NetApp SnapCenter Reviews

It's used as a backup and recovery software. Some of our clients are using the solution for private cloud primary backup.

It has very fast backup and can handle a huge amount of data. It also enables fast recovery. 

1. It would be a good idea to add date support and improve on resource management, not the backup itself, but in the manageability. Groups might be helpful for each site or data center so that we know a given data center has these resources while another data center has those resources. It's not always easy to group hosts by type.
2. A host is trying to set up a connection with every SVM configured on SnapCenter Server. This is not good, especially if, like in our environment, each SVM is configured for particular department and is beyond a firewall. As far as I know developers are aware of this issue.
3. It would be nice to have native plugins not only for Oracle and MS SQL. Community plugins can cover your needs, but I'd like to have more functionality.
4. I would like to have more friendly logging. Sometimes this could save time for our team and allow us not to create new case in support.
   

If nothing changes it works fine. But we faced some issues twice after we upgraded to next SnapCenter release. One time Vmware was affected and one time it was Oracle on Linux. Before update procedure, you should test any new release properly in a test environment!

It can cover much more than we have now. Scalability is a strong point. We are able to monitor it through a dashboard and reports.

We have used tech support and it has helped us in every case. It's very good.

We did have a previous solution. We switched to this one because it allows us to have a better RTO/RPO and the solution is included in our bundle.

The install is very simple. I just need to know the requirements and then I can install it. The number of staff required for deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on the organization. 

We evaluated SnapCenter vs NetBackup and SnapCenter vs Veeam.

SnapCenter is really good for VMware, it's really nice. It's also very good for SQL and Oracle. But you need to test it properly each time because there are times you will need to reconfigure your infrastructure.

We have plans to increase usage of this product. It currently covers about half of our infrastructure.

I would rate SnapCenter at seven out of ten. It's very good, allowing us to do fast backup and recovery, but like every product, it has its flaws, limitations and it has a room for improvement. It may not be useful for certain companies. But anyway, when I look at other backup solutions, I have not yet seen a product that is a ten out of ten.

We use it in our managed services for customers. We back up customer data from systems that we manage for them.

Because of the Role-Based Access Control, customers don't have to call our managed services representatives to do a restore, they can do it themselves. It's faster, easier, and more convenient.

The most valuable feature is the RBAC, the Role-Based Access Control. In our managed services, we can have different layers of security. Our customers can see their backups and some customers can do their own restores. But they are not able to mess up their schedules or data from other customers.

The reporting could be better. It's good, but reporting of the jobs could be better.

The stability has been good.

We haven't found any problems running multiple customers on it with large environments, so it scales well.

Tech support is good, in general: good to very good.

We used Virtual Storage Console from NetApp before and we used a third-party enterprise backup solution. We switched to SnapCenter because of ease of use and cost.

The initial setup is very easy. It usually takes about a day.

We have a template for the design of the servers and then there's a little bit of customer-specific customization going on, but only a little: The scheduling is customer-specific.

We only need one person, an engineer, for deployment and maintenance of SnapCenter.

Pricing is very good because if you already have NetApp controllers, then it's included. There's no added cost for SnapCenter. 

Do a PoC to see if it's a viable product for you.

In our company, we have about 20 users of SnapCenter. They are managed services backup administrators. Our management also uses the reporting. On the customer side, there are also have the people responsible for the virtual environment and the application owners. Those are the types of people that are using the product.

We are a NetApp partner. For our systems, we are using SnapCenter only for testing purposes. For customers, we started to install when it was SnapManager, quite some years ago. We have many installations with SnapManager and some installations with SnapCenter. We're at the stage of migrating from SnapManager to SnapCenter.

Our customers primarily use SnapCenter for SQL Server and VMware.

When we're talking about databases, it gives us a fast way to make clones and test environments.

Restoring and cloning are easy to do.

I'm waiting for SnapCenter for hybrid solutions. Right now, we only have SnapManager for hybrid. I need agents for that. People are looking to install SnapCenter in a SQL environment, but where they're running SQL on Hyper-V and using virtual files. Currently, we don't have support for hybrid. We can't do that.

People are also asking about SnapCenter for SharePoint. There was a SnapManager, but SnapManager is being brought to an end and now there is nothing for SharePoint. We don't have the ability to do snapshots for SharePoint.

Now, the stability is good. The first release was not very stable, but now it's okay.

I haven't had any issue with scalability. In our country and for our customers, it's okay. We haven't used it in the cloud yet. I think it's quite good.

Technical support is good, but it just depends on how difficult the case is. 

I have problems with the documentation, for connecting new shelves to the old FAS models. The case is marked "resolved," but I haven't received the documentation.

We used SnapManager. We switched because SnapCenter provides centralized management. It's also a newer product and it supports new databases and operating systems.

I think the initial setup is straightforward, but it depends on your skills. For us, it's straightforward.

The installation time depends on how many agents I need for the number of databases there are or how many systems. But in general, the initial configuration takes something like two hours.

We also provide SnapVault and Veeam. I'm a NetApp specialist, I don't install these other products. We have another person who does.

Our customers generally have one or two users using SnapCenter. They aren't very big companies which have a dedicated SQL or& Oracle or VMware administrator. Most of the users are DB admins and system administrators. For deployment and maintenance, two is a good number, so that there is some redundancy. But one person is enough to install it and maintain it.

I would rate SnapCenter at eight out of ten, because it doesn't have functionality for Hyper-V, etc. I need more agents and support for more systems.

We back up Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange 2016.

What we found was that we weren't backing up all of our SQL servers. We have now gotten to 100 percent compliance in backing up all of our data, and it's regularly measurable: daily, weekly, and monthly.

Where we had issues before, spread out in multiple products, like SnapManager For SQL and SnapManager for Exchange, now it's all under one umbrella. It's made backups and reporting much easier for us.

Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature. We used to have our SQL DBAs each do backups on their servers and there were some inconsistencies across our few dozen SQL servers. What we found is that having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on.

And the reporting feature has been particularly beneficial to upper management. Everyone wants to make sure that our most critical data is backed up on a frequent basis. When you do manual backups, you do not get the benefit of seeing successes and failures and how often you have to do restores. With SnapCenter, you get all of that.

The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support. Other than that, it's been a pretty easy product to deal with.

It's very stable. Once it was in place and we had confirmation from your backup targets, the only issue we saw was due to a .NET upgrade on the client. That was fixable on the Microsoft side.

We've thrown twice as many servers at it than at SnapCenter 2.0 and it doesn't seem to be impeded, performance-wise.

We do have plans to increase usage of SnapCenter. Currently, we don't have any Oracle in SnapCenter but we plan on backing up our entire Oracle environment. That's something that is being manually backed up right now, but we'd like SnapCenter to take care of all of that.

The support has been phenomenal. NetApp's support is the best. They always solve the problem. They are always treating us like we're their only customer. When we had something that was a problem, that they hadn't experienced, they coordinated a call with the developers of the product and we ended up getting it fixed. We encountered something that they hadn't seen before. It ended up being a patch for other people. It's been a fantastic process and product for us.

For Oracle, we do manual backups. For the other platforms, we would use a combination of VSC, SnapManager for Exchange, and Snap Manager for SQL. We switched to put everything under one umbrella and not have multiple, fragmented points of administration.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Then, we ended up going from SnapCenter 2.0 to SnapCenter 4.0 and we didn't do a straight upgrade. We did a separate server because we wanted, as an organization, to get away from Windows Server 2008. Transitioning those backups over to the other server was almost equally easy as setting up a new server.

Deployment of SnapCenter 2.0 took about three weeks. SnapCenter 4.0 was done
in under two weeks.

Our implementation strategy was to put this on the virtual machine that we could move
from data center to data center. Because we're a virtual environment, with multiple data centers, the ability to have SnapCenter be a plugin, and not like an agent, that reports back to a specific IP address, was very helpful for us. The strategy was to get the entire environment covered. This allowed us to do that.

It took two people for deployment: Myself as team lead and my senior engineer who's familiar with the NetApp product line. We have four storage engineers who manage it and their roles are data protection and senior-level engineers.

We did it by ourselves.

It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number. If we purchased a certain size of NetApp hardware, SnapCenter was included for free.

I'd recommend SnapCenter, if you're currently a NetApp shop and you're using a variety of other backup systems like NetBackup or others. This is much easier to administer and maintain and upgrade.

Our primary use case is VM backup and our secondary use case is backup from all databases like SQL.

Before, we had to go to the storage CLI or to the SQL Server to check if backups ran correctly. Now, we have everything in one central management view, we don't have different views. That's the main benefit. I don't think that it really changed our organization. It's more for us, as administrators. We save a lot of time. It takes us about 50% less time for the same checks.

Also, if we have to create a new backup for a new SQL server, for example, the policy is all ready and we can add it there with just a few clicks. Before, it was a lot more difficult.

The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place.

It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter. You don't need to go to SnapCenter to restore a single VM, for example. You just click on VM and you can restore it completely.

We are struggling a bit with the permissions and roles. We are not sure if there is an issue at our end, if we didn't get set things up correctly, as per plan. When you have role-based access, for example, it's a bit of a problem that the person who creates the backup job is the owner of it. We are struggling a bit with this, that everyone has the same view and the same permissions in there.

I don't think it's really an issue with SnapCenter. I think it's more that we aren't using it correctly.

In terms of additional features, if it was possible to create backups on non-NetApp storage, that would be helpful. For example, if you have a standalone host, you cannot back it up with SnapCenter. You have to make sure that everything is on NetApp. It would be nice if you could also back up systems that are not on NetApp storage. For example, if you have a standalone ESX host, and it is running a few VMs, it would be nice if you could back up those VMs, even if those files don't rely on NetApp storage. It would be a nice feature if it was possible to back up those VMs. At the moment, we are using another backup solution, Commvault Simpana, for those situations.

Normally, it's very stable. We don't have a lot of issues with it. We once had a case where everything looked good, all the services were running, but we were not able to access the management console. We still don't know, up to today, why there was this problem. The page was blank. Then, a few days later it just started to work again. That was a bit strange. But usually, it's very stable.

There are big possibilities to scale it up, of course, with all those roles. The idea behind roles is that you can give control for backing up and restoring to the person who makes the database, to the database owners. They can restore their databases. We don't have to do it ourselves. So it's very scalable.

We haven't used tech support for SnapCenter. There is a lot of documentation and best-practices guides on NetApp. We use those, and then, if we have questions, we ask our partner because they already have experience with setups like this, which always makes it a bit quicker. We also have a support contract with them, with a few hours in there. Usually it's quicker for us to ask our partner, rather than call NetApp tech support.

We switched this year to SnapCenter. We got a new all-flash MetroCluster. For that reason, we switched to SnapCenter and we left the technology of SnapManager for Oracle Databases and for the SQL backups, as well as the Virtual Storage Console we used earlier for VMware backups.

Another reason we switched is that before we had three tools. Now, we have all those in one, with the possibility to also back up other types of databases like SAP HANA or MySQL, etc. That was another the main point in choosing SnapCenter.

Finally, I expect NetApp will cancel support for SnapManager in the future and will only go with SnapCenter.

The initial setup is pretty easy. Also, with the plug-in registration in vCenter, it's very easy. Depending on the database you want to back up, it could be a bit more difficult. For example, we tried to create a backup of SAP HANA systems with SnapCenter, but there was an issue with the single-tenant and multi-tenant installations of SAP HANA. At the moment, it's not possible to back up multi-tenant databases from HANA with SnapCenter. I think that's an issue on the SAP side, because there is no backup solution on the market, with Snapshots, etc., for this scenario.

The time for deployment depends on how many different backup policies you have. If you have a complex situation, it will probably take longer. In our business it's pretty easy. We have just one policy for all the types of databases so we were really quick. It took about two days to get it running and working.

There were two of us involved in our company. One is more for backups and I'm more on the primary storage. It's difficult to draw a border between us, because there are the Snapshots and we have to make sure that they are labeled correctly and that the backup is working correctly. The two of us work to maintain it.

We did not use a third-party, for the most part, but we have a good storage partner, BNC, Switzerland. We had a few questions and they were able to help us out with the SnapMirror labels and the like, which didn't work at the beginning. But I think it's possible to do it on your own.

I'm not sure we've seen a direct ROI, but if you spend less time on the tasks of checking backups, that is also a return on investment. Of course, it's also cheaper if you can use the license that is already included, rather than if you have to buy another backup solution. And SnapCenter is fully integrated.

The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array.

We didn't look into other solutions because we have the licenses with NetApp. If you buy the storage cluster, you get a premium-license bundle, so SnapCenter is completely licensed with the storage. With other backup solutions, you have to buy licenses for the data volume or the count of instances. That was another main point. We decided to try it, since it was included, and we were happy with it.

Go for it and have a look at it. You don't really need much time for the implementation, but you have to make sure that you have a bit of know-how on how the Snapshot technology from NetApp works with the SnapMirror labels, etc. That is very important.

At the moment, there are three persons using it in our company: My backup colleague, the database specialist also has access, and I. In a future step, we are planning to move our Exchange backups to SnapCenter. We are using about 60 percent of the functionality, and we are planning to go up to between 80 and 100 percent.

I would rate SnapCenter at a good seven out of ten. As I mentioned, one time it didn't work because the page was blank. That was a bit strange. We don't really know what happened there. And the other issue is the roles; it's not very user-friendly. So we have to check this out in the documentation first. Those are the two main points for why I only give it a seven.

We use it for VMware. We haven't integrated any of our SQL or Exchange solutions with SnapCenter. We haven't tested that yet. I think there is a plugin for Oracle but we haven't tested that either. The primary thing we have been using in SnapCenter is the ability to integrate with our ESXi environment.

We have about 300 virtual machines, including virtual desktops. That's going to be increased to about 400 or 500, once the projects in the pipeline are rolled out.

Our organization is strengthened because we have NetBackup and we tend to use SnapCenter as the primary backup and recovery software. NetBackup has proven to be more the long-term archiving or storage solution.

The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters.

The integration with the vCenter could be better in the sense that the only plain view you have is the data stores. In previous versions of the plugin for the VSC, before Snap Center, you could view the virtual machine that you wanted to snapshot. It would include all the data stores that were in part of that specific virtual machine. Now, you select the data store and it should tell you whether or not there's a virtual machine you're looking for included in that resource group or that data store.

I don't know if the roadmap includes SnapCenter for Hyper-V. We tend to have a lot of Hyper-V and we also have a Hyper-V environment and that is backed up through SnapManager for Hyper-V. So now we have two management consoles and we would ideally like to leverage SnapCenter to include Hyper-V.

I understand that restoring directly from SnapCenter would be a bit complex. And they have the plugin. For me, the two obvious features to add would be that the plugin in vCenter should be more granular, enabling you to select what you want to back up in the resource groups. And I would like to see a plugin for Hyper-V.

I haven't had any issues with its stability. I had issues with the underlying virtual machine, but as far as SnapCenter itself goes, it has been reliable.

I haven't scaled it.

NetApp technical support is struggling. I've been using NetApp for several years. Maybe it's because support is outsourced, but I wish there were different degrees of support we could call into. I find that I'm starting on "page one" with support and I'm answering the same questions over and over. It takes a while before the ticket actually reaches someone who has the required level of experience and we can actually start working on the problem.

I feel there is definitely room for improvement in tech support.

We're using NetBackup. We haven't replaced any solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. The only problem, the only complexity we had, was when using SnapCenter cluster environment configuration. We have network load balancing between SnapCenters. We struggled a bit with that because of, perhaps, the firewall or something else, but once the installation was completed it was a complex situation to resolve.

The initial deployment went fairly quickly. It took about two hours in total. Then we tried to do the load balancing and we started having technical issues.

We install it for clients. Their strategy, initially, was to move away from IBM DS Storage and upgrade their infrastructure to deploy the converged solution from NetApp, the FlexPod solution. That was the initial scope: To go from the more distributed type of environment to a more consolidated, single-solution type of strategy. Instead of having different vendors, FlexPod provided a single support mechanism.

We evaluated SnapCenter vs Veeam. We found that since SnapCenter was integrated and there's zero cost involved because we had all the licenses, there wasn't a need to purchase something else. We have used it along with Site Recovery Manager. Veeam wasn't going to offer anything unique.

It works. It's reliable. There are no real negative aspects. It's a very solid product.

We only have one dedicated user. We haven't defined roles, we haven't used that functionality. We just provide one user with administrative access and that's being shared. We have three staff members managing the solution: SnapCenter, NetApp, and VMware. They all have access to SnapCenter. One is a backup administrator, another is the infrastructure manager, and we have a person who looks after the networking infrastructure, etc.

I would rate SnapCenter at nine out of ten. It's not a ten because of the limitations of the backup, of the granularity, and that it's missing the features for Hyper-V.

We're using it for Oracle and SQL, and we use it for backups and cloning.

The backup features are the most valuable because they allow the DBAs to replace SnapManager for Oracle (SMO), which is going away, and to do cloning as well.

We can also clone to different servers and have the actual backup clone mounted on different servers. And we can split easily too.

It hasn't improved our organization because we're going through some kinks with the product as of right now. We've had several tickets open, but because it's replacing SMO we have to get used to using it now.

As far as ease of use, the DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has.

My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60. I have to touch all of them. They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times. That's my biggest headache, having to touch each client to upgrade this product, via GUI or manually.

It's a good product. There should have been more thought put into it before it went live, because when the DBAs are so used to using SMO, it's obvious they're going to compare the two. If they're used to a function that SnapCenter doesn't have, that's an issue. Slowly but surely, it's getting the functions, but when it was presented to us we understood that it would just replace SMO as is, that we'd be able to do everything we needed to do. But we couldn't.

So far, technical support has been decent, it's been good.

Every time we bring up an issue that we're having, they say we have to upgrade to another version, but the version's not quite out. I think they're writing solutions to some of our kinks into the product, which is good, but I wish that they would just tell us that.

We switched from SMO because it was going to be discontinued. Going forward, we can't install it on our production servers anymore. That's why we went to SnapCenter. SMO is not going to be supported as of spring 2019.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just plug-and-play on the Windows Server, get the firewall ports open that are needed, and push to the clients. It is still a manual process, but that piece, the initial install, is easy. The upgrades are not.

The deployment took no more than an hour, but I did it on my own. If I had had initial support it probably would have been less. The reason it took so long is that I didn't have the right firewall ports open. It was clearly there for me but I missed something. So it took about an hour to get the ports opened.

I had everything that I needed. I just took it on by myself, and it was the first time doing it, and it was the first release of SnapCenter. It was 3.0. We don't have direct NetApp support. We have Datalink support. Datalink is our VAR but they didn't know too much about SnapCenter. They had to promote my ticket to NetApp and go from there. Once my question was answered - "Oh, you left out this firewall port" - then it was all good.

Our implementation strategy was to get all of our Prod servers into SnapCenter and that was accomplished in six months.

It's a site license, so it comes with what we have. We have over 400 terabytes of NetApp disk, and it comes with it. So the return on investment is null and void. Since we have it, we're using it.

It does the cloning piece, which it's supposed to do. But we figured that out when 4.0 came out. When we first went to it, it would not do that in 3.0. We're getting a return on investment because it basically comes with what we have.

We have a site license, so it comes with the product.

We didn't evaluate other vendors. All our databases are on NetApp storage, so we wanted to stick with NetApp.

Test out every function that you think you'll need before you implement it in your
production environment.

My role is just to do the configurations. The DBAs actually use the product because it's more of a set it and forget it. I configure it on the server then they get to use it. We have only SQL DBAs and Oracle DBAs using it, a total of about eight people. For deployment we just need the storage team which consists of two people.

If it botches, we will move more into Commvault, because we do have Commvault for backups. But with Commvault backups, it would be the storage team in control of their clones and restores, and we don't want that. So we're going to push forward with SnapCenter because, for the most part, it does what it's supposed to do.

I would rate SnapCenter a seven out of ten, only because of the kinks that we have to keep going through to get what we need. They end up fixing it in a different version, but I wish it was just ready for us on implementation, and then the DBAs would be off my back.

We have a handful of customers constantly using it, mostly for SQL databases, while one of them uses it for VMware.

From the feedback I've heard from clients, they do experience time savings with this solution. It's more efficient than before. SQL backup is just a pain, but with this solution, it seems to be much better. And the consolidated view is a good tool for them on a daily basis.

The backup feature is the most valuable, of course.

Moreover, what is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues.

What I did witness lately are issues with some Microsoft KBs, the updates. But it happened only once, and not on a major platform, it was on a small one. We're doing a major one for a customer in Paris with many SQL servers and, to date, everything is going well.

I have not yet had experience with version 4.0 - that is the latest one - but I have gone through the release notes and it seems to have some improvements.

It's quite stable, but sometimes the stability seems to be endangered by the ecosystem itself and especially the OS updates. This is what we did experience from our side. But the demand for this piece of software is pretty slim among our customers. We have five or six customers using it. Since we support more than 400 customers, this is a pretty rare solution in our scope. But still, the stability seems to be fair.

We've got customers with just one or two servers, and we've got customers with a lot of servers. But NetApp is something that is quite monolithic. You need the same base installed for or one server or ten, 20, or 50 servers. The prerequisites are really even, because you cannot tune the deployment for a small environment or a big one. There is only one flavor.

I use their tech support on a daily basis. Lately, we have experienced many changes. In the past, we were able to directly access level two but that's over. Nowadays, we always need to go through level one. For us, it's a pain and a waste of time because NetApp wants us to be highly certified. We've got here a big team that is very knowledgeable about NetApp solutions, meaning the whole portfolio. At the end of the day, it's somewhat frustrating for us because when we do engage NetApp, it is because we cannot be completely autonomous. But by that point, we have already taken many troubleshooting steps. Especially for the end customers, when we don't have a solution and we have to open a case with NetApp support, often they get the feeling it's something of a "rerun," because most of the time they need to do the same steps that we already did ourselves.

We are trying to hide that process and make it seamless, but sometimes it does end up with a big waste of time and it's a bit frustrating. I have spoken about these kinds of concerns many times already with the department managers.

They moved all the service providers to this new scheme. It was a corporate decision and we just have to comply. Every authorized service partner, nowadays, is forced to go through level one.

I'm not involved in the initial installation but I do support the solution and sometimes do upgrades. In my opinion, the upgrade I did went well, but it's been a while. It was from version 2.0 to 3.0. At that time, it ran fine and was better than expected. It was seamless.

The upgrade took a little more than an hour. We did a first station, just to ensure that all the prerequisites were met up front, to set it up in the best way. The customers always want the sensitive stuff to be done outside of business hours.

My advice is the same for all of the offsite products made by NetApp. You need to look carefully at the prerequisites to avoid any bad surprises afterward. But if you follow the rules, it should go easily.

The solution is mostly is used by backup administrators and sometimes DBAs. From my side it's really hard to tell who is using it because I am always in touch with the same one or two people at every company, because these are the people who are opening the tickets.

I would rate this solution at seven out of ten. It's more than "fair," but it's not perfect. But I will be pleased to have a look at version 4.0 to see what the improvements are.

Our clients use it for backup and restore.

It needs to support vSphere 6.7.

The stability seems good.

I have not had to use NetApp support. As far as our customers are concerned, we are the NetApp representative.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. There is a little bit of work in getting it to work, but it's not too bad. It's not complex. The one time I installed it myself, it was for a somewhat complex customer, so it took some days.

My advice to someone who is looking into implementing this product depends on their environment, whether they're using several SnapManager products, whether they've been using SnapManager before, or if it's a new install. It would also depend on the versions of the products being protected.

The solution needs one primary administrator for 400 or 500 users.

We use it for backup and for restore, primarily. It's really just for VMs. You can use it for other things, but we don't have other things to work with.

Earlier this week, we had a server that was having some issues. One of the database guys came in and said, "Do we have a Snapshot, do we have a backup?" I had looked at all my reports and I said, "Yeah, it looks like the backups worked fine this morning. We've got one as of 1 AM last night or earlier than that." I had saved a bunch of them.

If we didn't have SnapCenter for backups, that situation would have played out a whole lot slower. Without the ability to interact with VMware and have VMware perform the restore using the Snapshot taken by SnapCenter, we would have had to make a clone of the Snapshot and, a lot of times, if you're dealing with RDM drives, you've got to re-present clones of drives. It would all be done within vCenter and we would have to link back to either a vCenter-owned Snapshot or to link back to local Snapshots which might have been taken on the NetApp. The primary storage going to vCenter was through NFS on the NetApp. It would have become a number of more steps and have taken significantly longer to perform a restore than what I've found with using SnapCenter.

Since we have never really done regular backups with vCenter, it would have meant reverting an entire host. It's not convenient to try to do an entire host and then figure out what's changed on all the other VMs on that host. That's basically what it would require. You present the storage for the host to vCenter and it's taken in one shot. You can't just take a little piece of it and restore that, you restore the entire Snapshot. It may only take minutes to restore everything that way, but you're restoring all VMs to the exact same state as the VM you wanted to rescue.

The way that it interconnects with VMware is really handy, because you can go right into your vSphere Client, where you spend a lot of the day anyway, right-click on one of the VMs where you have backups running for however long, and you can restore either some files or restore the entire thing. You pick the Snapshot. I've timed it and it's under two minutes for it to completely rebuild the VM and restore it completely. I really like that feature. It's fast. If people have a problem I can get them back up online in less than five minutes.

I also use the monitoring feature every day. It can send an email every day and tell you, "These worked, these failed," for whatever reason. Typically you have to do some other kind of backup or run it again. That feature is really nice. You can automate it so it tells you afterward what worked, via email.

Finally, it's pretty simple to operate. The interface isn't complicated.

There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there. That's been a drawback and we're trying to figure out some kind of workaround. Obviously, you don't want to have an SMTP server using "anonymous." You want it to be locked down to some kind of authentication domain level. I would like to see that changed.

The SMTP thing is a concern for me. At the moment, we're just using it anyway, until we can figure out something else. In the worst-case scenario, I can set up my own PowerShell script to send an email and use "secure" that way, based on the reports that it's generating. But I can still log in to the website because it's got a web portal. I can go into my web portal and see, "Okay, the backups finished last night." That's not as simple as getting an email, but at the same time I can just open up a website and see the results anyway.

I've had no problems with its stability. I haven't had to restart the server for any reason. Any failed backup that I've seen so far has not been related to SnapCenter. From what I've seen in the last year, it is pretty near bulletproof, as far as being able to run, once you set it up.

I don't think scalability is bad at all. Like I mentioned with the vCenter thing, as long as you understand that if you've got different sites or different vCenter stacks, you're going to have to have a SnapCenter for each one of those. But in terms of scalability, if you actually have a network that is significantly bigger or suddenly grows really big, it would be as simple as going into your hardware, whether it's physical or a VM, and just increasing your resources a little bit. By default, they said you should use 8 gig of RAM and two processors. It doesn't take much up many resources, so scalability doesn't seem like an issue at all, particularly if you end up having SnapCenter for each site.

I talked to technical support when we had the SMTP issue, to try and figure out a way to use domain-level authentication to send an SMTP message rather than just anonymously. And there was the time when I placed a ticket for the vCenter plug-ins, when I was trying to figure out why it wasn't working quite the way I expected between two different sites.

NetApp has always had fantastic response. I get someone on the phone, we do a little preliminary work, and if we need something later, it's usually a matter of single-digit hours to get the higher-level support online. They can do WebEx and get right in there with you and take a look at it. They've got people who are cleared to work on classified networks and that type of environment as well. They've probably been the easiest company, of any of our vendors, that I've had to deal with.

To understand the broader picture of where we were coming from, we had an existing network that was hodge-podge and built over the years; a combination of three different kinds of SAN storage from EMC to EqualLogic and we had a tape backup solution from Dell. They were all running a little bit here, a little bit there. They were using Commvault for some of the stuff and there was major overhead. It was a lot more than one person was going to be able to handle in my position. What we did was build a parallel network that was going to replace the whole thing, based completely on NetApp and using SnapCenter and VMs. It's far more streamlined.

I came across SnapCenter because I had worked previously with contracts with the Navy and Marine Corps and they had been exclusively using NetApp filers for the last nine to ten years that I'd been working on it. They had used a couple of different solutions before that, but then I heard that SnapCenter was coming, as I came out of this contract. We had a NetApp resident on our previous contract and he kept me updated: "Hey, this is coming out," or "We have this new tool." So I heard about it from him. I said, "Let's look into this and see what it's going to take." I read about it on the internet, I looked at some of the documents from NetApp; how to install it, how it works, how it interacts with VMware or Oracle or other databases.

The initial setup was pretty simple. I created a single VM, which didn't have to have huge resources. I grabbed the all-inclusive image that you can apply in your vSphere client to just create a VM with the right operating system, completely configured and ready. I used that and that was really simple.

I just downloaded the file I needed from NetApp, created the VM using that template, and then I logged in to it through a VMware consul and configured an IP address and whatever else I needed to set up on there. It really didn't take very long, once the image had done the work through VMware. The setup took less than half an hour, and it was functional. It was able to talk to the filers, take Snapshots, and interact with vCenter. Part of the implementation is that it configures vCenter with its own little plug-in. It's really pretty slick and it actually installs it on the vCenter. That's what gives you the option to right-click on one of the VMs and see SnapCenter as one of the options. You go in there and choose the type of backup. That's all installed as part of the configuration.

I can't say how long it's going to take vCenter to get its part done, but from the command-line perspective, it was less than half an hour to configure everything else, after the VM was created.

Regarding an implementation strategy, I looked through the NetApp document on SnapCenter 4.0, and read through it briefly. Then I said, "Okay, we need to do this step, this step, this step..." I got a basic image of it in my head and then went forward with it. It wasn't complicated. There weren't a whole lot of extras and hoops you have to jump through. It was pretty simple.

Let me add another observation - and they may already have something in mind to change this. In our environment we have two different sites. We have a vCenter on both sites, but they're not linked; they're completely independent. One thing I noticed is that the vCenter that I set up on "site one" was able to do backups for both of them, but it had trouble seeing the backups on the second site. They had mentioned this on the documentation: If you're not using linked vCenter sites, then it can have problems communicating with the second site. Apparently, if they're linked, it handles backups for both sites, restores for both sites, monitoring, etc. In our environment, it was simple enough for me to repeat the process in our second site, have a second SnapCenter server, just to do that site. That made everything simpler, rather than trying to figure out if backups weren't working.

Going into initial setup, you have to understand that because you don't want to have it try to take care of two completely unrelated vCenters. It doesn't work well for that. Maybe they have some kind of update plan to change that, but for right now, I couldn't get it to work. I went through a couple different cases with NetApp to try and resolve that. Finally, we just said that it's not really designed for one SnapCenter server to be able to run a vCenter plug-in on both sites. That's what it would really amount to: You would have to install a second vCenter plug-in, and its own rules say it can only have one. When you're trying to use just one to do two different sites, you get weird issues in connectivity and the like.

I did it myself.

The timeliness of the backups and the restore turnarounds are the areas of ROI. A lot of times, it's fairly important servers and, if they go down, you don't have half an hour to fiddle around with stuff while you're losing thousands and thousands of bits of data that are supposed to be coming in. The biggest return that I've seen is that once we find a problem, it's done in 60 seconds to a minute-and-a-half, usually.

There's no licensing involved. That was a question I had when I first set everything up. I didn't have any problems with it at all, but everything I had ever used had licenses. I noticed there was a place that said "License" but when I went in there it said "Standard File License." I thought, "Well what do I need to do, what kind of license do I need?" I came to find out they had upgraded some things and they said, "Actually, there is no more license required. Whatever you've got in there, that standard version, is good for everything. You don't have to buy anything. You never have to upgrade it." It's been simple. I've done one upgrade on the OS, one minor patch that came out. It took no time really. It was simple, automated.

There was no license required because they had a contract with NetApp already.

Because it can interact with more than just NetApp, I'm sure you can use it as a stand-alone. But unless they change the way licensing works, I would suspect that you just purchase a license for that one device and there isn't like an ongoing, "you need more licenses." You have the base license and it's yours. I haven't pursued that so I can't tell you for sure.

They had already chosen NetApp as their storage for their filers. We could have looked at a number of different things and at the time that I came onto the contract, they really didn't have anything yet. But I knew from the experience that I had, that I really didn't want to bring Commvault into that solution. There were one or two other more flakey-type solutions that I'd seen in the past and I knew I didn't want to deal with that. I thought that looking at something that was made and supported by the same people who created our filers would make the support a lot simpler for me if I needed to reach out. I knew who I could get and when I could get them. I knew what to expect. That was really why we chose it. The others weren't really much of an option. It wasn't a matter of cost because, if I remember correctly, there really wasn't any cost to having SnapCenter. There's no license involved.

Make sure that you've got some kind of a server in mind for it. If you're not going to be using just an IP address, if you want to use a domain, make sure that you've got access to your domain controllers so that you can create a DNS record. Just download the installation guide form NetApp. A high-schooler could probably pull it off.

As for the number of users in our organization, I'm really the only one. I do all the SAN storage and I overflow into the VMware and the enterprise networking. I'm the only one that interacts with it, although we've got three different people who could if they actually wanted or needed to. It would be easy enough to set up a user for them. We've got one VMware lead, and he primarily takes care of that. I just back him up when he's not here. We've got a primary network lead, and he does our routing and switching and firewall work. Either one of them could step in, had they the need to do so, but right now, I'm really the only guy with a SAN or NAS-type storage background or certifications. They usually just leave it alone. They get a copy of the backup reports if something fails, so at least they are aware of it, even if they don't have to go do anything.

It has been very low maintenance so far. I'm the only one who maintains it. Running whatever upgrades that come out for the OS is really all I have to do. Even if something broke, it doesn't take that much time out of one person's schedule to find out what's wrong. I honestly haven't found anything wrong, other than those couple of points that I mentioned and that wasn't actually broken, it just doesn't function like that.

There is a possibility that we could add backups for Oracle, if for some reason their native backups don't pan out but, other than that, we just see minor growth in the virtualized area. If we have to add more servers, that's really the only kind of growth we're anticipating.

I'm giving it an eight out of ten because, while I really like the way it works and how bulletproof it has been, I believe they could improve it by adding some kind of authentication to their SMTP. Also, they probably could improve by having a single, central spot that can handle multiple vCenter sites. Those two concerns aside, I'm completely happy with it.