NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

We use this primarily to consolidate our services and block services.

We are using Linux and eventually, we are going to use SnapMirror. So far, we have seen benefits from using this solution. When we started this process there were some very specific goals about log and files being stored in a single static device. This is achieved with a RAM solution. We are also able to integrate with the cloud, which is another goal we achieved. The solution has also saved us on costs, of course. We calculated that we are saving $1,000,000 across three years.

The consistency of storage management across clouds has effected our storage operations. Essentially, one of the benefits of open NetApp is that ONTAP is pretty much the operating system for any mirrored device, so it doesn't matter if it is in the cloud or on-premises, or whether you use other NetApp products, you pretty much have a safe interface with ONTAP. We like that.

One of our goals is to unify file our block file services into a single storage device. At the same time, we want to replicate on-site services to the cloud. That's also a benefit for us because that way we can move it to the cloud if we need to.

Replication to the cloud is the most valuable feature. Deduplication and compression are also very important to us. We are in the process of adopting the cloud. We are going to AWS and we are trying to do a safety technician call out with integration to the cloud. NetApp allows us to move some of the volumes to the cloud, at the same time that we continue providing the cloud services that we have on-premises.

We are in the process of doing various plans for all equipment in order to do acceptable recovery of products in the new environment.

Maybe I need more speed, but so far, I don't have any feedback for improvements.

I would like to see something from NetApp about backups. I know that NetApp offers some backup for Office 365, but I would like to see something from NetApp for more backup solutions.

The stability is great. We have been doing different scenarios about errors from controllers, to disks, and so far it is very stable. We have not had any issues. We upgraded our own version and did not have any issues there, either.

This is another issue that we like from ONTAP. There are products for different scales. It is very easy to use.

When we deployed everything, we opened a case with support for two minor issues we had with some servers. They're great. They were willing to help, easy to communicate with, and respond very quickly. They already found the issue and resolved it.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That is how we deployed it. Their configuration wizards and ability to automate the process were very easy. The wizard is very easy to follow. There are videos, so you don't really need a lot of skill. If you understand integrations and have a basic knowledge of the cloud, you can quickly connect your equipment. It's good.

We did evaluate other solutions.  We evaluated the main players in this area, like EMC.

There are some features that we really liked from NetApp. One of them is the ability to consolidate files and blocks. Other vendors have some mirror solutions, but they are not in the maturity level that NetApp is. We also really like that NetApp has a product for the cloud that is really working and is proven and valuable. Other vendors do not have that, or if they have it, you need to deploy something in the middle. That is something that we like. We don't need to deploy anything. We can just run the backup directly from the OS and spin out the solution.

Try not to focus only on the current issues, but also look into the innovation process of NetApp. It is very impressive how they have been able to develop and continue trying to develop products for the cloud. Try to gain a deeper understanding of established needs and requirements for files and blocks.

I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

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.

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 main use case of ONTAP is for users to utilize SharePoint. From there, they need to access data where there are specific applications as well as an individual shared folder.

It is being used for application purposes as well as for individual user purposes.

We are using the latest version.

This isn't an isolated solution. We must have NetApp to support our faster access on a file protocol. We found the same solution on Azure is just as helpful when compared to the on-premise solution.

The solution provides us unified storage, no matter what kind of data we have. If we take a normal storage account in the public cloud, then it may not be active in terms of identity level. However, using NetApp, we can leverage the identity management control integrating with our AD. From there, we can gain the computer user's access and maintain the user side entity for who is accessing what.

On-premises, we are using the same NetApp. We find the solution in Azure to be more reliable and tailorable in NetApp with the same NetApp features because it gives us the most updated NetApp solution.

If you have a larger amount of data than normal in the cloud, it is easy to provision and maintain. Waiting for the delivery of the controller, the configuration of enclosures, etc., all this stuff is eliminated compared to using on-premise.

Eight months.

From my months' experience, I haven't seen a single point of failure within the ONTAP, except for Azure maintenance.

Scalability is a very good feature. If our data reaches 90 percent (or some threshold level), it automatically increases the storage within ONTAP without our intervention.

The solution helps us control storage costs. It is scalable. If we need more storage, then we can opt for a monthly or yearly option.

The technical support is good.

Once you register with NetApp Cloud Central, people will get in touch with you who can assist you with deploying your solution.

This is the first time that we are using this type of a solution in the cloud.

The initial setup is straightforward, but I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution.

Deployment time depends on the client. On average, deploying the entire solution can take about a day (eight hours), if there are no issues.

For a standard storage implementation project, we need to have some shared storage for the client's application as well as the user groups and shared files that they have been using. To leverage this, we've been using this solution.

You need to go through the NetApp website and go through the documents regarding deploying ONTAP. If you experience any difficulties, there is a technical team to help you.

Some of the sales managers and other team members helped me setup the environment. They explained to me how the pay as you go and BYOL models work. If you need to the BYOL model to work, they will use some temporary licenses for a 30-day evaluation. They are there for you from beginning to end if you need assistance.

Because we went with the BYOL instead of pay as you go, we haven't seen ROI.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save. If you use traditional cloud providers, then you cannot manage unified lists. For that, you would need to follow a set of rules and some other stuff. You also need to have more people managing the entire environment. Whereas, NetApp provides a single point solution. 

They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy. 

Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have. We would like NetApp to come up with a solution for this. For example, a customer may think, "Let's use this solution." Later, he realizes that, "This is our solution and I have this budget for the year. If we can pay upfront for one year, then we can reduced the amount we pay." This is currently not possible if we select the pay as you go model.

Your OCCM should always be the same as your ONTAP, e.g., suppose you have deployed one ONTAP, then due to some reason, you deleted it and also OCCM. Then, the next time that you want to deploy another OCCM and ONTAP, that same license won't work because the license is based on the OCCM serial ID.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We only evaluated ONTAP.

NetApp is an industry leader as well as we have experienced with NetApp on-premise. That is the reason we chose NetApp as a reliable partner.

We don't use the solution’s cloud resource performance monitoring.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

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.

My employer is a partner here in Brazil. We have clients using many different versions of the solution. Some clients are using private clouds and hybrid clouds.

Our clients use the solution as a Direct Access Recovery (DAR).

The volume is an amazing feature.

I would like to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website.

I have been using it for 12 years.

It is a stable product. I haven't had an issue with the stability of this product.

Its scalability is very good.

I haven't had any trouble with their technical support. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

We need two engineers for the deployment of this solution: one for deployment and another for maintenance.

The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me.

I would rate this product as 10 out of 10.