NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

Our primary use case is for shared storage. We use the solution to support our ERP environment, where our teams want to share storage between different servers/apps. We're mostly using it for NAS.

It's meant to do the same thing in the public cloud that we were doing in our private cloud. In the private cloud we can control the infrastructure, whereas in the public cloud we don't have as much control. This gives us a way to optimize resource usage in the public cloud, without overpaying or wasting resources.

It also provides unified storage no matter what data you have. It makes sure we have control of the data and that we know what it's being used for. The main thing for us is that we need to know what applications are consuming it and responsible for it. The solution helps us do that.

In addition, it helps us because we know what it's used for, who owns something, and who's accountable for those storage costs. Ultimately, it helps us reduce our storage needs and that's where we get our savings.

Compared to native cloud storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to better manage shared storage.

I don't have a preference for any feature. It's meant to optimize storage and usage within the public cloud.

Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database.

I've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about three years.

As far as I know, everything is stable.

It's very scalable.

We focus on apps or IT services that are using it and currently the total is in the neighborhood of about five.

I haven't used technical support.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Our challenge is understanding all the different storage that we set up and being able to tie each storage that we create back to an IT service and, ultimately, a cost center. That piece was difficult to set up and we had to do some things manually.

As for the amount of staff required on our side for deployment and maintenance, it's very minimal.

We used NetApp to help with the setup. We focused on just getting things up and running, rather than making sure everything was set up the way we wanted it to be. Part of that was the JCI issue, and part of that was that the vendor might have helped us better plan and better organize.

Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is to make sure you have a proper foundation and design in place to manage everything from A to Z before you start deploying your first storage on NetApp.

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 use CVO for NFS data storage, NFS sharing, and SMP sharing.

CVO helped us migrate to the cloud. We were already using the same software on-prem. We just migrated it to the cloud, so it helped us with that. 

The workload migration was outstanding. It was seamless. We have on-premise CVO within BlueXP. We just drag and drop the on-premise workload to the cloud workload. It just migrated and cut over. That was it. The time required depends on the volume size. Our largest volume took us three-and-a-half weeks. It takes some time to migrate the data from on-prem to the cloud. 

We have on-prem NetApp AFF, and we're looking into using NetApp Data Sense or Blue XP Data Sense for the backup servers as well. Everything integrates perfectly. We have some on-prem workloads that run on NetApp, and CVO on a cloud. We can migrate between the two if needed.

Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise. 

I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI.

I have used CVO for four years.

CVO is highly stable, and the performance has met our expectations. It does exactly what it needs to do.

Scaling CVO is straightforward. It's super easy to grow the cloud environment compared to the on-prem solution. It's easier to scale.

I've had no issues with NetApp support so far. It's been excellent.

We had the on-premise version of ONTAP. We also have a Nutanix array for our hypervisor. 

I've set up four NetApp CVOs. They all took around five minutes to set up. It's super easy.

The licensing is good. They make it easy for you. You go to the sizing site. It's a bar that you drag and drop.

I rate NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP nine out of 10. If you're a fan of the on-prem version, you'll like CVO on the cloud. 

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. 

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).

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.

Our primary use case is data replication to the cloud.

Using Snapshot copies and thin clones for operational recovery is convenient. This technology makes things very easy.

The unified file and block-storage access across clouds and on-premises infrastructure have made things easier for us. It means that we do not face significant roadblocks.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it.

We would like to have support for high availability in multi-regions.

There is no support for Microsoft Azure.

I have been using this solution for three years.

The stability is very impressive and we have had no issues with it.

Scalability is not an issue because it is really expandable. If you don't know the structure of the business you can scale up, scale down, and do everything graphically.

We have not used NetApp technical support directly. We have been speaking with partners who are in our region.

We used the NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running, and we found it very simple. It was very easy, and you don't have to be an engineer to get it working.

Partners from our region assisted us with the deployment. CW did a good job starting from scratch and getting everything up and running. When I would give a requirement, they would come up with all of the options that were available.

I have tried Pure Storage and EMC RecoverPoint, but ONTAP is easier to use.

I love this solution. They have a lot of features and they explore the market really well, whereas other vendors fail to do those things. ONTAP keeps evolving with the needs of the market and follows the trends.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for SAP production environments. We are running the shared file systems for our SAP systems on it.

It's helped us to dive into the cloud very fast. We didn't have to change any automations which we already had. We didn't have to change any processes we already had. We were able to adopt it very fast. It was a huge benefit for us to use the same concepts in the cloud as we do on-premise. We're running our environment very efficiently, and it was very helpful that our staff, our operators, didn't have to learn new systems. They have the same processes, all the same knowledge they had before. It was very easy and fast.

We did a comparison, of course, and it was cheaper to have Cloud Volumes ONTAP running with the deduplication and compression, compared to storing everything, for example, on HA disks and have a server running all the time as well. And that was not even for the biggest environment.

The data tiering saves us money because it offloads all the code data to the Blob Storage. However, we use the HA version and data tiering just came to HA with version 9.6 and we are not on 9.6 in our production environment. It's still on RC, the pre-release, and not on GA release. In our testing we have seen that it saves a lot of money, but our production systems are not there yet.

The high availability of the service is a valuable feature. We use the HA version to run two instances. That way there is no downtime for our services when we do any maintenance on the system itself.

For normal upgrades or updates of the system - updates for security fixes, for example - it helps that the systems and that the service itself stay online. For one of our customers, we have 20 systems attached and if we had to ride that customer all the time and say, "Oh, sorry, we have to take your 20 systems down just because we have to do maintenance on your shared file systems," he would not be amused. So that's really a huge benefit.

And there are the usual NetApp benefits we have had over the last ten years or so, like snapshotting, cloning, and deduplication and compression which make it space-efficient on the cloud as well. We've been taking advantage of the data protection provided by the snapshot feature for many years in our on-prem storage systems. We find it very good. And we offload those snapshots as well to other instances, or to other storage systems.

The provisioning capability was challenging the first time we used it. You have to find the right way to deploy but, after the first and second try, it was very easy to automate for us. We are highly automated in our environment so we use the REST API for deployment. We completely deploy the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance itself automatically, when we have a new customer. Similarly, deployment on the Cloud Volumes ONTAP for the Volumes and access to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance are automated as well.

But for that, we still use our on-premise automations with WFA (Workflow Automation). NetApp has a tool which simplifies the automation of NetApp storage systems. We use the same automation for the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instances as we do for our on-premise storage systems. There's no difference, at the end of the day, from the operating system standpoint.

In addition, NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because, again, it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well. It's pretty good.

Another feature which gets a lot of attention in our environment is the File Services Solutions in the cloud, because it's a completely, fully-managed service. We don't have to take care of any updates, upgrades, or configurations. We're just using it, deploying volumes and using them. We see that, in some way, as being the future of storage services, for us at least: completely managed.

Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair. My guess is that those will be the next challenges they have to face.

One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have. That was something of a challenge for us: where to use HA disks and where to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP in that environment, instead of just using Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages.

Right now, the scalability is sufficient in what it provides for us, but we can see that our customer environments are growing. We can see that it will reach its performance end in around a year or so. They will have to evolve or create some performance improvements or build some scale-up/scale-out capabilities into it.

In terms of increasing our usage, the tiering will be definitely used in production as soon as its GA for Azur. They're already playing with the Ultra SSDs, for performance improvements on the storage system itself. As soon as they become generally available by Microsoft, that will probably a feature we'll go to.

As for end-users, for us they are our customers. But the customers have several hundred or 1,000 users on the system. I don't really know how many end-users are ultimately using it, but we have about ten customers.

Technical support has been very good. The technical people who are responsible for us at NetApp are very good. If we contact them we get direct feedback. We often have direct contact, in our case at least, to the engineers as well. We have direct contacts with NetApp in Tel Aviv.

It's worth mentioning that when we started with Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the past, we did an architecture workshop with them in Tel Aviv, to tell them what our deployments look like in our on-premise environment, and to figure out what possibilities Cloud Volumes ONTAP could provide to us as a service provider. What else could we do on it, other than just running several services? For example: disaster recovery or doing our backups. We did that at a very early stage in the process.

We only used native Azure services. We went with Cloud Volumes ONTAP because it was a natural extension of our NetApp products. We have a huge on-premise storage environment from NetApp and we have been familiar with all the benefits from these storage systems for several years. We wanted to have all the benefits in the cloud, the same as we have on-premise. That's why we evaluated it, and we're in a very early stage with it.

To say the initial setup was complex is too strong. We had to look into it and find the right way to do it. It wasn't that complex, it was just a matter of understanding what was supported and what was not from the SAP side. But as soon as we figured that out, it was very straightforward to figure out how to build our environment.

We had an implementation strategy: Determining what SAP systems and what services we would like to deploy in the cloud. Our strategy was that if Cloud Volumes ONTAP made sense in any use case, we would want to use it because it's, again, highly automated and we could use it with our scripting already. Then we had to look at what is supported by SAP itself. We mixed that together in the end and that gave us our concept.

Our initial deployment took one to two weeks, maximum. It required two people, in total, but it was a mixture of SAP and storage colleagues. In terms of maintenance, it doesn't take any additional people than we already have for our on-premise environment. There was no additional headcount for the cloud environment. It's the same operating team and the same people managing Cloud Volumes ONTAP as well as our on-premise storage systems. It requires almost no maintenance. It just runs and we don't have to take care of updating it every two months or so for security reasons.

We didn't use a third-party.

We have seen return on investment but I don't have the numbers. 

The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company. We have an Enterprise Agreement or something similar to that. So we get a different price for it.

In terms of additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees, you have to run instances in Azure, virtual machines and disks. You still have to pay for the Azure disks, and Blob Storage if you're using tiering. What's also important is to know is the network bandwidth. That was the most complicated part in our project, to figure out how much data would be streamed out of our data center into the cloud and how much data would have to be sent back into our data center. It's more challenging than if you have a customer who is running only in Azure. It can be expensive if you don't have an eye on it.

We have a single-vendor strategy.

Don't be afraid of granting permissions because that's one of the most complex parts, but that's Azure. As soon as you've done that, it's easy and straightforward. When you do it the first time you'll think, "Oh, why is it so complicated?" That's native Azure.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Cloud Volumes ONTAP is that from an optimization standpoint, our on-premise instance was a lot more complex than it had to be. That's was a big lesson because Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a very easy, light, wide service. You just use it and it doesn't require that much configuring. You can just use the standards which come from NetApp and that was something we didn't do with our on-premise environment.

In terms of disaster recovery, we have not used Cloud Volumes ONTAP in production yet. We've tested it to see if we could adopt Cloud Volumes ONTAP for that scenario, to migrate all our offloads or all our storage footprint we have on-premise to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. We're still evaluating it. We've done a lot of cost-comparison, which looks pretty good. But we are still facing a little technical problem because we're a CSP (cloud service provider). We're on the way to having Microsoft fix that. It's a Microsoft issue, not a NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP issue.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. There are improvements they need to make for scale-up and scale-out.