NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

We use Cloud Volumes ONTAP to back up ONTAP Select instances from our plants and distribution centers to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Azure. We store a backup solution for all or most sites.

In terms of how this solution has improved my organization, we use a third-party backup solution, like Spectrum Protect from IBM to backup finances. That's not the best way to do it. Our choice was to move from that technology straight to using the same technology for backup, which is essentially NetApp. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is NetApp. It's the same technology which is where the efficiency really is. It's much more efficient than using a third-party solution.

It provides unified storage no matter what kind of data we have. Right now, it's just backing up Volumes but NetApp is a unified solution. In our case, it's really for file storage, NFS or CIFS.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to keep more backup. We can keep more backup because of the cost of storage in Azure versus what we have in our data center. This is also completely off-site from our data centers. We have two data centers close to each other, but this actually keeps us as an offsite copy too because it's far enough away. It does keep control of our storage costs from a previous backup technology because it's kept in Azure and it's cloud-based storage. It's not our on-premise storage, it's kind of a hybrid cloud solution.

We're saving around 20% on storage. 

It is the same technology that we run on our sites. All of the backup functions and recovery are similar. It's the exact same process. From a learning experience, it's the same. If you learn ONTAP itself, then you can do Cloud Volumes ONTAP without an issue.

The main feature of it is what we call "native backup technology." We're not using somebody else's technology backup, we're using NetApp. 

The other important part to us is the Cloud Manager. It gives us a single pane of glass to look at the environment. Everything is remote right now but we will be backing up some on-premise very shortly.

Lastly, the API and web services are fairly good. That is an important feature too. We write some code to do different things. We have code that runs to make sure that everything is being backed up as we say it is and we try to also detect places where we may have missed a backup.

I'm very happy with the solution, the only thing that needs improvement is the web services API. It could be a little bit more straightforward. That's my only issue with it. It can get pretty complex. 

I have been using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for a year. 

So far, we haven't had any downtime. 

It scales well. We can add to the license. We have a 100 terabyte license right now, but we can add to it very quickly.

There is very low maintenance because once you deploy it, you run your scripts and you can see what failed and not many things fail. So, it's pretty quick.

We did contact their support initially during the initial install. It was our cloud technical support. We had a resource from them. They were excellent. 

We switched to CVO because of the efficiency and architectural consistency because it uses the same technology. NetApp to NetApp is not trying to go to somebody else.

We were backing up Spectrum Protect and we were using SimpliVity backup at one time on the license, but essentially those weren't solutions and we moved totally away from that.

The initial setup was straightforward. You log onto their marketplace and deploy the Cloud Manager. Then it will deploy the actual CVO itself. It's pretty much a point and click. You have to set up some things ahead of time, like your Azure connections if you don't have them. Those can be more complex, but the actual solution itself was fairly straightforward.

There are prerequisites that have to be done like networking to Azure to your cloud and making sure that you have firewall rules in place. Those are more site-specific, like customer-specific issues. It's not really related to CVO directly.

It took about three months to deploy all the sites which are just for North America. This is also deployed within our company and in Asia. We have about 24 sites and we have a 100% adoption rate. 

We did the deployment ourselves. 

We never really got down to the TCO. We just know that it was at least 20% better. The only reason we would pick it and change everything is that it was cheaper and consistent with our architecture. 

We don't think it's that expensive when compared to what we were paying for the previous vendor. This is less expensive. Pricing is good. 

My main advice is to get your cloud technical support online. Make sure you have all the prerequisites properly done and you understand how to deploy the Cloud Manager. That's really the main thing.

Anytime we want to deploy new sites, we have to get the network people involved for firewalls because in our case, we're coming from Azure, which is where the CVO is, back into our company's network. The security protection is the most important lesson that you've got to get right. The security of your connections is important. 

I would rate NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP a ten out of ten. 

We're trying to see whether it's a good fit to move our secondary storage to the cloud, which would then be in competition with ONTAP Cloud Volumes. However, ONTAP gives us a bit more flexibility. If it's cost-effective, good enough performance, and has all the tools we need, we will continue with it. So far it looks great.

ONTAP made us less reliant on in-house hardware. It has already changed the way we're looking at our investments, purchasing plans, and budgeting for the next three to five years. We are shifting more into the cloud OpEx rather than keeping our expenses on the hardware side. That is already a good outlook.

We're just using AWS for now, but the consistency of storage management between our own program and the cloud seems to be great.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our company's data footprint in the cloud. I don't have the numbers in my head. By using compression in the cloud and deduplication, it's something that definitely reduces all the data, probably by more than 20%. That is in comparison to using native cloud source storage solutions.

In terms of our company's cloud costs, we're still seeing about the same amount of money spent. However, it's shifting towards the OpEx part and that gives us the flexibility to scale up and down versus the investment that you have to do upfront in the beginning. It's the shift that we're interested in rather than the total amount at the moment. In the future, we might expect that the cost of the cloud solution will drop. Therefore in the future, we may also see the total costs go down.

For us, the value comes from the solution's flexibility, speed, and hopefully cost savings in the long term.

I would like this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider.

The stability is perfect. We have had no problems. On-premises was also good, so I'm not worried about this.

The solution is definitely scalable on the cloud. On the cloud, you can scale almost infinitely. You don't have to worry about reaching any limits, so that's definitely very good. Also in performance levels, you can have underlying storage in the cloud allowing you to change the IOPS, or performance at latency on the fly. That is something you cannot do very easily on-premises.

Their technical support is great. We're using a partner in the Netherlands for support and we have a great relationship with them.

I first encountered NetApp at Insight 2018 Barcelona. I was there and talked to NetApp.

I found the initial setup straightforward. Cloud Manager is point and click, which makes deployment pretty easy.

We involved NetApp a little bit but it was to look at the product. It's so simple to use that we were able to do it mostly ourselves without a lot of help.

Take a look at it, try it yourself. It's one month for free, with no licensing costs from NetApp. Try it out. It doesn't cost anything but some of your time. It's pretty simple to run and see how it works.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because the multi-cloud has to be in three layers.

My primary use case of ONTAP is for all of my data.

We have DR and we once had a problem with electricity and the data moved to the other side of the DR and the user and I didn't know about it. ONTAP has avoided this from occurring in the future.

The most valuable features are that it's easy to manage and it's reliable. 

I haven't had to restore the Snapshot copies and thin clones. Every time I check, it's working.

I don't use the inline encryption.

In the next release, I would like to see more options on the dashboard. 

Local support needs improvement. 

It's very stable.

Scalability is easy.

Their technical support is very good. 

We previously used HPE 3PAR and we switched because of the complexity we had with HPE. It was easier with NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward. We started with a small pilot and we then moved to production with no downtime at all.

We used an integrator for the setup. They were good. 

We chose NetApp because after we did the pilot, we saw the difference between both of the companies.

I would rate it a nine out of a ten. I give it this rating because of my experience with it and the ease of implementation. To make it a ten it wouldn't cost money.

My advice to someone considering this solution would be to go for it. 

Our primary usage is as a repository for the application servers. It's mostly for NFS, with very good replication options and backup features. There are also tools that we need to put there and replicate between our on-prem and AWS locations.

We tried to use EFS, for example, but one of the cons of EFS was that the performance was degraded once we had a lot of files and very large storage. It took it a while to handle everything. Also, backing up was harder and we needed a third-party. With NetApp it's much easier. Performance is very good and there was no need to change our environments, our speeds, or our automation because we have NetApps on-prem as well. When you have 100,000 files on smaller volumes, or you have bigger volumes with millions of files, it's almost impossible to work with EFS. With NetApp we didn't even feel it. It's all flowing really well.

The snapshot ability we're using is very good, SnapMirror. For example, we have a vault account and we can SnapMirror our volumes to that vault account. It has a NetApp that sits on it as three buckets and acts as our offset backups.

The FlexClones make all the management easier for us.

They're making the right improvements right now. The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that as well. That's a good advantage.

We've been using it for two years already.

The stability has been very good. The only time that it was down was because someone took the machine down. That was in the beginning and then we fixed the permissions. But it wasn't an issue on NetApp's end that caused the system to go down.

Both performance and scalability are really good. We started with a small system but have grown really fast. We needed to change the type of system and the license. We were able to do that online with no issues. Doing so, and going with the bigger type of system, also gives us better performance. 

So if you need more performance, you can always change the type of system. Working with NetApp, they provide us with a consultant, if needed, to determine what the best type of system is for our use case, based on the performance that we need. They're flexible.

We're growing all the time. We have several sites already and we're adding more sites when needed. We are keeping the on-prem as well because it doesn't always make sense to move to the cloud. It depends on budget, the CapEx and OpEx. But we are growing.

The support has been great. Every time we've had a question or something that we didn't know how to do, a setup issue, they have helped us. There was one time that we set up a new one on a new version and there was a small bug that was fixed really fast. It wasn't within how the system functions, it was a bug in the deployment part. They helped us really quickly and we were able to manage that as well.

There was a lot of downtime with our previous solution. Also, the performance wasn't what it should be. Any update that we did required downtime, and there were quite a lot of updates because there were a lot of bugs. That's where Cloud Volumes ONTAP is very good because they're using the same software as in their devices. There are no special needs or special bugs. They're using a very mature a solution.

The initial one we set up was more complex until we understood the parts. There is a manager that is doing everything for you, but you need to know which IP, what are the prerequisites, etc. It took a while to understand that. But once we did the first one, it became very easy to deploy. My team can now do it in one or two hours, with all the integration that we need.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we get the requirements from the business. Whenever we need a new environment, for example, my team sets it up really fast. We can set all the configuration like any other systems we have: with our monitoring tools, the backup, snapshots; everything the same way. It's easy to manage and replicate things to look the same.

Migration was pretty easy. We could use SnapMirror or we could use NetApp's XCP Migration Tool. That was pretty awesome. It replicated the data faster than any other tool that I've seen. That was a big help.

For deployment, there are two guys from my team who work together. Of course, we have a network guy setting up all the network stuff, and there's the cloud team that is doing that part of the configuration. Once we have all the prerequisites, they can set it up really fast.

For maintenance, it requires less than one person. We have a small group, about eight people for 150 systems, which manages systems worldwide, not just on the cloud but also on-prem. It's part of managed systems and it's being managed with the management tools. We don't see that as something where we need to add more people if we add another system.

We used a third-party, mostly for the cloud itself, for the VPC configuration, the environment-related stuff that my company uses. But we did not use one for NetApp itself.

Since we're a SaaS business, we need to have stable environments for our customers. We can't have downtime every week or so. Stability is very important for us, as well as a guarantee that data is being backed up. If someone, even by mistake, deletes something, there is a way to recover it. Stability, availability, performance, all these kinds of things, mean we're eventually getting more customers and more satisfied customers.

We've been working with NetApp on pricing. They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair.

In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage, the instances, the storage. It's using EBS drives or S3 buckets. So there are all the Amazon fees that you usually have. But overall, we compared the price we have with NetApp and the price for going with DFS and there was a difference, but it was worth the performance, stability, and to have the capabilities NetApp has for doing backups. All these features are covered.

It's NetApp. It's what we know. Our NetApp on-prem has been really good, so we continue to maintain that.

There is a 30-day trial that you can use to get a feel for it. You can work with NetApp in case you have questions in deploying it. They're helpful with that. If you're planning big, to deploy in several sites or a few systems, and you have plans for the future, you can always talk with NetApp and work on getting the right price for you and what makes sense. It depends on your growth and how big your footprint is. They will help you, of course. 

I would rate it between nine and ten out of ten. I don't have any complaints. Maybe it could be cheaper but as for how it functions, it's really doing what it needs to do.

The primary use case for ONTAP is both on-premise and in the cloud. For on-premise, we utilize it for hosting our virtual infrastructure environment through VMware, as well as hosting personal and shared drives. Then, in the cloud, we also host personal and shared drives within AWS and Azure.

An example of how ONTAP is improving our organization is through back-up and restore, as well as offsite replication capability. We utilize SnapMirror very heavily on our sites and then also to replicate it offsite to other sites in our organization to make sure that we have very fast local restores if necessary. As well as offsite replication for disaster recovery capabilities as we have certain events that impact our facilities from that perspective.

We use ONTAP for a number of mission-critical applications. Some that specifically run some of our facilities. I'm in the energy industry and we had a certain scenario earlier this year that one of our systems went down and after a few hours I had to start having the conversation with some of the other supervisors if we couldn't get the system back online. However, NetApp support was able to get the system back online with us without having to do an RMA for another device. Support really helped bail us out in that situation of getting the system back online and not having to shut our facility down.

ONTAP has allowed us to keep cost down in the storage environment based upon the deduplication and how we're utilizing it to replicate from a number of different sites and centralize some of our offsite replication capabilities.

Some of the most valuable features of ONTAP for us are the reliability and availability. We have a lot of built-in functionality within ONTAP to provide back-ups and restore at the volume level. Also, individually if we need to restore specific files within a volume. It's been very helpful us to have that.

Within ONTAP, some of the new features that we've been utilizing recently are the FabricPools which we think is great. One of the new services is the cloud volume service that's available within AWS and Azure that we're really liking.

We use ONTAP in the public cloud for Linux NFS mounts, as well as Windows CIFS volume shares. A lot of times multiple applications or systems will need to share that data and NetApp ONTAP in the cloud really allows for all those applications to utilize shared data in their application communication.

NetApp ONTAP, easily, in our environment, allows for a 3:1 compression ratio on average. That's really helped, whether it be on-premise or in the cloud, to help drive down cost utilization in our systems. There's a number of systems that we have that run pretty high utilization. That data reduction helps us prevent from having to continue to expand those systems.

The key feature, that we'd like to see in that is the ability to sync between regions within the AWS and Azure regions. We could use the cloud sync service, but we'd really like that native functionality within the cloud volume service.

One to three years.

ONTAP has been very stable for us, specifically in the cloud environment. It allows us to have high availability as well as standalone systems if that's what we want within our specific workloads. Also, on-premise has been a very stable environment. We have very few outages and when we do, we work with support to get systems back online in a timely manner.

I would rate ONTAP as an eight. It has a lot of great features, some features that we didn't even know we needed until we talked with our account team and they walked us through some of the reasons for some of those features and then we look at implementing them. The stability of the environment really helps us have that as a key solution for our organization.

In terms of advice I would give a fellow colleague or friend about implementing ONTAP, it would be to just continue to work with your account team to make sure that you're finding the right solution to fit your workload need. We have a very generic workload in terms of virtual machines infrastructure. NetApp really provides a great solution there for us in that environment.

The solution is used for NAS, which includes CIFs and NFS.

The solution works the same on the cloud as on on-premises, so we sometimes access the on-premises features even though we use the cloud version. There is hardly any difference. However, the performance depends on the disc type used and the network.

The auto-extension feature is good as it requires no manual intervention and once that is enabled, the auto-action option is receivable.

Some monitoring issues require improvement.

The auto alerting and monitoring should be better in the next release.

I have been using the solution for three years.

It is a stable solution. I rate it seven out of ten.

I rate the scalability a five out of ten. And in terms of storage, we have different types of storage like SSD, standard, SSD, premium, and SSD, which can expand the pool or aggregate. Also, the availability part and any payload are seamless. Plus, I have the same technology on-premises, so there is replication and SnapMirror. 

In our company, around 3000-4000 users are using the solution at present.

The customer service and support team is good. 

Positive

The solution is very easy but not too complex as well. I give it a six out of ten. Two people are required for the maintenance.

I rate the pricing as an eight out of ten.

The solution is recommended if someone is looking for NAS on the cloud. 

The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Generally what we show our customers are possibilities for using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for multi-cloud environments, to do disaster recovery and to back up sites.

Our company provides backup and DR professional services. We allocate people to support our customers' needs in these areas. We implement the solution that the customer requires.

By creating snapshots and a multi-cloud dictionary, the solution doesn't have to replicate all the data. The dictionary can point to some of the data on another site and create a correspondence between sites. It's going to lower the storage cost. For example, it saves my clients between 50 and 60 percent.

One of the features our customers like is that it can be used from one cloud provider to another. They can use it from Azure to AWS or vice versa. That way, they don't need to use the same provider for backups. If something goes wrong on the primary site, having the same data in another cloud service provider is important.

We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side. Those requirements are just for our big customers. We have one, here in Brazil, that is very big that uses a lot of mainframe storage. But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers.

We have been a NetApp partner for three years. We have been distributing this solution for about a year and a half.

I cannot precisely say what the SLA availability is for the platforms, but in general, the stability of the cloud service provider, whether you put it in AWS, Azure, or even in GCP is very good. There are very few moments during the year that those platforms have instability. Normally their availability is at "four-nine's."

We have people assigned to us from NetApp to support us in both pre-sales and post-sales. On the post-sales side, our customer may open a case with us and we will open a case with NetApp.

NetApp's support is responsive.

Positive

We started using Spotinst and then NetApp acquired the company. From that point on, we have done a lot of business together with NetApp.

The setup is familiar because many software as a service providers have created the same types of stacks and permissions and roles. We are able to use the same skills to do these kinds of installations.

Overall, the pricing of NetApp is aggressive and the pricing becomes more aggressive as the amount of data increases. The cost for a given volume of data that you are storing becomes lower. The greater the volume of data, the cheaper the license.

With increased volume, it is expected that the cost of each megabyte will be less. It's not a "wow," or a compelling feature. It's much more compelling when you say that, by using the solution, the data replication will be improved. Those are more technical arguments and better than saying if you increase your volume you're going to decrease your price per megabyte. Other features are also more compelling than that.

The licensing is very straightforward, with the cost based on the volume.

In the past, we have tried to resell other solutions, like Wasabi, and we evaluated the Commvault solution. NetApp has many solutions for us, not just the storage and itself. It doesn't just create a repository for saving things with a lower cost. NetApp has cloud products as well as an open-source project. That variety of offerings is the main aspect that is important for us.

The primary use is virtualization as well as filer storage, pretty much all the features of the ONTAP suite.

We don't have any cloud footprint for contractual obligations. So, it's all pretty much on-prem, but it's in a co-location.

We use it to replicate between data centers. It is for our DR site as well. We use it to create redundancy.

We do on-prem S3 for StorageGRID. The on-prem infrastructure is cheap. It works just the same. It's S3, so it works very well as far as integration and things that use S3 in our environment.

The most valuable features are the native filer capabilities because a lot of SAN providers don't do that. When they do it, they do it with an appliance or a secondary. With this, it is just baked in right there on the system that you require. You don't have to have anything extra.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are the best thing since sliced bread. Rollback is super easy. It's just simple, and it works. It's very efficient.

The stability is good. I've been with NetApps for a long time, so I've seen them fall and come back. However, with cDOT and all this new stuff, it is great. It just works.

We're not that big, storage footprint-wise. However, it's simple. You just add nodes. So, it works.

We have not really used the technical support.

We had previous experiences with deploying ONTAP at other companies successfully.

ONTAP makes our storage solutions more flexible. Traditionally, that's hard to do. ONTAP gives you those features which you typically have to build yourself.

It's straightforward. But you do have to know what you're doing. Things do what you expect them to do. There is quite a bit of initial setup, but with things like Ansible and all this new stuff that they're doing, it makes it much easier and automated. So, it's simple.

I did the deployment myself with a little help from our vendor's professional services.

We have had less downtime.

Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost.

This company that I work for now is just acquiring quite a bit of NetApp equipment. We will be doing SnapMirror. I have done it in the past at another company.

It does exactly what it does, and it does it well. It works, and that's what really matters at the end the day: uptime, functionality, and scalability.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement. No one is ever going to be a 10.