NetApp OnCommand Reviews

I primarily use OnCommand or ActiveIQ as a monitoring appliance for NetApp. It connects to any site on-premises or can connect to the cloud in a limited sense. It provides a GUI for managing various on-premises NetApp activities. It scans storage, provides warnings when volumes are full, monitors snapshots, and offers error message notifications if there is defective hardware.

The ease of configuring NetApp FAS series is noteworthy, as they support multiple standards like iSCSI, NFS, Fibre Channel, and NVMe. NetApp's data efficiency protocols are unmatched in the industry. ActiveIQ offers significant improvements in data monitoring and error notification. It provides crucial data management features and has versatile support for various protocols and standards, making it a one-size-fits-all storage solution.

OnCommand is an appliance that connects to the NetApp which is a monitoring appliance. The tool provides alerts on events and errors of NetApp. 

I am impressed with the product's ability to warn us whenever something is wrong with the system. It is connected with Active Directory and Exchange. Whenever there is anything wrong with NetApp, the solution will alert you to an event error, post which you can start to troubleshoot. 

We use this solution to provide storage and applications to our users.

With the new version 9.11.1, the System Manager functionality was improved - you can do more operations using GUI. Also, multi-user authorization is a nice new feature.

The primary use case of this solution is for centralized storage. We are silver partners of NetApp and I'm a technical manager.

Snapshot is the most valuable feature.

The most valuable feature is the system manager itself. The system manager helps us to manage our NetApp server with a user-friendly GUI instead of a CLI, but sometimes we also need to use the CLI, because some features are not available in the GUI. Most often, we use it to create aggregates, storage virtual machines, volumes, shares (like CIFS and NFS), and also to present disks (from NetApp) on some other physical or virtual machine to perform several tests.

On the other hand, the GUI gives us fast (simple) configurations, simplified management, extensive administrative capabilities, unlocking the power of clustered Data ONTAP and also clustered scale-out storage.

There are always areas for improvement, but they need - 

• Intuitive browser-based GUI;
• Wizard-driven configuration to get up and running quickly;
• Automated non-disruptive (Data ONTAP) upgrade;
• Storage provisioning and disk aggregate management;
• CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FC, and FCoE configuration;
• Snapshot and SnapMirror management;
• SnapVault support;
• Storage virtual machine management;
• Monitoring of HA pairs;
• Support for SVMs with Infinite Volume;
• User interface enhancements;
• Support for storage Quality of Service (QoS);
• Support for all NetApp FAS systems and FlexArray software;
• Support for NetApp All Flash FAS; and
• Built-in reports and dashboard summarizing data around inventory, capacity, and efficiency at the enterprise level.

It would be great if the GUI can perform the same configurations as the CLI can, but we know this is difficult to implement. For example, it would be nice if there could be an option (after ONTAP installation/configuration) to manually deal with root aggregates (of course with needed restrictions). In some cases, you need to modify its size if your storage is full or something, and of course if root aggregate has some free space (in our test cases we always had). 

Also, we are missing more graphical diagrams, maybe warnings or some help that can be useful to manage with NetApp more easily (in cases when you are not really sure if something could go wrong).

In OnCommand Unified Manager, we can monitor the entire cluster as well as configure data protection through Unified Manager. 

At present, OnCommand Unified Manager has just the monitoring and data protection features. It would be better to add some features for entire cluster management and storage management. 

Automation should also be included so that instead of separately accessing Unified Manager and OnCommand Workflow Automation, we can work in a single window. It is very much required.