NetApp AltaVault Reviews

We used to have a tape backup. The tape backup has so many operations and orders. With AltaVault, everything is automatic. There is no one who needs to babysit and manage everything. It automatically does all these jobs.

Once you set it up, we have a Symantec Backup. We set up all the policies around the call data, because it's very simple. Therefore, you don't need somebody to babysit it. It's just set it up and forget it; plug it in and let it go.

We use it in the plants right now. We use NetBackup just as a cataloging service, so if NetApp would probably make it in one box (integrating it), then it would work better to marry to other catalogs. That's the one thing. Everything built it, it could be more beneficial to customers.

To clarify, the catalog feature is lacking, and you need to depend on somebody else.

It's stable. I don't think there's any problem in stability. They made a stable product.

There may be some issues with the scalability.

For this case, we don't really need to scale, it's not our primary thing. As long as it backs up automatically and everything.

We haven't used it and don't need it. There's no support calls to talk about.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very straightforward.

We chose this solution because we were in touch with a sale representative, and they introduced us to the new products. They knew what product we could include. We like to keep it that way, so it keeps the management very easy. One product, one company, and one number that we call for any issues. It makes it very easy.

AltaVault is very economical. You don't need big expertise to manage this product. If you are working school and building a table, this is the best product. You can make it very low cost, and at the same time, it's a great investment.

We use cloud-based backup with AWS and NetBackup as our backup software. Basically, what we do is take the snapshot backup through AltaVault, encrypt it, and put it on the database.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: They would have to be in business for five years and should have a clear road map, for stability and everything. It's not that someone can just open a company and you're the top one in the first three years, but if you don't have a clear road map of your vision, then it makes it difficult.

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 use the solution more for archiving. It's like having the data outside of the place and that's with the indexing and everything.

We like that you can have it from a single point from a storage provider, rather than having different products from different providers. The same support will be from the same place.

The interface is great. The GUI is great. It's so easy to work with.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Scaling isn't a problem.

The solution is stable.

The solution needs faster indexing.

We've implemented this solution for a while. I've been working with NetApp since 2014. This is a long time.

The stability has been good. It serves its purpose well. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

Any department that is having files shared and data that can be deleted and changed a lot would need this solution. Here is in the Middle East, it's a little bit different as the adoption of the cloud is not so strong. Mostly the type of businesses that would use this product are all SMBs. I'd recommend a higher level for enterprises. 

There is nothing wrong with the scalability of the product. It's simply a matter of licensing and configuration, nothing more, nothing less. If it needs something from the back end, it's a configuration that can be done or adjusted easily as it's something on the cloud. You can just change the attributes that you need for the service. It's simple. Nothing is hard there. As it's not a mission-critical thing that it needs to be up 24/7, you can do these upgrades easily.

I've interacted with technical support. I interacted with them a lot in small cases and in big cases. The good thing about NetApp, when it comes to a serious issue, if we're talking about real downtime, you will find everyone online with you.

The initial setup is so straightforward it doesn't require very many prerequisites.

The deployment time depends on the size of the data. In general, we can say that testing, taking the data back and forth, can take about two days.

You just need one person for deployment and maintenance. You do not need a big team. If your business model is having one support and deployment team and they are doing the same job, then you can have one person. If it's different departments, you can have one for the support and you can have one for the implementation and that's it.

As integrators, we handle the professional services for NetApp. We do not take professional services from the vendor right now. In fact, we are a service arm for NetApp. We are bound to the documentation and everything from the vendor. However, we are the team that does the implementation.

What will happen is that customers will eventually get to an ROI. It'll save time and effort for the team that is working. This is a very important thing and it will give them opportunities to do some other work. 

It's not expensive. Its cost is fair. 

You can have set up a subscription. You can do the payment like that. The payment model is completely different from region to region and partner to partner. Sometimes we can take it as facilitation from our side as an investment with the customer and we can make it monthly as well. It depends, however, mainly, it's set up as a SaaS service with monthly payments.

The one price includes everything. Usually, when you receive the quotation, everything is there. It's divided up and the various aspects are written there. These are essential things in the initial quote.

We're partners. We are system integrators. I'm exposed to storage regarding NetApp - all services of NetApp and HDS and AltaVault. We are also selling that. From the backup perspective, arguably our specialty is actually in Commvault and Veritas. We handle backup, archiving, and data management solutions as well. 

NetApp these days is completely different than the old days. NetApp started as a software company. The core is the software, which is the ONTAP software. Now ONTAP software can be deployed on the cloud. If you're looking for on-prem storage, you can have that. If you're looking for the storage capabilities yet you want the same capabilities on the cloud, you can have it by having the ONTAP for the cloud. The only difference is that NetApp doesn't have a complete solution for the cloud as a cloud provider. It's not like Amazon and it's like not Azure. This is a service that is running on those services.

They do not have the same capabilities as the on-prem storage - such as the rate of de-duplication. They don't have de-duplication actually as a normal feature with the normal rate. They don't have serverless replication between desks. It's not like that. It's a clock active storage there on the cloud. However, when you use the NetApp ONTAP on the cloud, it allows you to treat the cloud storage and cloud tier like normal storage on-prem with everything, regardless of the number of snapshots, compression, or deduplication.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.

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