NetApp AltaVault Reviews

It's been able to keep us lean and mean on the storage front. I don't want to be buying many racks of storage just to put in my datacenter, when it's not really providing lots of value. I want to have all the imported data with me, thus being able to lower that storage footprint.

Being able to effectively keep the live data on-premise, or the most recent data on-premise. But I make an affordable solution, where if data is out of a certain time, it goes and leverages all the cheap storage, whether that'll be the storage grid or an S3/S3WS. It's gives me the flexibility of keeping my day to where I want it now. If I need to get the data back really quickly, I put it on the long term retention, being able to access it in the same way.

Most importantly is having that island into that datacenter, and being able to address things in the same console. Thus, it is irrelevant where it's stored.

There are some bits it could do better. With tighter integration maybe with Veeam, or something like that, it'd be really good.

It is still shipping at the moment and it's quite a bigger plane. So, if you are going to go down the physical route, I'd charge for the VA.

I would improve upon the form factor. Some of the usability stuff is good. There's some better features around that prepopulate and cash-in again, that could be improved upon, but again, minor things.

Stability is rock solid from my point of view. I've been running it now for around 18 months. No downtime, no support code was locked. That speaks for itself in my opinion.

At the moment, we're running it as a virtual appliance. There is no physical stuff on the site. It's all virtual. It seems to be doing the job well. If I need another one, I can scale it out.

I haven't use tech support.

I was sourced to go out into the market and look at what was out there. I'd been an existing NetApp customer and it made sense to look at what they had, especially now with the new versions of ONTAP and being able to literally snap mirror and snap vote stuff off into AltaVault, that was a real plus. I didn't need another piece of software to go and grab data to go put it into the cloud. Being able to manage one interface is really powerful.

We chose AltaVault, because we were really looking at our storage costs. They were always increasing each year. I don't think we've ever deleted data in our business, so every year I was going back adding more costt. I needed a solution that I could look at for over three to five years and say I'm going to put this investment in now. Also, say to management, over three to five years based on the current growth rates, and obviously leave it open for the future as well, it's going to cost you roughly this much. Because I know exactly how much it's going to cost me, I am able to charge that back into different departments, which is really good.

The initial setup took 90 minutes. It deployed on the floor and was actively being used in 90 minutes.

Up until now, it has been AWS, though we are looking at the storage grid in the future. For a backup software, we're using SnapManager with the SnapCenter, or with SnapManager 3.0, it's really good. There's no third party bits there.

We are looking looking to use Veeam in the future as a repository to leverage all their great stuff.

It's quite cost-effective.

Cloud-base will pay AWS by the minute, but then with AWS, it's an Excel-based decision. I am worried it has become more cost effective to built it yourself, so building something around a storage grid or something like that.

I'm in the middle at the minute of evaluating if it is cheaper to put on AWS or is it cheaper to go build it yourself? That's something I'm looking at.

We looked at other competitors, for example Data Domain from EMC. We didn't use it, though. Something that made the decision a wider one with AltaVault was the manageability. I didn't want another thing in the datacenter that I couldn't manage in the same way.

By using SnapManager and SnapVault, there's no additional training the team really needs to pick it up fairly well. It can all be managed easily.

Depending on where's your primary data and what you want to achieve, AltaVault's not great in all cases. In my case, it is really good. I have really long data retention periods, and I want to keep my arms around the data. Also, I want to know where it is, but at the same time, I don't want to be looking at it everyday on the datacenter. Having a solution there that can move data from on-premise into the cloud and back is a massive win.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their reliability: We're in a storage market and a data market, the first thing is reliability. Everything that I do on top of it, I want it to work, but it has to be a really good foundation the bottom.
• Cost is obviously a factor, but for me, it's about reliability.
• I have somebody on the end of the phone. Where if I do have a problem, I can call and have good support with them? That's something that until you actually have a problem, you don't really realize its importance.

For me, it's about a company that I can work with and a company who's always innovating, not standing still. A company like that, with cost and the support, it's a great decision.

There's multiple ways, but the primary way that it helps us out is that it's seamless. Once we put it in play and configured it how we want, we don't have to go back and massage any configurations. Therefore, we haven't had any issues with it as of yet, so it works great for us.

Being able to move data seamlessly from one-premise to the cloud (Azure). It works great. The backup solution is perfect for us. What we do, we do that from our primary location and our disaster recovery location, so it works fine in our solution.

I would like to see voice activation as a new feature. If we could just tell the system what to do verbally, that would be perfect for us. I don't know how that can happen, but at this point I really can't see anything needs to be added it.

Though, more capacity with the basic model of the AltaVault would probably help out.

Once we put it up and it's running, that's it, there were no problems. We don't really have to do anything else with it. The stability of it is perfect for us, because we actually have a lot of other NetApp solutions and products in play. Therefore, it allows us to focus on other solutions and products, other than when we should add new things to it, the stability is fine. It's perfect.

It is scalable. We haven't used it to its max capability, but we're planning to in the near future as we're taking on more work for ourselves with other organizations within the Department of Transportation. As of yet, we haven't used it to its full capability. I will have to wait and see within the next year how it works out with the scalability.

Superb. They were very helpful with the design, implementation, and configuration phases. They have been very helpful.

We were using other companies as far as NetBackup. We were using the solution for EMC, and we wanted to try to do something different. That's what we did by selecting the AltaVault.

Some of the reasons why I assume they chose NetApp is we look for vendors who are all about being flexible: A unit that can be flexible in different environments, such as cloud-based or on-premise, and also if it works with other vendor's products.

I was not involved in the setup.

Dell EMC and an IBM system were vetted. These are the only two that I know.

It's been very helpful for us in our environment and what we do.

Buy it. Get it. It'll help your environment as well. It's one of the best products out there.

I wasn't in design phase of this, but from what I know, we had vetted like two or three other companies and NetApp came out on top, so it's a good solution with good service.

It's an object store. It was used for archiving. They're kind of doing away with it in favor of just using object native ONTAP. It doesn't really seem like something that's still being developed. It's kind of being replaced within another solution set within NetApp.

The most valuable feature is the portability of large archived data. You're able to put things on large on-prem, low-cost storage and then augment that with even lower cost storage in the cloud.

It's a good product, but it's becoming outdated and moving to their other primary architecture.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup can be a little more complex. It's a lot of policy. It's complex for good reason.

You could compare it to a Dell EMC or ECS, and I think it's probably a little less costly than that. Within the marketplace, it's a medium cost.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. My advice is to stick with ONTAP and ownCloud because NetApp AltaVault is going to die.

We primarily use the solution as an email backup and for some SharePoint instances on the cloud.

The solution can be used for all Office 365 applications.

In comparison to other backups, specifically Commvault, it's easier to work with.

In the past, there was a product called Snap Protect. If there was any sort of integration between this and the online arrays from that, it would be perfect. It would allow for a lot of integration between the on-prem and cloud. It would also help customers with migrations. It would make for a more complete platform.

It would be nice if the solution was more complete. Many customers are looking for a single solution or silo that they can manage everything from. It would be nice, instead of having different products, if everything a client needed was in one solution.

We've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any requests from the client in terms of support. That means, they haven't run into any bugs or glitches or have had any crashes. If they had, we would have heard about it.

The solution is based on the number of users and nothing more. You can just add subscriptions if you need to expand the solution out.

The solution's technical support is quite good. Out of ten, we would easily rate it a nine. 

In the past, I have worked with Hitachi.

The functionality was good. It offered unified storage with normal arrays. However, the pricing wasn't as good.

The initials setup isn't complex. It's quite straight forward. 

In terms of deployment, It depends on the number of users a company has. Once it is started, it doesn't take more than 30 minutes.

The pricing of the solution is reasonable.

I don't use the solution myself, I recommend it to customers. We're a Star Partner of Netapp.

The solution is a cloud-based subscription. It doesn't need a deployment. It's subscription base, therefore, it's sort of its own service.

The solution is great for reducing headaches in the IT department. It's easy to use and narrows issues surrounding taking Office 365 to the cloud. Users can simply install it and get safe, easy access to cloud backups. They can retrieve data easily if it's deleted. They have a great data protection policy in place. All of these reasons are why I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We have a whole bunch of DR and backup auditing requirements, and this simplifies that process and strips back all the operational overhead of managing tape. With that operational overhead of managing tapes gone, we're able to focus people's time on more important things.

The flexibility. Being able to virtualize it, port it wherever I like, test my backups, test my DR capabilities whenever I like without impacting anybody. We had some problems with physical devices in the past and the virtual appliances mean I can shift it around whenever I like.

More than a 500 volume limit. At the moment, it only supports up to 500 volumes for SnapMirror and that's a problem. We've got 750, so a larger limit for volume replicas for SnapMirror.

It's quite simple to use. We haven't had many issues. This is really the last stumbling block for us. Once that limit goes away, it's almost set-and-forget. It's just how you want it.

It was a bit flaky to begin with, but 4.3 that we're on now has been great. We were early adopters so we ran into a few problems, but in recent times it's been good.

Scalability is awesome. With the virtual component, just being able to spin up whatever size one that makes sense, it's great.

We had this very technical problem. When we first stood the system up we used rsync to copy files across. That didn't work. We found that AltaVault didn't like hundreds of thousands of files, it wanted big, single files. So, we changed that and tarballed all the files up and sent them across and it all worked happily.

When we went to upgrade to 4.3, to SnapMirror to it, we decided to check with the virtual appliance, that we could actually retrieve data from the physical appliance. And when we did that, we found that there were symlink errors. What had happened when we did the rsync, it created the symlinks but when we deleted that out the AltaVault database didn't clear those symlinks out at the time. So, when we went to retrieve a file, it was looking for a symlink that didn't exist and there were a lot of problems. We worked with NetApp technical support to get a workaround in for us to be able to access that data from a second appliance and then were all up and running.

Technical support were excellent. Knowledgeable.

We were refreshing our storage about two years ago and, at the same time, our tape infrastructure was due for a refresh as well. As part of that our partners, including NetApp, worked with us and they showed us AltaVault and it appeared to be a great solution.

It was very simple. You power it up, give it some basic details, get an Amazon account, plug it in, and it works.

We did look at Hitachi. We did look at HPE. But we had a 15-plus year relationship with NetApp so it was more just kicking tires to confirm that there wasn't anything amazingly better out there. We were happy with NetApp so we stuck with them.

Our use case is cloud-based archive to AWS.

For us, when selecting a vendor, cultural fit is big. But, in this space, the cultural belief in the protection of the data is critical. We see NetApp as a technology company that has that at the heart of their strategy; keeping the data integral is number one, everything else comes after, and that's number one for us too.

The product does as it's intended, as it says. All of the features meet our experience. I would suggest to make sure that you are looking at fabric pulls and storage grid and ensuring that what they do with the AltaVault aligns with those technologies as well because there might be some other efficiencies you can gain there. So just have a broader look. But the AltaVault itself will do exactly what you need it to do.

Our primary use case or this solution is data backup.

The solution is very easy to use and it offers great support. It is also a very flexible solution that saves us a lot of time.

I would like to see more web support.

The program is very stable.

The technical support is good.

Our company grew, so that is why we chose this solution.

We used a consultant for the installation and deployment and the service was excellent. The initial setup was straightforward. You just follow the instructions.

It is a rather expensive program.

We also looked at VMware but this solution offered better support.

It is a good solution. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We meet the requirement of having stuff that's backed to the cloud. It's eliminated tape-based backup systems. There is better security for backup data, because nobody can get it. It's encrypted, in the cloud, so you can't. The cloud puts it in some kind of encryption.

You can store backups for a while.

We did have some issues with the software and the firmware. We had to update it, but that was it.

It's not been an issue right now. We just purchased a new one.

We have used tech support. If you get the right person, it's good. We have had issues getting to the right person, but once you get to the right person, they are knowledgeable.

We had Brocade, and then we went to this, AltaVault. We were looking for something to backup to the cloud that was easy to use.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The pricing is not too bad, but could be a little better.

It was Riverbend or NetApp, and we chose NetApp because they have good support.

We're doing AWS S3 with Glacier with cloud-based backup. The integration is good. It works with Veeam and Commvault. We are using Commvault for our backup software.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support.

I'm pro NetApp, so I recommend the solution.

Replacing an aging tape infrastructure by being able to backup to local cache as well as to the cloud.

• Able to reduce administrative burden on tape management.
• Able to simplify and streamline our backup process.

More in depth reporting about the files in local cache: Where they are, how much there are, and what files it is moving to and from the cloud, as it needs to. Most of that's kind of behind the magic curtain process that we don't have a whole lot of visibility into.

Also, we were actually able to discover a bug in the product that they're still working on. We've been working with their tech support trying to get it fixed. It's a bug with the Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol with older Windows operating systems. This is something we absolutely want fixed in the future, basically as soon as possible.

We haven't had any stability problems (full uptime).

We have not had any issues yet, though we haven't scaled either.

They listen to what their customers are saying.

We have extensively used tech support. It's decent.

We were previously using LTO-5 with Quantum. We switched because our tape infrastructure was rapidly becoming unable to handle the amount of backup data, and our engineers were having to replace tapes very frequently as well as the speed of backup, and just the management. Our business was quickly moving to a backup everything forever model, which tape is not geared towards.

I was involved in the initial setup in my organization. We connected AltaVault to to AWS Glacier, and for backup software, EMC NetWorker.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. There were not many issues at all with the setup and configuration. The Glacier side setup was a little unclear, due to some problem with documentation, but we were able to work through it together.

We chose AltaVault based on a couple of insights ago, when NetApp first purchased it from Riverbed, we are also a Riverbed customer and so we figured that would fit very well. Most of our data is on NetApp, so we figured it would be a very easy transition. I believe we looked at a couple of other products from other vendors, but the NetApp solution seemed to be the most robust for us.

They're adding more to the product, and the overall vision of the product is correct and true.

Definitely make sure to look at the system requirements, make sure that you're onboard, and give it a try. Make sure you have people on your staff that are familiar with cloud, because it can be a little tough to set up if you're not already familiar with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Previous experience with vendor is always good.
• Industry penetration