NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

For the most part, we're using it to move data off-prem. We have the ability to do mirrors from on-prem to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and we also have both single-node instances and HA instances. We are running it in both AWS and Azure.

We're using all of the management tools that go along with it. We're using both OnCommand Cloud Manager and OnCommand Unified Manager, which means we can launch System Manager as well.

Unified Manager is what monitors the environment. OnCommand Cloud Manager allows you to deploy and it does have some monitoring capabilities, but it's not like Unified Manager. And from OnCommand Cloud Manager you can launch System Manager, which gives you the lower-level details of the environment.

Cloud Manager will allow you to create volumes, do CIFS shares, NFS mounts, and create aggregates. But the rest of the networking components and other work for the SVMs and doing other configurations are normally done at that lower level. System Manager is where you would do that, whereas Unified Manager allows you to monitor the entire environment.

Say I have 30 instances running out there. Unified Manager allows me to monitor all 30 instances for things like volume-full alerts, near volume-full alerts, I-nodes, full network components being offline, paths, back-end storage paths, aggregate fulls. All those items that you would want to monitor for a healthy environment are handled through Unified Manager.

We're sitting at multiple petabytes of storage on our NetApp infrastructure. We're talking hundreds of thousands of shares across thousands of volumes. Even with that size of infrastructure, it's being supported by three people. And it's not like we're working 24/7. It gives us the ability to do a lot, to do more with less. Those three people manage our entire NAS environment. I've got two intermediate and one senior storage engineer in our environment who handle things. They're handling those multiple petabytes of on-prem and I'm just starting to get them involved in the cloud version, Cloud Volumes ONTAP. So, for the most part, it's just me on the Cloud Volume side.

In terms of the storage efficiency reducing our storage footprint, the answer I'd like to say is "yes." The problem I have is that nobody ever wants to delete anything. We have terabytes of data on-prem in multiple locations, in both primary and DR backed-up. And now, we're migrating it to the cloud. But eventually, the answer will be yes.

I work for the government, so all of our information is classified. We do a lot of on-prem with NetApp backup storage. I'm also interested in the recovery features. I'm going to take that back to the team and see what we can do with that. 

The upgrades, storage, and recovery features are some of the big aspects we discussed two weeks ago. We have an overflow in other locations that I can't talk about. We had a bunch of questions about what we would do in the event of a disaster to recover data that's been there for the past 15 to 20 years.

CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes. 

CVO has reduced the amount of storage significantly. The solution has saved costs. We've done a cost analysis of on-prem and then the cloud. On-prem is where it's at for our mission. Some organizations can store their data in the cloud and not access it for years. We need data constantly and require the ability to dig into data from five to 10 years ago. 

The primary use case is to use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for unstructured data storage, both for Windows and Linux-based machines. We use both from an NAS functionality perspective, along with SMB and NFS file shares/exports, for storing unstructured data.

The solution enabled us to deliver on our cloud-first strategy. It also provided us some savings and consolidation capabilities from a volume perspective where we can run with less management. We can run higher volumes of unstructured data and store higher volumes of unstructured data as compared to other solutions.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is where we host our NAS storage on which we keep our files, et cetera. We have three clusters of CVO, each serving close to 300 terabytes of data. We have our SQL backup workloads and the application data residing in it. We are using the tiering policy, which pushes the inactive data down to cold storage to help save on costs.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is all cloud-based and we have our workloads on Azure.

At one point we were paying close to $80,000 a month for cloud resources, and now it's down to $25,000 to $30,000 after using the tiering.

Also, using Unified Manager we are able to resolve issues before they have an impact. For example, there were conditions where bulk operations were happening against a particular volume, and our business was also writing the data. We caught it using Unified Manager. The IOPS were low and there was a high latency, close to 1,500 milliseconds. We had a look at exactly what operations were happening and, before the user even reported it, we reached out to the team that was doing the bulk operations to stop whatever process they were running. That's just one example. We have had a lot of occasions where the tool has been really handy when it comes to proactive monitoring. 

And it's not only for proactive monitoring. The same tool is also used for a lot of root cause analysis.

We use it for multiple cases. We use it for DR and backup tiering. 

We have some Oracle Databases in AWS that need backing up. We back them up to CVO. From CVO, we tier them out in a FabricPool scenario, then tier them off to StorageGRID. This way, we are putting minimum space on CVO, which has expensive storage. Instead, we are pushing them on a stream. This is really efficient in terms of performance and backup. I like it because we are able to restore quickly. 

We also use this for dev test data. For Oracle database, we are putting the data file for Oracle Database on a CVO data file. This way, we are able to replicate and clone the Oracle Database very quickly and efficiently with minimal space consumption.

It is much easier to control data since we can run queries across all our platforms with just one solution. Not only that, we can also monitor all the platforms with Active IQ, where we can see all the alerts, messages, and space consumption through a single application. This is regardless if the data is on-prem or AWS. It is much more efficient. 

We use NetApp for our on-premise file shares, and we use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as an offsite backup copy.

Being able to deploy in AWS is a big advantage for us. The company I work for was recently spun off as a smaller company. We sold most of our company to a large company and all of our assets went to that company. Then we started building our first data center and we did not have a second data center for our outside copy. This was a great solution in these circumstances.

In general, NetApp provides unified storage, but we mostly use it only for NAS. It gives us great control over our data. We can define which region or zone we put our data in, in AWS. That way, we can strategically place our offsite copies. Instead of putting everything in one place, we now have more freedom to put data wherever we want.

We are also saving at least $100,000 a year on storage costs.

We are predominantly using it as a backup target for our products. We are also doing some CIFS shares to remote sites that don't have their own file server infrastructures.

It gives us flexibility. In a disaster situation, or even in an office relocation, there can be a gap. NetApp CVO allows us to continue to provide service customers with access to their data, even if a physical site is going to be down for a long period of time. It's only really viable if you know a site is going to be down for a long period of time. We've had office relocations and there have been gaps between when the old office closed and the new office opened, during that period of moving stuff over and setting things up. There were a couple of weeks where we were serving the data out of the cloud, rather than out of the physical site. NetApp CVO may have improved our uptime by 1 or 2 percent, because we don't have that much downtime to start with.

It has all the advantages of the real NetApp product. You can provide storage in most of the formats you'd want. 

It helps us to keep control of storage costs because it's an OpEx-based model rather than a CapEx-based model. It depends on how you license it. You can have it up and down, almost on an hourly basis. Obviously, we don't do that, we've got it up long-term. But it does have that flexibility to bring up an instance of a client filer for just a short period of time.

It has saved us from having to buy and host another filer somewhere. That would be the only option to achieve the same goal. If we were to buy another filer to provision the capacity we've got in the cloud, the CapEx would probably be at least $200,000, whereas the running costs are not that much. It depends on how you deal with AWS, but we don't pay that kind of money. It probably saves us 75 percent of the cost of buying a filer for real.

Our organization utilizes a hybrid cloud in which Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a single node. We have multiple instances of Cloud Volumes on a single node in AWS, and we primarily use it to take snapshots for disaster recovery.

We save many snapshots at that location so we can redirect users if something happens on our primary site. 

The other use case is backup. We enabled SnapLock, which acts as the WORM, making those snapshots immutable. In other words, they can't be deleted.

Those are the two use cases. One is disaster recovery, and the other is to preserve a third copy of the snapshot. This is typically for Tier 1 applications. We have a third copy, and no one can delete the volume's snapshot. The end-users don't work with Cloud Volumes directly, but if our operational team needs to restore some files that aren't on-prem, they sometimes go to those instances in Cloud Volumes. That's only when they have to restore something beyond the date range of the on-prem snapshot.

The main benefit we get from this product is the ability to deploy it anywhere we want, whether that's on-prem, a remote physical location, or in the cloud. It doesn't matter from an operational perspective where it is. The command line and operating system are the same. 

If I give it to someone to manage, they don't know if the product is running in the cloud or on the physical location. That's great because you don't have to worry about knowledge transfer. The product runs the same regardless of how it's deployed. Cloud Volumes has also significantly improved performance and storage efficiency because it has capacity tiering, which is helpful if you're cost-conscious. 

It provides unified storage, so you can use it for NAS or block. However, we segregate a separate cluster for files and another for block storage. Fortunately, it's the same ONTAP operating system, so a user doesn't need to understand a different set of command lines or another method if dealing with block storage or files. It's all the same for them.

It helps us manage our native cloud storage. Cloud Volumes allows us to choose which storage types are applicable for us. In our case, it lets us choose a cheaper EBS storage, and then we can perform capacity tiering in S3. It gives us the flexibility to determine which type of native AWS storage to use, which is cool.