availability of the storage solutions, especially if you have rack resiliency requirements. 
• Understand how the solution is designed and configured.
• Understand what your performance requirements are.

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.

My primary use case is we have both Windows and Unix and they share file systems for compiling code. The big advantage with NetApp is the ability to file Linux symlinks in the Windows environment. 

When I came on board they had NetApp and ONTAP was old and the system was getting to its end-of-life and corporate wasn't sure which way they were going to go. They couldn't quite make a decision on whether to buy a very large unit or a small unit because we were gonna become a central hub. They decided to scrap, and what to choose landed in my lap. I decided to go with a smaller NetApp that would fit the main requirements that I needed NetApp for and I use other types of storages for VMware. My volumes, that are NFS and SIFS, there's a lot of stuff that's used both on Windows and Unix so I need the ability to maintain the permissions between the two. I get better security with ONTAP and I get better control of users space requirement because I have qtrees and quotas and then I have the masking of user accounts, NIS to AD. The other thing that's a really good bonus is that ONTAP has a deprecated NIS and a lot of other vendors are deprecated NIS.

Critical applications are not as critical as like you'd normally experience because I am R&D and it is a production environment for R&D, but I have time to build a recover. I can recover hourly from snaps, everything else I recover from tape backup because my backup uses MDMP and it'll be just as fast as Snap and storage are cheaper.

Cost of storage hasn't reduced but it's more cost effective because the very specific requirements drop the ball. Especially when it comes to user account translation from Unix to Windows. ONTAP and Dell EMC are the only two real vendors that know how to do that properly.

For me and my users, the most valuable feature is the ability to mask Unix accounts to Linux accounts.

Stability's perfect because I have two nodes, I'm not overloading the nodes because it's just R&D and it's very specific lines, so it's a lot of terabytes but we're not in petabytes. For what I do it's very stable.

Scalability is perfectly fine. Right now I only have the two nodes and one shelf. I'll be able to easily upgrade additional shelves. They gave me plenty of cabling when I got the unit so all I have to do is disconnect and reconnect the cabling and that's it.

Tech support has been pretty awesome. The only thing is that 9.4 has been presenting a couple of challenges and there was one case, for example, where I didn't want Snaps. There's a command to be able to disable the scheduler, but with 9.4 that command doesn't quite work. I ended up using a workaround which tells the scheduler that it has zero snap capability on all snap jobs.

The initial installation could've been quite easy, but there was a lot of miscommunications with professional services and there are a lot of details that they didn't quite provide which caused a very complicated installation.

A lot of Windows builds have been failing simply because when they go through the file system they can't file the symbolic links that are created on the Linux file system. Now they will resolve because ONTAP supports that.

I would rate this solution a ten. It's very easy to use. What I really like about it is it incorporates the same thing as CentOS and RHEL 7 which is the Tap commands. If you have an idea of what commands you want to use, you can tap through and figure out what you need without having to go and look for the full syntax.

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.

The primary use case is as an application file server.

It is able to restore back several points during the day if there is a production issue.

• Flexible consumption
• Being able to scale as we need to
• Data production
• SnapMirror

I would like to see Synchronize Snap mode in the next release.

Stability is good. We haven't had a severe outage in years.

Scalability is very good, especially how it has matured over the past few years in cluster mode. We can now add nodes without disruptions.

Technical support has generally improved, especially the tickets for Cloud IQ where you are able to go through and it intelligently tells you how it has changed over time. That's pretty nice.

Performance: We outgrew the box. Or, the support was ending. It was one of those two scenarios.

The initial setup was straightforward. It came in a box ready to go.

We used a reseller for the deployment, Applied Computer Solutions out of LA, who was very good. We've been using them since 1997.

The data compression and deduplication have kept us from buying more disks these past three years.

Try it out, get your hands on it, and see what it does.

Every year, I am impressed with the product. It has gotten better over the years with cluster mode, but it is not 100 percent perfect. There are certain technical limitations with being able to use it for SAN, but it's improving.

• SnapVaulting
• SnapMirroring
• Backing up

We are saving more disk space which saves us more money.

Aggregate data, compaction, and deduplication for ONTAP are its most valuable features, so we can save space.

It is stable.

We haven't had any issues with the technical support. When we've used the technical support, they have been helpful.

Previously, we have 7-Mode technology. Now, we have cDOT. We changed because now we can move volumes without any interruptions.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

They could reduce the price.

We looked at NetApp and Dell EMC. We chose NetApp because it was cheaper, more scalable and ordered.

It is a robust product. If you buy it, you will have no issues.

We use it for the security business. We use it mostly for capacity-oriented purposes, rather than performance-oriented.

It's a major product for us. We are dealing with security stuff so the encryption features in NetApp really help, as well as the deduplication. We are able to minimize the storage hardware. The compression and deduplication have helped reduce our overall cost of storage.

The valuable features include replication, Snapmirror. That's really useful for us. Also, FlexGroup is useful as it is capacity-oriented, so we can keep extending the space.

I'm waiting for end-to-end NVMe.

It's been running for years and years and we haven't seen any issues.

Scalability is good. The NAS can expand to 24 nodes for the FAS series, and for SAN it can expand to 12 nodes.

We have had to use tech support and the response has been good.

We switched from our old solution because of the features. We went with NetApp because of the redundancy, availability, scalability, and cost.

The initial setup was easy. It took just a few commands.

We used a reseller. Our experience with them was good.

We did a PoC with a few other products.

ONTAP has been in use for over 25 years, that's one of the major advantages when compared to start-ups and other companies. It's also global, NetApp has support all over and, in case of an emergency, their response is good. When there is an issue, many people jump onto the call to try to resolve it.

NVMe over Fabrics is margin-technology at the moment, but the future will be NVMe. All storage, end-to-end, will be NVMe protocol. The speed of NVMe is good. The current existing technology is SCSI-based, one command per Cube, but with NVMe you can run 65,536 commands in each Cube, meaning 65,536 Cubes. That is really fast. In terms of NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fibre Channel infrastructure, if the hardware supports it, it should be good. As the protocol improves, there should be end-to-end support for the NVMe protocol.

We don't use this product for machine-learning, or AI, real-time analytics or other groundbreaking types of applications.