The primary use case for our customer is disaster recovery. They had an array that was reaching end-of-life, and they were trying to decide whether to go with a refreshed new array on-premises or go with CVO in a cloud. The chose the latter.
Our customer is a large organization that has just merged with several other organizations, so they have a lot going on. It was important for them that the time to market was very short, so they needed to deploy fast and get it set up with minimal impact to the business and their IT staff.
Our customer does not use the inline encryption using SnapMirror.
This business is only using file access and no block access. NetApp provides much of their file access across their infrastructure, so this being a DR solution allowed them to have the tertiary copy.
They use Snapshots and I believe they use clones, as well, but I do not have any specific data.
Currently, they are only using AWS, but they certainly are looking at alternatives to save money.
The data footprint in the cloud has expanded since the implementation.
Using NetApp CVO has definitely reduced our customer's overall spend. However, I think that their cloud costs have probably gone up a little bit.
They do not make use of the functionality to move data between hyperscalers and their on-premises environment.
Our customer finds SnapMirror to be valuable.
NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance.
This solution has been deployed at our customer's site for about three months.
The stability has been really good. It has only been deployed for about three months, but they have had no issue so far.
Scalability is very good. If they need to expand then that is one of the features of this solution, easy expansion. We haven't seen any issues there. They haven't expanded it yet, but certainly, the functionality exists.
Our customer was previously a NetApp shop, and they were already familiar with SnapMirror, so upgrading to the current solution was a no-brainer. They saved money and have the same functionality.
The initial setup is straightforward and easy, with no learning curve involved.
The NetApp Cloud Manager works well, and the customers are happy with it.
Our customer has not specifically seen ROI. However, they did a calculation that showed they saved money by not buying another on-premises solution. So, there is some return on investment there, I would say, or a TCO saving at least.
The customer was happy with NetApp and did not look at any alternatives.
My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to definitely take a look at NetApp for all of the cloud-specific products that are out there now. I think that NetApp is definitely a leader when it comes to the cloud approach, especially compared to other storage vendors like Pure. Pure is definitely playing catch-up to NetApp.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.