NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

It just gives us the capability to get cloud resources.

The primary use case for ONTAP Cloud is getting data into the cloud.

We are using the product for our future planning in the following:

• Disaster recovery in the cloud
• Backup in the cloud
• Development in the cloud.

• SnapMirror
• SnapVault
• Fast, persistent storage in the cloud

Just more scale out. It can only do two nodes. One SVM, which would be okay as long as I can scale easily.

It needs to be matured with more capabilities.

So far, so good.

It's limited. We're trying to figure out better methods as we need to scale out more.

We have built-in support. It is good. They are an onsite resource.

We needed persistent storage in the cloud for platforms, and there's really not options right now in AWS or Azure.

We also use Avere Gateways. That's pretty much it.

I was the one who evaluated and approved the use of ONTAP Cloud.

It functions and I think in the future it will be a reasonable method of getting NFS and the cloud.

The most important factor that lead us to use OTC versus a native cloud storage solution was having enough fast capabilities and social capabilities. It is extremely important that our storage enable us to render and integrate on-premise systems with cloud services. Cloud integration is also very important for us in our selection of a future on-premise storage system.

We use AWS cloud service.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We are 95% on NetApp on-premise. We wanted compatibility with their on-premise solutions.

We store our user documentation repository in NetApp. We are serving multiple divisions, and there are use cases grouped by divisions, by user access rights, et cetera. We also have specific requirements for the backups and restores.

The main use case for us in going with Cloud Volumes ONTAP was to ensure the IOPS or performance. There are other solutions available that are probably more cost-effective than NetApp, but given the criticality of our application, the performance expectations, and the availability, those were the factors that helped us to zero in on the NetApp solution.

In terms of administration, the portal which provides the dashboard view is an excellent tool for operations. It gives you volume divisions, usage rates, which division is using how much data, and more. The operations portal is fantastic for the support team.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides unified storage, no matter what kind of data you have. In terms of our data, it's mainly Word and PDF files, but we have a specific use case where applications are using XML files for document management.

The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases.

We started using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP in production in April of this year. But we had been working with the NetApp team before that, from October of 2020, to get the configuration right in the test environment. Overall, we have been using it for about one year and two months.

There has been just one incident since we started using it, in which a node refresh needed to be done. The stability is pretty good with only one incident in 14 months. We're pretty happy with that.

We have been pretty impressed with the scalability because when we started, we had to immediately onboard two more divisions and it was pretty straightforward, once we had the base setup going. We were able to scale it up pretty quickly and we were able to do it on our own.

We are using Cloud Volumes ONTAP daily. Our departments are copying the files on it and sharing them. It's a part of their daily work.

At the project level, we are not looking to expand our usage of NetApp, but at the organizational level, there are plans. They are looking at additional use cases that can be  onboarded to NetApp.

After we deployed we had a couple of queries in terms of optimizing uses. We raised a support ticket and the help was available within a couple of hours. They had people on a call supporting us.

We're pretty happy with the support we're getting and with our account manager. Everyone is prompt in responding, so we're quite happy.

Positive

We used a typical Windows file share. Then, when we moved to the cloud, we worked with Azure Files. But in terms of performance and stability, we found that NetApp was way ahead of the other solutions.

Overall, the setup process was excellent. It was pretty straightforward but we also had NetApp engineers available and dedicated to us on a call when we were setting it up. To help us get going, there was tremendous support available, which was good.

The setup time was about six hours and there were about two hours during which we had conference calls with the NetApp team. 

The NetApp team was very helpful. The engineers worked with us to understand our use cases and advised us on the configurations. They weren't just checking what we were doing but were contributing to the overall setup. That was a good experience.

It's too early to comment on ROI because we're just a little more than one year into a five-year business case. We'll probably see a return in the third or fourth year.

The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing.

We looked at Azure Files and the Amazon EFS file system.

The pros for NetApp were definitely the stability, performance, and availability, out-of-the-box. Even Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be set up in HA. With Azure as well as AWS, you have to have your own custom solutions on top of them. Another advantage with NetApp is the admin portal which has a very good dashboard. Because it gives a good view of usage in real time, decisions become easier for the business.

The only challenging part that we faced with NetApp was that it would have been good to have a sandbox available for a PoC scenario. Without it, what we had to do was get a trial license and set it up. With Azure and AWS, you go directly to the console and just provision it. With NetApp, we had that initial period where we had to set it up on a trial license for a month, and when that was getting close to expiring, we had to extend it.

First and foremost, test the use cases where you need availability and performance as the key drivers for a solution. In those scenarios, NetApp is way ahead compared to what the competitors offer. But given the cost of the other solutions, there has to be a three- to five-year view if you are going to go with NetApp. You will not see a return on your investment after six months or one year.

I'm happy with the way it is handling our use cases and meeting our performance requirements.

In some places, it helps to reduce the amount of our storage, but a lot of our data is very active and in very small files, so the system does not have enough time to keep track of all that. In one instance, we had a job, and we dumped roughly 25 terabytes in a day into the system, so for it to understand and try to reduce it and compress it, it sometimes does not have time because it is just so busy.

It has saved us on costs. I am not on the manager's side, but I have seen that the cost is better. I do not have the exact numbers, but it is probably two or three dollars per terabyte or something in that realm. Some of our competitors cannot beat that, so that does help.

A lot of our customers have their own cases. We create new volumes for each of those cases. One thing I have noticed is that it is very simple to move the data where we need to move it, delete it, or archive it if we need to archive it to StorageGRID.

We have a lot of challenges with ONTAP. We are an eDiscovery company. With ONTAP, sometimes we have issues where we are over the capacity of how many volumes we can have on a cluster. That is one of our biggest issues. The other bigger issue right now is keys. We do not have enough. NetApp itself does not give out as many volumes as keys. I do not understand that, so we have to shift and drive and do things like that to get our new data and make sure it is encrypted.

Their support and development teams can collaborate better to resolve an issue.

We have been using NetApp ONTAP for over five years for sure. We have the second-largest StorageGRID in the world with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues. There were only a couple of panics or something like that, but those are normal issues you deal with once in a while. 

Scalability is there. You have to buy ahead shelves and everything else to keep it growing. It is fairly simple.

We had some issues, but the communication was not there in terms of what they were doing and what the status was. It took us a couple of years to fix them. If they had kept us in check with that, it would not be as big of an issue. We have also dealt with PowerScale support. In the 7070 code, we had so many problems, but we worked with what they call the CodeRed team or the recovery team for a year. We worked side by side to fix those issues. Even some of the bigger management and directors tried to help us and keep us informed of what was going on. 

There is a bridge between NetApp's development and support teams. They do not know how to communicate with each other. Why cannot their developers talk with their support and work with them? To me, that is a collaboration. Their development and support teams need to collaborate more. In the case of PowerScale or Isilon, I did have the recovery team, and their recovery team had developers behind them.

Overall, I would rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have used Isilon and PowerScale. I made the switch because we moved to a different company. One of the pros of the other solutions is how NFS integrates with SMB on Isilon and PowerScale. You could have an NFS mount with an SMB mount, and the permissions would not be stuck. With ONTAP, you cannot put them together. One reason is that a lot of their shares are more CIF shares. That is a Microsoft protocol, and NFS works more with SMB because that is the same language.

I was involved in the initial setup on some new systems, but not on the legacy systems. It is pretty straightforward like any other system when you set it up, but there are a lot more simpler pieces to it.

We have not gotten to the cloud yet because our company is too big for the cloud, and it costs millions of dollars to put it up there.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP integrates with AWS native services. For us, it is not that big a deal, but we are looking at some of our smaller divisions overseas where it is more efficient to back up to AWS and other similar things, but we have not been able to implement it just yet.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for multiprotocol access.

It helps us with our snapshots with our backups. We do a lot of SnapVault backups to our secondary data center and that is very efficient for us. It reduced our recovery time.

ONTAP has reduced our company's footprint on the cloud and has reduced our cloud costs.

Multiprotocol is the most valuable feature because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data from Linux and from Windows clients. That was our value proposition for CVO, Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The operational recovery of snapshot copies and thin clones is very fast and efficient. We do a lot of database refreshes, and the dual clones and copies have reduced a lot of operational time.

It is highly stable.

Scalability is good.

Their technical support is amazing. 

We are old NetApp customers and we chose this solution because we wanted to adopt newer technologies. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy. We have faster deployments. We used Cloud Manager to get up and running. Its configuration wizard and ability to automate the process was amazing. It's easy to use, simple, and it does everything.

We used a partner for the deployment called EBT. Our experience with them was smooth. They know what they're doing. 

We have seen ROI.

We are a big NFS shop, so ONTAP is a great fit for us. If you are an NFS shop then I would recommend getting ONTAP.

I would rate ONTAP a nine out of ten. Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management. 

It provides flexibility for our VM environments. We use it to transport data between on-premise systems and the cloud.

AWS is the biggest and most common use case for integration with ONTAP.

We have a number of systems that we run on-premise and have not been moved to AWS for various reasons. ONTAP allows us to manage our portfolio across two domains. 

It manages our environments with a single purview of data management, especially as each variant of ONTAP uses identical metadata and file system formats. Then, data can be universally managed and manipulated throughout the data fabric.

SnapMirror helps mirror metadata and data volumes between endpoints in a data fabric.

The navigation on some of the configuration parameters is a bit cumbersome, making the learning curve on functions somewhat steep.

I would like them to make upgrading simpler. I would like it if they could offer a simpler upgrade guide which you can generate through their website, because their current version is full of dozens of complicated CLI commands. 

It is very stable and versatile, but you need to have an advanced degree to administer or monitor it.

Since it has seamless integration with AWS, scalability is not an issue.

NetApp ONTAP and AWS work really well together. ONTAP was designed to run within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances. Once Cloud Volumes ONTAP is installed, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes are assigned to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP EC2 compute instance to create the equivalent of a Data ONTAP storage array.

Purchasing this solution through the AWS Marketplace was simple, which was why our organization chose to go through it. The AWS consumer-based pricing model makes it easy for developers to use their credit cards to spin up virtual servers immediately.

Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration.

We are making good use of the product. It has a lot of features and is an efficient/stable product. The recovery using Snapshots is a big plus, alongside the flexibility in volume creation for Unix, as well as Windows environments. Its challenges are on the learning curve, as well as its pricing could be improved.

We use it for file services, both CIFS and NFS.

The university didn't have a centralized file service before we moved to NetApp. Now, departments can share information across 24,000 students, across 10,000 faculty and staff. They can share data without doing it through email, which was the old way.

It has definitely helped reduce the overall costs of storage. We actually started out with the IBM M-Series seven years back. We switched to NetApp. The same hardware from NetApp is a better price than it was through IBM, and the support is better. So it has reduced our expenses through that path. And since it's so easily supported, we don't need a lot of people to support it, so our support costs are lower.

We've had a lot of centralization going on. We have 13 schools, each of which had its own IT department. All those IT departments are now out of business because their work has been centralized into our department. Part of that was due to the economy changing and the school changing its business models, but that put our NetApp storage heavily into use. So it's hard to distinguish cause and effect.

I can't specify the amount of space saved, but the deduplication and compression in ONTAP are very effective. We're probably getting 35 - 40 percent savings because of dedupe and compression. And because every volume we put out is a quoted Qtree on a volume, we don't have wasted whitespace. I'm billing for 800 terabytes every single month, that's running on one petabyte of rotating disk. So, it's very good at saving me space. I'm running with about 20 percent available disk, above and beyond what I'm billing. So it's pretty good at that.

We're charging four cents per gigabyte per month and, unfortunately, I'm making money at that rate. We're not allowed to make a profit. I've been looking at reducing what we're charging our customers because it is so cost-effective.

The ability for our users to restore data from the Snapshots is very valuable.

I would like to see more cloud integration. NetApp had nothing for cloud integration about three or four years back and then, all of a sudden, they got it going and got it going quickly, catching up with the competition. They've done a very good job. NetApp's website has seen phenomenal changes, so I greatly appreciate that.

It's very stable. We've only had two outages with NetApp in seven years. One was a planned outage to fix a problem - that one was seven minutes long. The other was an unplanned failure, which caused us to be down for about five hours. Overall, we're still within our five- and six-nines of availability, so we're happy.

It's completely scalable, as long as you're willing to buy the hardware. That's why we're looking at cloud for the future, so we can stop buying hardware and maybe use the cloud instead.

It's excellent. The technical support has been very good.

One thing I find very annoying is the new web interface, where it takes you through a little AI assistant, a little robot thing, to try to answer your question first. That thing is infuriating because we've already done the research, we know we need support. Fortunately, there's a link so you can get past that quickly.

What I like about NetApp Support is that, generally, the person who takes your case is the one who works it to the end. There aren't a lot of handoffs or a lot of callbacks.

We had always done block storage and we had a large IBM infrastructure, a large ESX infrastructure, physical servers. We knew that we needed a file service, so we set that up. It was really a first for our university. We switched from IBM to NetApp because we thought we'd get better support from NetApp, and we really have. IBM did a good job, but it was obvious that IBM and NetApp didn't always play well together. IBM was slower to put out patches and fixes compared to NetApp. When IBM was telling us to go to the NetApp site to find support, we figured we'd just switch to NetApp.

The initial setup was quite straightforward because we knew what we were going to do with it and we hired Sirius on for a limited part of the job. We did most of it on our own.

I know we're providing our service very cost-effectively, and it's selling faster than we expected. Money is coming in faster than we expected and, therefore, I need to drop what I'm charging per gigabyte per month so I don't make a profit, because we're not allowed to. So it's obviously successful.

Our shortlist was really only NetApp. We looked at about a dozen other products, Hitachi and everything else, but NetApp really had the best product.

Talk to any peer you can find about what products they looked at. We spoke to a dozen peer institutions - universities, colleges - about what they were doing for file services. We found a lot that were failing and a lot that were successful. The successful ones were mostly on NetApp.

It's a very solid product. I've been using if for about seven years, and it's been mostly bulletproof. They have very good support and a very good quality hard drive.

We use it for mission-critical applications but less than we used to. A lot of our mission-critical stuff is now going out to cloud. That's why I'm here at NetApp Insight 2018, to see how we can tie this into the cloud. Absolutely, all of the university's "crown jewels" used to be on NetApp storage. Now, some have gone out to AWS and we're integrating into AWS more and more. For example, Blackboard is no longer running off out NetApp storage. It's now running out of the cloud. The same is true for all the financial stuff, all the Workday and the like. They've moved off of NetApp and out to the cloud.

In terms of machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, and those kinds of ground-breaking apps for storage, that's more the research support side. We're not doing that. We're doing more of the general file systems support, for general-purpose use.

I don't have any opinion about NVME over Fabrics, I haven't researched it yet.

We bought our equipment through Sirius Computer Solutions, and we're very pleased with that. They care. We've had a couple different senior salespeople with them over the years and they've both been excellent. They're very committed to their customers.

I rate NetApp ONTAP Cloud at eight out of then. I won't give a ten. There's always something that's better out there, but you're going to be paying double or triple for it. For the price, the quality of the hardware, the quality of the support, the features it offers, I'm thrilled with NetApp.

We are using it for storing files, to get high-performance access to files. We are also using NetApp for DR. We copy the information to the same system in other regions.

The solution's high-availability features are cost-effective for us because we are able to use the cloud benefits to reduce the cost of DR. For example, if we have it in one region, we can copy the data to another region. They keep it powered off and then they power it on for a few minutes, copy the data, send the data again, and shut it down again. That reduces the costs by approximately 80 percent.

Similarly, the data protection provided by the solution's disaster recovery technology is cost-effective and simple.

We're using Cloud Manager to automate some of the management. We use it for bringing the DR environment up and down as well as for scheduling data synchronization between different regions, worldwide. It's almost impossible to do that manually. Compared to an engineer doing it manually, it's about 90 percent faster. That's specifically for this kind of operation. In reality, the automation is enabling such capabilities. It's not actually reducing the time taken. If it didn't exist, we would never do it. That's even better than saving time.

Overall, NetApp has standardized and certified file services, both on-prem and in the cloud, corporate-wide. In addition, by using the automation, it has provided us cost-effective DR and management. In the cloud it has enabled us to provide tailor-made storage solutions for each of our cloud customers. The storage efficiency has reduced our storage footprint because we are offloading all the data to the storage account. So it has reduced the cost of corporate storage. And the data-tiering has also saved us money.

What is most valuable is that the system is the same as what we use on-prem. So the guys who are responsible here for managing NetApp feel comfortable with it& and that they have enough knowledge to manage the system in the cloud. We are able to& keep the same standards that we have on-prem in the cloud.

The usability is& great. We don't have any issues with it.

We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us.

The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data. So we do that once, at night, to another region and then shut down the destination. It's good because it's using Cloud Manager and its automation, but I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud.

We have been using it for about half a year in production; longer when we include the PoC.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any issues.

We still haven't needed to scale up, but I think the scalability is good.

We are using it for a system which stores files and parts of databases, but the system is used by hundreds of customers. NetApp is not used directly by them, rather through the system. We may plan to increase NetApp according to the usage of the system but we still have no specific plans.

We are using NetApp engineers and they are great.

Before NetApp we used a home-grown server in the cloud, a Linux server with a big disk. It was less simple to manage.

We're also using Avere, a storage solution that was purchased by Microsoft a month or two ago. It's mainly responsible for real-time data synchronization between on-prem and the cloud environment. It's different than NetApp which doesn't provide the kind of synchronization solution that Avere does. It's two-way, real-time data synchronization between the Oracle storage solutions which we have on-prem and the Avere solution that we have in Azure. NetApp does not help with such requirements.

The initial setup was very simple. It was quite easy to set up the environment in just one day. We started with a small implementation and then added more and more parts of the solution. We started with just one desktop and then added additional ones and then added tiering.

It required a small number of staff members. That's all we needed because it was pretty simple. We did a few sessions online and one or two onsite, for the entire solution. For our specific case it requires almost no maintenance. It only requires management to expand the disk capacity or perform the management operations, per-request. Generally we wouldn't require an increase to our storage team to manage the solution.

We used a NetApp engineer to help us.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer. The DR environment is billed by the hour and paid to Azure directly and NetApp is paid on a yearly license.

We checked Dell EMC and HPE but we chose NetApp. The Storage team made the decision. One of the main reasons they chose NetApp was the existence of NetApp on-prem and the knowledge of it the team had. We are familiar with NetApp and the products are good, so we decided to extend the success to the cloud as well.

Implement it. Do not think about it. It's very simple and very useful.

We are using it for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in AWS. I believe we're using the latest version.

We were able to move our VDI environment into AWS. It has been a big performance boost. It has helped our customers all around the globe access virtual desktop.

Upgrades are much easier in terms of upgrading ONTAP. It is so much easier with CVO.

It provides unified storage and gives us better access to our data. We're able to manage it. I don't really see that any different than the on-prem solution, but it does give us the ability to manage access and permissions.

CVO enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used management options provided by AWS. That's because we're more familiar with ONTAP. So, it is not like we had to change how we manage storage. That was the big thing, and it has an easier user interface. Managing AWS storage is also pretty easy, but to me, the easiest thing was the fact that we're familiar with ONTAP.

I do like the cloud manager. It is a nice way of managing our environment. It definitely is a nice tool to do basic ONTAP tasks such as setting up backups, creating volumes, and managing permissions.

I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships. 

I like the backup feature because it is all SaaS, and it is easy to set up. My data is encrypted in transit. 

The compliance feature is also good, but we haven't used it yet. From what I've seen in the demos, it is really a nice feature. I like the fact that we can analyze our data. We can do data analysis with artificial intelligence and categorize data. 

They definitely need to stay more on top of security vulnerabilities. Our security team is constantly finding Java vulnerabilities and SQL vulnerabilities. Our security team always wants the latest security update, and it takes a while for NetApp to stay up to speed with that. That would be my biggest complaint.

We have been using this solution for two years.

I haven't had a problem yet.

We have not had a scalability issue, so it scales easily. We are using about 20 terabytes. We have about 200 people who are using it on a day-to-day basis. They are mostly from the finance team.

We have plans to increase its usage. We are investigating it. It is all based on the business.

I've had many support cases. Sometimes, it takes a while for them to give me a solution that works. Sometimes, they give me a solution that works, but it depends on the problem. I would rate their support a seven out of 10.

We were using NetApp, so we were using NetApp arrays. The main reason for switching was that we wanted to move our VDI environment into AWS. So, the main reason was to use the NetApp in AWS. One of the reasons why we went with Cloud Volumes ONTAP was that it was easy to migrate our on-prem solution into AWS because of SnapMirror.

We worked with Amazon FSx for a little bit, but it wasn't really ready yet. It was just released, so we decided to stick with CVO.

It was straightforward, but we were mandated to use Terraform. So, I had to create a Terraform code, but it was easy to set it up. It takes a couple of hours to just set it up if you know what you're doing, but planning, designing the application, and everything else took about three months.

We had an on-prem solution running on arrays, and we wanted to move our VDI infrastructure into AWS. In terms of the implementation strategy, first of all, we wanted to figure out the kind of array and what can we do in terms of ONTAP to make it work. We had to set up a PoC and get some test users and a VPC in place. We had to get security rules and security in place. So, there was a lot of stuff just besides ONTAP. Obviously, we needed to get the whole cloud infrastructure in place to support the VDI users, and CVO was just one part of this project.

I did it myself.

Our users are happy, so I guess that's a good return on our investment.

It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees.

My advice would be to go for it. It is a great product. It is a great piece of software. NetApp is cutting edge when it comes to software in the cloud. I don't really have any warnings.

I don't know if we're saving more money by putting in more data. It does have tiers, and I guess there is data reduction that does help us save more money. We're using cloud on CVO, and we take advantage of reduction capabilities that do help us. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.