NetApp SnapCenter Reviews

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.

The primary use case is for our backup strategy. We run almost all our backups over SnapCenter and we are migrating the rest.

It saves us a lot of money and manpower. We automate everything in our environment. We can just run some scripts over it and update all agents automatically, and we don't have to take care of each individual client. We can do that from the central SnapCenter station. That's a huge benefit for us.

A simple example of a way it has improved the way our organization functions is that if we have to update or analyze any backup errors, in the past we would have to go directly to the server, log in, and go to the log directory. We had to analyze it directly on the server itself. But now, we have a centralized, single pane of glass and we can use the SnapCenter GUI, which saves also a lot of time for our operating teams.

For the applications team, for the SQL admins, they log in to the GUI more because they can run their SQL restores out of the SnapCenter UI. They have the benefit that they can now restore their resources on their own. In the past, they had to open a ticket and say, "Oh, we have to restore that volume and that LUN," and then the storage and backup team had to restore it and give the information back. Now, the application owner or service owner can do that by himself. So that's a huge benefit for them.

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.

SnapCenter is a product for customers who want centralized management of their backup and recovery processes. Customers need application-aware backups, like Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, or any application designed on the NetApp storage volume.

So, if a customer uses VMware, this tool or software is centralized and installed on a separate system, server, or virtual machine. It connects to the NetApp service system on one side and to the application on the other. This gives customers the ease of managing everything from a central command and control, instead of using multiple tools to do the same job.

SnapCenter is just a tool, which actually makes the entire features visualized for the customer, like the cloning feature. The cloning is basically a feature of NetApp, which can be managed or used by using SnapCenter. 

A cloning feature can also be used by CLI command instead of using SnapCenter, but obviously, the customer has ease of management, like all the others in UI solutions.

This is basically the best UI solution from NetApp. So the cloning feature is to clone a snapshot from another snapshot or a clone of a volume. It is used for testing and development purposes. A safe, efficient snapshot. It also saves storage space. Normally, you need separate spaces to create Unity and test environments. If the users use the cloning feature, they can save storage space and start using the particular feature. The customer uses it to save space instead of buying another capacity upgrade.

So, by using capacity upgrades, the customer can use the NetApp volume feature alone, which covers volumes and snapshots. It is a feature that gives the customer the best value for their purchase.

NetApp SnapCenter's integration with hybrid cloud environments:

When it comes to backup and recovery procedures, NetApp SnapCenter connects with other NetApp software and cloud backup tools. It integrates the SnapCenter, the on-premises system, and the cloud. It's good to have central control and authority that connects the devices or storage systems in your data center with your data on the cloud.

When you need to backup and restore from your data center to the cloud or vice versa, SnapCenter serves as a centralized tool. Additionally, you can use other tools, such as cloud backup software and NetApp Cloud Volume ONTAP. SnapCenter connects with Cloud Volume ONTAP instances available on major cloud service providers. This gives customers the benefit of a hybrid strategy, having local backup and a remote NetApp setup on the cloud.

For example, customers have a primary production site and a disaster recovery site on the cloud, benefiting from the services available on major cloud service providers like Azure. SnapCenter's capability allows customers to leverage these services efficiently.

NetApp SnapCenter's automation capabilities:

When we use a GUI tool, automation is a basic feature that centralized GUI or UI tools should have. Customers can schedule all workflows, snapshots, and backups. The restore process should not be automated, but the backup schedule can be easily automated.

For example, a customer may need daily, hourly, weekly, or monthly backups at certain dates and times. Automation is essential since people cannot work 24/7. Automation ensures that backup and recovery procedures run smoothly. SnapCenter and other live management backup recovery tools can schedule snapshots and maintain backups.

Additionally, the users can use the auto-delete function to save space by deleting old backups after a certain period. This scheduling is part of the backup strategy, including retention policies for how long backup sets should be available in the storage system. This is how SnapCenter's automation capabilities support a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy.

Ability to meet compliance and data governance requirements:

Compliance requirements often necessitate daily or monthly backups. To meet these requirements, you need to demonstrate to the governing authority that backups are performed and successfully completed. SnapCenter is a valuable tool that enables you to provide this evidence. It allows you to show the compliance authority that the customer is performing backups according to the compliance department's regulations. Therefore, this tool, or rather product, is very effective in helping customers meet these specific requirements.

SnapCenter is mainly for the backup environment, allowing you to save data for your data projection.

You can quickly deploy new virtual environments. It provides efficient and easy-to-use data protection. If a file goes missing or corruption occurs, you can restore it swiftly using the snap restore feature, allowing you to return to work almost immediately.

Backing up SQL and Exchange is our primary use case.

We are putting a new SharePoint infrastructure into production - we're upgrading SharePoint - and our users need a test environment for that and they need it refreshed every day. These are big databases. My colleague is able to create a clone of the production database on a daily basis, through scripts, or through SnapCenter's command line interface which comes in handy. He puts in a new database every day for our users.

I'm not sure this would be possible otherwise. I don't know how many databases SharePoint consists of but there are a lot and they're big. If you need a clone of your databases every day, I don't know if it would be possible to do so overnight, using a traditional backup and restore. I don't know if it would be ready the next morning for users to use. But with SnapCenter, now, it is ready.

The difference is that it's more manageable. Backup timeframes are shorter, restore timeframes are shorter, and we have one portal through which we can control everything.

Our partner firm, an IT firm, was using NetApp SnapCenter for training and educational purposes. They were partnering with an organization to train staff.

NetApp SnapCenter is complex, and I know about some training materials for the solution. Most banks and financial institutions use the solution. The partner firms get engineers or train them from scratch to support the financial institutions. Financial institutions prefer on-premise data and have few things in the cloud.

Primary use case is covering fast backup and restore for customers, mostly for SQL databases, some Oracle database systems in servers, and some file share backups with Snapshots with the possibility of restore.

SnapCenter is usually an additional software, which is not the main backup software. Most companies have already found a backup solution and are using SnapCenter to be able to do a fast restoration of their data. Therefore, they are using two solutions at once, side-by-side. Companies will have their primary backup solution and SnapCenter as a redundancy because the primary solution isn't favored to recover data so quickly.

The biggest advantage of the product is you can provide a quick restore. We have some companies with policies which require us to be able to restore their data back up and running in maximum 15 minutes. We can achieve these customer policies for RPO and RTO using SnapCenter.

Most customers are able to restore their full backup of the database in two to three minutes (15 minutes is the maximum). This way, they have another 10 minutes in their time window to restore SQL transaction logs, etc.