NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

We use the solution on premises for files and in AWS for the target.

We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our organization's data footprint in the cloud. The data-tiering helps a lot. I would say improving data tiering to S3 reduces our footprint by about 90-95%, which is huge. That is instead of just sitting on EBS, which is expensive storage.

The solution's Snapshot copies and thin clones is a really fast and easy method for recovery.

I think the challenge now is more in terms of keeping an air gap. The notion that it is in the cloud, easy to break, etc. The challenge now is mostly about the air gap and how we can protect that in the cloud.

So far, it has been very stable. We haven't had any downtime or other stability issues.

This product is very easy to scale.

Most of the time they're very timely. Sometimes you just need to wait, which is okay because those times are not critical issues. When we do have to wait, the response time is usually a day or two, but that's fine with that level of criticality.

I've used NetApp for many years. It's something that I know is very stable and reliable. Recommending it to the current company was an easy pass. When I joined the company we were using a different vendor. It was an EMC solution for file, but we moved to NetApp. NetApp has more storage efficiency, the Snapshot feature, and better performance when you have multiple snapshots.

It's very straightforward to set up. It was very easy and fast.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It was very easy and there was almost nothing to do. It's just a click of a button.

We used NetApp Build Engineer to deploy. We had a good experience with them.

Definitely check out this file solution. We are using that and the cloud solution. It's something you need to see in your environment if you are not using it yet.

NetApp is nine out of ten. If we address the air gap concern, it would be a ten.

We use this solution both on-premises and in the cloud.

Our primary use case for our on-premises implementation is production data and DR. In our cloud implementation, we use this solution for DR.

Moving to the cloud version was something that was different for us, but it was a fairly easy transition. Once we got comfortable with it, now it's second nature. There are many new features and I find that it is more valuable.

In terms of operational recovery, the solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones are easy to do. It greatly simplifies DR testing or application testing because we can very quickly clone a volume provided to the application team. They can use it, and if they want to keep it then we'll split it off and they have their own volume. Or, if they don't want to use it then we just throw it away.

With respect to using inline encryption using SnapMirror, this is something that we are interested in but our version does not support it. Once we upgrade to a supporting version, we plan to deploy it.

The solution's unified file and block storage access give us a standard common interface and a set of tools that we use regardless of whether we're dealing with the cloud or on-premises.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones have greatly improved our application development speed. The DBAs can create clones on their own and do whatever they want with them. They can keep them, destroy them, split them, etc. It takes a load off of the storage administrators and puts it where it really should be.

The consistency of storage management across clouds has made our storage operations a lot simpler. We didn't have to learn new interfaces and new command sets. Everything that we're used to using on-premises works for us in the cloud.

With respect to our data footprint in the cloud, we are seeing all of the storage benefits being extended from what we have on-premises. We're just getting into the cloud now, and we're probably seeing between a 30 and 50 percent reduction in our data footprint using compression, compaction, and deduplication.

This solution has made everything easier to do. The most basic operations are very simple and we've been using NetApp tools, plus some of our in-house tools, to automate a lot of the processes. It saves us a lot of time and effort.

ONTAP is extremely reliable.

The inclusion of onboard key management in CBL would simplify the way we have to do our security.

Multipathing for iSCSI LUNs is difficult to deal with from the client-side and I'd love to see a single entry point that can be moved around within the cluster to simplify the client configuration.

I have been using this solution for eighteen years.

In terms of stability, this is a rock-solid solution.

The scalability is great. You don't have to add controllers to add storage space and you can scale out if you need to add more horsepower to your cluster.

NetApp's technical support is outstanding.

We have not moved off of another solution. Rather, we are expanding to implement a new solution for a problem that hasn't been addressed yet. Specifically, we are looking to use CBO for replication that up to this point, had not been done yet.

The initial setup of this solution is very simple. I don't remember there being any problems that we looked at and had to research an answer for. It just worked.

We use Tego Data to assist us with this solution. They've been working with us for years on NetApp, and they're just great. They work with us hand in glove on any projects that we reach out to them for, and they know our environment just about as well as we do.

Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two.

We've looked at other storage solutions and we just keep coming back to NetApp because they provide us with everything we need. They have great support and the hardware has drastically improved in horsepower and capacity, so we're happy to stay with them.

I have no problems with this solution at all.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to take a serious look at NetApp. They have products that are very flexible, extremely reliable, they're cost-competitive with other storage solutions, and their support is outstanding.

There is always room for enhancement, but what it does, it does very well.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our use case is to have multitenant deployment of shared storage, specifically network-attached storage (NAS). This file share is used by applications that are very heavy with a very high throughput. Also, an application needs to be able to sustain the read/write throughput and persistent volume. Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps us to get the required performance from our applications.

We just got done with our PoC. We are now engaging with NetApp CVO to get this solution rolled out (deployment) and do hosting for our customers on top of that.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save.

• CIFS volume.
• The overall performance that we are getting from CVO.
• The features around things like Snapshots. 
• The performance and capacity monitoring of the storage.

These features help us to have a backup of our volumes using the native technology of NetApp ONTAP. That way, we don't have to invest in other solutions for our backup requirement. Also, it helps us to replicate the data to another geographic location so that helps us to save on the costs of backup products.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP gives us flexible storage.

There are a few bugs in the system that they need to improve on the UI part. Specifically, its integration of NetApp Cloud Manager with CVO, which is something they are already working on. They will probably provide a SaaS offering for Cloud Manager. 

We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full. 

Six months.

I cannot comment on stability right now because we have not been using it in production as of now.

We still have CVO running on a single VM instance. As an improvement area, if CVO can come up with a scale out that will help so we will not be limited by the number of VMs in GCP. Behind one instance, we are adding a number of GCP disks. In some cases, we would like to have the option to scale out by adding more nodes in a cluster environment, like Dell EMC Isilon.

Get NetApp involved from day one if you are thinking of deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP. They have a very good support team who is very helpful. They will help you with every aspect of getting the deployment done.

We previously used OpenZFS Cloud Storage. We switched because we were not getting the performance from them. The performance tuning is a headache. There were a lot of issues, such as, the stability and updates of the OpenZFS. We had it because it was a free, open source solution. 

We switched to NetApp because I trust their performance tool and file system.

We did the PoC. Now, we are going to set up a production environment. 

The initial setup was a bit challenging for someone who has no idea about NetApp. Since I have some background with it, I found the setup straightforward. For a few folks, it was challenging. It is best to get NetApp support involved for novices, as they can give the best option for setting to select during deployment.

The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge.

My team of engineers works on deploying this solution. There are five people on my team.

We have not realized any money or savings yet because we are still in our deployment process.

They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product.

We did consider several options. 

In GCP, we also considered NetApp's Cloud Volumes services as well, but it did not have good performance. 

Another solution that we tried was Qumulo, which was a good solution, but not that good. From a scaling out perspective, it can scale out a file system, whereas NetApp is not like that. NetApp still works with a single VM. That is the difference.  

We also evaluated the native GCP file offering. However, it did not give us the performance for the application that we wanted.

We do use the cloud performance monitoring, but not with a NetApp product. We use Stackdriver. NetApp provides a separate thing for the monitoring of NetApp CVO, which is NetApp Cloud Manager.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

The primary use case is for files, VMware storage, and the DR volume on the cloud. They also use this solution to move data between on-premises and the cloud volume ONTAP.

It's difficult to say if it has helped to reduce the company's data in the cloud right now without running it for a while. It's the same for the cloud costs.

We are going through testing right now, and can't tell if it will affect their operations until we validate it.

The most valuable features are the ease of management, the deduplication, storage optimization, SnapMirror, it has flexible in testing for different scenarios, rapid deployment of the test environments, and rapid recovery.

The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens.

The ability to go back in time. It's easy to restore the data that we need and it has good stability with CIFS. When a client is using CIFS to access their files, it is pretty stable without knowing Microsoft issues.

The simplicity and ease of usage for VMware provisioning are also helpful.

Some of the area's that need improvement are:

• Cloud sync
• Cloud Volume ONTAP
• Deployment for the cloud manager

These areas need to be streamlined. They are basic configuration error states to acquire late provisioning.

I would like to see the ability to present CIFS files that have been SnapMirrorroed to the Cloud Volume ONTAP and the ability to serve them similarly to OneDrive or Web interfaces.

We are talking about DR cases, customers who are trying to streamline their environments. In the case of DR, users can easily access that data. Today, without running it as file services fully and presenting it through some third party solution, there is no easy way for an end-user to access the appropriate data. This means that we have to build the whole infrastructure for the end-user to be able to open their work files.

The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure.

As an example, you cannot reuse that administrator name, because that object is created in Azure, and it will not let you create it again. So, when the first deployment fails and we deploy for a second time, we have to use a new administration name. Additionally, it requires connectivity from NetApp to register the products and the customer is notified that Network access is not allowed, which creates a problem.

This issue occurs during the time of deployment, but it isn't clear why your environment is not deploying successfully. For this reason, more documentation is needed in explaining and clarification steps of how it needs to be done.

We are just validating the cloud for a couple of our clients, so we haven't had it affect our client storage operations.

Scalability remains to be seen. At this time the NetApp limits on the levels of premium, standard, and the basic one are unreasonably incorrect.

It is hard to go from ten terabytes to three hundred and sixty-eight terabytes and leave everyone in between there hanging. Nobody is interested in going with the limit of ten terabytes to test this solution.

I am talking specifically about Azure, Cloud Volume ONTAP and the differentiator between three levels of provisioning storage.

I have used technical support and it's mediocre.

They gave their best effort, however, at the point they couldn't figure out the problem, they simply said that we would have to deal with Professional Services. I was not impressed, but I understand that it is a new product.

It can be straightforward if everything is perfect, but if there are any glitches on the customer's side then potentially it could require long-term troubleshooting without knowing where to look for the problem.

We have deployed on-premises, but currently, we are testing it on cloud volumes.

For the initial deployment, I used the NetApp file manager to get it up and running.

When it comes to choosing the right solution for our clients, they trust our judgment in recommending something that they know is going to work for them. 

Most of our clients are looking for availability in disaster recovery data and centralizing it into one cloud location. In some cases, a customer doesn't want to go with multiple clients, they want to have it all in one place. They are also looking for simplification in management of the entire solution, provisioning, managing copywriting from a similar interface and a company that can be responsible for the support.

Our customers evaluate other vendors as well. They have looked at AWS, several from Veeam, and partners from ASR for different replication software.

Customers decide to go with NetApp because of our recommendations.

I have experience with other application services including Commvault, Veeam, and ASR.

If Snapshot copies and FlexClones are licensed they work great. The challenge is that the client will not always get the FlexClone license, then it is more difficult to provide it in the future.

Some of our older clients do not have a license for FlexClone, so the recovery of snapshot data can be problematic.

In some cases, they use inline encryption using SnapMirror, but not often.

Inline encryption addresses concerns of data security, as well as using Snapshot. If it is encrypted and it's not near encrypted traffic, then it has less chance of being accessed by someone.

I don't work with application development, so I can't address whether or not snapshot copies and Flexcone affect their application, but for testing environments where we have to update with batches made for maintenance, yes, it allows you to provision, to test, and it validates the stability of the testing and updates releases.

The clients included me in the decision making.

Each has its pros and cons, but with NetApp, this is a NetApp to NetApp product. With Windows backup solutions, it can be from any storage platform to any cloud also. In different ways, they have different workflows with different approaches, but you know each of them is meeting with its business objective, giving you a good balance.

My advice would be to try it first, figure out all of the kinks that might come up, have the proper resources from NetApp lined up to provide you support, and don't give up because it works in the end.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We mostly use it for disaster recovery.

We are using Cloud Volumes only for our NAS storage, not FAS, which includes Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware.

We are remotely able to manage data.

We have performance monitoring, but there is not much load. Sometimes, we use it to trace performance when there are performance-related issues. We will then log a case based on what needs to be checked, like a network issue.

The flexible volumes are its most valuable features because we can increase and decrease the volumes. 

There is unified storage, which provides flexibility. It is set up perfectly for performance and provisioning. We are able to monitor everything using a separate application. It provides error and critical warnings that allow us to take immediate action through ONTAP. We are able to manage everything, log a case, and follow up with the support team, who can fix it. That is how it is unified.

We can take a Snapshot. We created a snapshot policy for the cloud, non-cloud, and test so there are three policies. We take Snapshots daily and weekly. This hardly takes any of our attention.

It is very comfortable to learn and work with when managing everything, e.g., with upgrades and maintenance. We can do everything perfectly. 

They don't provide training documentation where we can learn about the back-end architecture and how it works. I have needed this type of documentation for Cloud Manager, its AWS integration, and managing the on-premise back-end. We would also like to learn about future enhancements from documentation.

I joined Baxter International six months ago. That is how long that I have been using the solution.

It is stable compared to other storage solutions. 

It provides a stable storage for flexibility. Everything is perfect and works quickly.

We upgraded last month. I am not a fan of the upgrade to 9.7.

Everything is fine with the scalability.

We have more than 10,000 people using the solution on the cloud. 

The company has more than seven filers and controllers each. 

There are four people managing Baxter International's storage in India and the UK. Two people manage this device, a senior technical associate and myself.

The tech support is wonderful. They provide support in a timely fashion. They have provided support to us on knowledge base related issues, fixing them without any problems.

Types of issues we have logged:

• Time sink.
• Getting a warning alert about not being able to connect to Cloud Manager when we log into it. The support has provided links, but this particular issue is not fixed yet.

We are currently in the process of deploying the new NetApp box and are unable to deploy it. We are getting some errors. We are working the the network team to fix this.

I still need to learn about SnapMirror with the new migration.

The operations team did the setup.

I am not aware if it saves money on storage. This is managed by senior people.

I have used IBM and Hitachi.

The product is secure.

Cloud Manager also works quickly.

I would rate Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a nine (out of 10).

Our primary use case for ONTAP is for DR. 

ONTAP has improved my organization because we no longer need to purchase all that hardware and have that all come up as a big expense. It worked out better for our budgeting purposes.

We use it to move data between hyperscales on our on-premises environment. We're able to do that with SnapMirror and it's pretty simple to set up and move data around. 

The most valuable feature is DR backups. 

ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms.

We use SnapMirror inline encryption for security in the cloud. A lot of people, especially legal, want their data to be protected. That's what we use it for.

Snapshot copies and thin clones have made our recovery time a lot faster. Doing a restore from a snapshot is a lot better than trying to do a restore from a backup.

In terms of time management and managing our infrastructure, we are a lot better because of the consistency of storage management across clouds.

I wouldn't say it has reduced our data footprint in the cloud because whatever we were using was basically a lift and shift as of right now. We are hoping as we go we'll be able to take advantage of all the storage efficiencies like compression and all that. Hopefully, that'll save us quite a lot of space and time.

In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now.

We haven't had issues with stability so far. 

Scalability comes down to what service or what NetApp Cloud solution you're using. There are different solutions for what you're trying to achieve. Based on your requirements, you just need to pick the right solution that works for you.

I haven't had any issues, so technical support is pretty good.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we were told we were closing the data centers so we had to migrate to the cloud. The management told us we are closing data centers and migrating everything into the cloud. That's what kicked us off.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It could be a little challenging if you don't know how the network security groups and how the roles in Azure work. That's where we had the challenges with deploying because we had cloud managers in different regions, one in Azure West and one in Azure East and we were trying to do replications between the two clouds. The Cloud Central Cloud Manager wasn't able to make a connection and that was because of some of the roles that we had to provide. Even the documentation on that was kind of scattered across. It wasn't just one page and it had all the information. So that was kind of challenging and it took me a lot of time to figure that out. I think it should be in one single pane of a page. Not as scattered around different pages.

Once I reached out to the support they helped me out, but I was trying to figure it out on my own reading documentation and it didn't do anything.

The first one I deployed in Azure was very simple. The second one that we deployed and I was trying to make the connection between, that was complex because of how the roles worked.

We used consultants for the implementation. We had a pretty good experience with them.

We have seen ROI. All of our SLASs via some of our SQL databases,  have SLAs of around five minutes. SnapMirror works great for that. We don't have that and if we have a disaster, then we could be in big trouble if we have SLA breaches and stuff like that.

It has not reduced our cloud cost. We're still pretty new and we're still trying to figure things out like how the cost modeling works and which is the best performance and best cost for our workloads. Based on that, it's a lot of tuning. Once you get there, you just need to monitor your workloads and see how it is and just go from there.

For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA.

For the DR we are using NetApp but for the production, a lot of the cloud architects in our company want to go native to Azure or native to AWS. Since we are a NetApp Cloud shop for a while and even our RND on-prem is mostly just all on NetApps. We want to keep that going, going into the cloud because it's a lot simpler to manage our infrastructure, our storage and take advantage of all the efficiencies that NetApp provides. Whereas if you don't use that, all of those savings, and if you have a lot of data as we do, petabytes of data, and Microsoft and AWS, take advantage of all those efficiencies and we don't because we don't have that capability. With the NetApp integration, we can take advantage of all those efficiencies and other performance.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because of the simplicity of the DR is amazing. You just set it up. If there are any issues bringing it back, bringing it online in a DR site just takes a few minutes and then you're back up online again.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering ONTAP is to give it a try. That's how I learned. I didn't know anything about the cloud. Then our company just started telling us that we were moving everything to the cloud and we had to learn about it. That's how we learned and moved everything to the cloud.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is used for disaster recovery right now, and the primary use case for our current clients and environments is CIFS. Most clients use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a replication destination for CIFS. It's a way to back up their documents and files offsite for disaster recovery. They have VMs that they spin up and connect to. 

In most cases, we have not deployed anything that uses the service protocol, like iSCSI or NFS. It's strictly CIFS. We haven't used one solution—matching DR for CIFS volumes—which is a destination that replicates from on-prem to the cloud, but we've done DR tests with that. 

The other two instances we're currently running will be the same scenario, but we're not there yet. Right now, they are being used for SnapMirror destinations of CIFS volumes only, and that's all three. We've been running Cloud Volumes ONTAP in Azure as a VM along with a connector. They had one deployed before I took it over, but it's typically done within the NetApp Cloud Manager system. Once we connect to the Azure portal or subscription, we push out the CVO from there.

Our clients see most of the benefits. Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides offsite backups. We used to host our backups on physical infrastructure in a data center or on remote sites. There were a lot of storage costs for replication. By implementing Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the Azure portal, we eliminated the cost of additional hardware and everything you have to maintain on-prem in a physical environment and put it up to the cloud. That was a considerable cost savings for the customer.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a massive improvement in terms of manageability. It's easier for customers to perform certain functions from that interface, knowing it sits on a high availability platform. We don't worry about paying all these separate vendors for replication solutions. Other costs are associated with maintaining physical infrastructure in a data center, like electricity or storage space, RAM, and other hardware. It has improved our clients' bottom line because they spend less on disaster recovery.

The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive. 

I haven't been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for too long. It has been a little under three years since we started working with it. We were mostly doing a lot with data centers, so we only really started getting into cloud systems about three years ago.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP seems to be fairly stable so far. The only time we have issues is when there is a circuit interruption, but this product has been pretty stable. We haven't had issues with crashes or data getting corrupted. We've had interruptions due to internet problems or leaks between the sites. 

These are things we have no control over because they're different providers. That's the only issue that I've seen. But once those come through the actual system itself, it's been fine as far as resiliency, performance, and availability.

We can expand on it as needed. In particular, it's easy to add storage, and storage expansion is probably the feature we utilize the most. We don't mess with any other features, like within the protocols or anything like that. Those are fine, but storage scalability is pretty good.

Our clients' storage needs vary. Typically, it's somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 terabytes, but at least 15 to 30 terabytes. Each client is a little different, but the one that uses the most storage has a capacity of about 30 terabytes.

NetApp technical support is pretty good. We sometimes have to wait a bit, but they're good at resolving issues once they find out what the problem is. They come back with solutions, so I would rate them pretty well.

Deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be complex at times, but I think it's a learning curve. You have to put in many different pieces, and it's not always easy to find the documentation you need on the web. Some parts are straightforward, but sometimes you need to do some digging before deploying. 

It really comes down to planning. When implementing, we ensure each case is planned and deployed to the networking part for Azure. We also put together a template. That way, other engineers can follow or use it as a guideline when building it. I make a basic template of the required information, configuration settings, etc. 

These were all deployed as part of a much larger project, which included new hardware that was upgraded. The Azure and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP were part of that upgrade experience. It was in conjunction with the client getting a new on-prem NetApp system and other infrastructure, like switches. Once everything was migrated, we implemented the Azure part in Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

We have a small team for handling deployment. I think they have maybe two people. One person could do it, but there is an alternative if somebody is out on vacation. The managed service division covers all the maintenance for our clients. The managed service team takes over all the backend IT work for our clients. Instead of having a full staff, the client pays us to manage the backend of their servers and other infrastructure. As a managed service, we go in and take care of their switching, patches, upgrading, etc.

We do all of the implementations for our clients in-house who are the end-users. We sell them the solution and deploy it for them.

I believe our clients see a return because they don't need to purchase hardware. It's much easier and quicker for them to get additional storage when needed compared to an on-prem system. 

They save on costs associated with ordering additional storage for a physical on-prem system versus expanding what you have and you pay a little more in Azure. One client saw significant cost savings on their electricity bill. They reduced their bill by almost half just by shutting these things off.

Our management and salespeople deal with pricing. I'm not part of the price negotiations or anything like that. I work on design and implementation.

I rate Cloud Volumes ONTAP nine out of 10. It's an excellent solution that is cloud-based, so you don't have to worry about leasing or purchasing hardware. All costs of purchasing lines and circuits are upfront. Since this product works over the internet, you only need data access, which most of them have. 

Overall, I would say this is better than an on-prem solution that requires physical hardware at remote sites. You don't need to invest in buying or maintaining physical hardware. In this case, you're paying a monthly cost for something. You can decide at any time to stop using it if you don't need it anymore. That's a problem with owning physical infrastructure. You have to dispose of it when you don't need it anymore. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is also easier to manage and upgrade than on-prem systems.

I work as a cloud architect in the multicloud team. We have customers that run NetApp services like CVS or CVO on Google or AWS or Microsoft Azure. We help them, support them, and we do migrations from their prime workflows to the cloud.

The primary use case is the migration of workloads from on-prem to cloud. We use the SnapMirror functionality to move to GCP, for example. The second use case is that we also have some file services which we need on the cloud platforms. Our customers use file services like NFS and  CIFS or SMB to address their requirements.

We save money using CVO because there is a data-tiering concept. There are algorithms that make sure that data which is frequently accessed is kept on the faster disks, and data which is less frequently accessed is stored in a cold tier. Deduplication and compression also provide storage efficiency and savings..

The feature which I like the most is that it has the capabilities that the traditional storage system offers. It provides all the functionality. The deduplication and compression work exactly like ONTAP's traditional storage. So people who have experience with that find it very easy to manage. And, exactly like the traditional NetApp system, it provides you SnapMirror and the Qtree functionality, which means you have the multi-protocol mechanism. That is something that many of the cloud-native file services do not have. 

The capacity is also flexible. You can start from a small disk and you can go with a bigger disk size.

CVO is quite well when it comes to use the file services on a cloud-native platform. 

It does have some compliance features. If a person is looking for compliance with GDPR, he can use the compliance feature provided by Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Most companies have some kind of compliance software for example, Data Custodian.A second option would be to go with the compliance feature provided by Cloud Volumes ONTAP. You can implement policies that would restrict the usage of data. NetApp doesn't control the data, the data stays with the company.

Currently, Cloud Volumes ONTAP is not a high-availability solution. When you deploy the solution it comes in single-node. It supports a single-node deployment in Google Cloud Platform, but with other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon it does offers dual controllers deployment models. However, the RAID protection level isn't quite well designed since it is laid out at the RAID 0 level. So even though you have a dual-controller deployment in place, you do not have high-availability and fault-tolerance in place during a component failure.

NetApp has said it will come out with HA as well, but even if they come out with HA, the way CVO data protection is quite different than a traditional NetApp storage system. Hence, in my opinion It needs to be improvised with RAID protection level on CVO to have better redundancy in place.

In addition to it, when it comes to critical demanding workload or read-write-intensive application, it doesn't provide the expected performance that some of apps/DBs require for example SAP HANA Database. The SAP HANA database has a write-latency of less than 2 milliseconds and the CVO solution does not quite fit there. However, It could be quite well worked with other databases, where the requirements are not so stringent or high demanding for write-latency. I don't know if NetApp has done some PoCs or evaluation with the SAP HANA databases so they are certified to use with.

A last thing, it is an unmanaged solution, it means  someone who has no storage background or technical experience for them it's quite challenging to manage the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. They may need a NetApp managed-service model so the NetApp support team can help them to maintain or manage or troubleshoot their environment. When you deploy the solution to a customer environment, you shouldn't expect they will have some storage experience.  They might be software or application developers but this product would require them to upgrade their knowledge on the storage track. In my opinion NetApp should consider selling the solution with some add-on services model for example   CVO Manage Model support service models to support and manage customer CVO infrastructure.

I have been working with Cloud Volumes ONTAP since 2018. We are using two kinds of solutions from NetApp. One is the Cloud Volumes Services  managed cloud storage services and second one is Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The stability is only lacking when you have a problem with the underlying subsystem and the hardware has failed. I have not encountered that problem so far. 

When doing tests for some of our LOBs, I realized that if your aggregate goes offline then you would have to do a manual failover. That means if you are using CVO for instances, like VMs or, on the on-prem world if you are doing hybrid-cloud connectivity, then you would have to unmount your disks and mount them back. That would be a disruption. 

But when it comes to overall product stability, if you don't have any underlying issues, it works fine. But if you have a subsystem level issue, then you will have a problem.

There are capacity limits. It has a maximum of 368 terabytes.

I have never used technical support from NetApp. I know people there whom I was working with two years back, and they are my points of contact if I need something. I haven't used technical support because if I have issues I directly contact the people I know. They are usually quite responsive. I have not had any problem with the support so far.

I have done the deployment end-to-end for our customers. The CVO setup is quite simple and straightforward.

You need to have a cloud account, a service account, which CVO can be used with for a cloud provider like Google. You cannot download CVO directly from the marketplace, you need to be on the NetApp website. If you have a service account already created, it will authenticate. You just feed it the information. It's a GUI interface. You just click "next" and it will ask you for the information, like "Which network do you want to deploy?" and "What is the name of your machine?" etc. I don't think anybody needs experience to do the set up.

The challenge comes with configuration, such as if you want to do a multi-protocol or an AD integration. Those things are a little bit deep. A person who has already worked on those kinds of things can easily do them. And other than that, the deployment is quite easy.

The deployment time depends on what you feed to the appliance but it should take about 20 to 45 minutes, everything included, except things such as Active Directory integrations or multi-protocols.

There are many people in our company using CVO but, from an architecture standpoint, I am the one who is helping the LOBs. Some LOBs have some experience because they have been using NetApp. But when it comes to the deployment on the cloud, they are not aware of how the service account works.

If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp.

Because we have been a NetApp customer for a long time I think we do get some discounts when we buy this solution from NetApp on a large scale, although I am not involved with the pricing side.

I work with file solutions from other vendors. We have vendors like Elastifile which I used to work with but it was acquired by Google. I also checked a Google-native solution. And Azure has file shares as well as something called NFS Blob, but it also uses the NetApp in the backend. It's a NetApp CVS. It's not like CVO, it's quite different, but it does provide the same functionality, such as file services like CIFS or NFS. But that solution lacks other things. It doesn't work like CVO because CVO provides a lot of features.

CVO provides all the functionality any customer would need on cloud. It's a single solution that covers everything.

It's not a managed solution, so a person who uses this solution should have some prior knowledge using NetApp storage. It is your responsibility to manage the solution.

CVO does provide unified storage, We use CVO's cloud resource performance monitoring. It provides you overall performance stats, such as your disk level, your egress traffic going from the disk, the read/write, random data and sequential data. But for databases, you need specific tools like DB Classify. While CVO does give you information, it doesn't give information at a more granular level. It only provides information from the disk side, such as the IOPS and the throughput you're getting. But there are other things that play a vital role, such as your instance size or type. If your instance-type  or size configuration is not properly configured or if it is fighting for resources, you won't get a good performance. In conclusion, it provides a holistic view, but when you want to drill down you need different tools to look at the subsystem level, like the DB or application level.

CVO provides quite good  file services that no other cloud provider offers so far, from what I have seen. It has all the mechanisms, such as NFS and SMB and it has multi-protocol. It does provide exactly what a normal storage system provides. The thing it misses is performance/fault tolerance.