NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Reviews

We do electronic health records, electronic billing, and telemedicine, using artificial intelligence.

We're quite pleased with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and we're using it for HIPAA compliance, as well as in Luxembourg, where we have another one of our business units, for GDPR. It's meeting both of those requirements. Google is opening up a new data center in Luxembourg this month, so we've been coordinating with NetApp on that.

The tools are very nice and we've been working with them on upscale and downscale of storage. We've been working with them on the architecture for doing backups and how we do that for the U.S. and in Europe, and they then work with Google.

On the administrative side, the tools are very good for our backend guys. Their console makes it easy to look at our backup and storage availability, and the tools make it easy to manipulate the volumes on the storage and move things around.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud has multiple performance tiers that allow you to closely align it with your workload performance requirements. From the console you can move different volumes around, based on the CPU setup that you want to use. With backups, you need less compute to move the data around, so we use their tools very effectively to tune the environment for storage.

We are able to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly, as our needs grow and shrink. We're using their tools and their dashboard, which allow us to view our peak loads and to tune the system as we go. That probably reduces our storage costs by 25 percent in the way we are currently using it. It has also lowered our costs by cutting about 10 percent of our time. We need fewer manpower resources to run it. We've got two people, whereas in some cases, in other environments, it takes four to five people.

We also see Windows infrastructure savings. A Windows Server is a little over $1,000 a month. Instead of needing two, we only need one, so the service has helped in regards to our compute costs.

The service enables us to share data across VMs. Those VMs are based on the environments that we have, including dev, test, and production. We move volumes around pretty rapidly when we need to do load testing and scale testing. When you're doing scale loads, you're running routines that will scale up and you look for the failure points, where the VM will crash. Those test loads help us to understand scale.

We've invented a brand new internet protocol for privacy at our company, so it's a privacy-preserving internet protocol. We do end-to-end encryption but if your phone's offline, then we need someone to install that encrypted stuff that you might be sharing with somebody else. We have a technology called Docker Swarm running across multiple data centers. Files need to be put somewhere that can be accessible across multiple Google data centers. So we actually ran our system, something called GlusterFS for a while and hit a whole bunch of problems. That meant that we had to have somebody, me because we're a startup, looking after it all the time and that just became pretty boring. That's a boring job. 

I was looking for a vendor to come up with technology that I didn't have to look at every single day and that's where we came across NetApp. I set it up, deployed it, and haven't had to touch it. Our use case is really having a network file system across multiple data centers that is highly resilient. 

NetApp has helped our customers to quickly move large numbers of files to the cloud. The offering that we have allows people to share encrypted data between themselves, like large files. If you have a file on your phone and a picture and you want to share it with somebody else, you can use our applications to move that data across so only the person that you're sending it to will be able to open it and look at it. We allow people to do that and NetApp is underlying that. The NetApp machine only ever sees encrypted data because it's end-to-end encrypted, but it's enabling people to have to send files and enable them to use their mobile devices for that. Nobody will be able to snoop them while they're up there.

Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better.

The service allows us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time. That was one of the things that I was firstly concerned with was if we need more storage, how easy is it? With the NetApp solution, it's as easy as logging into a browser and saying, "I want more storage." It's that easy and completely pain-free.

Our compute and storage costs went up frankly, but I was okay with that because I got more time back. So it's fine. We have a data store that's shared across all of our compute nodes, it's pretty reasonable economy-wise. It's a little bit more expensive, but I think that the value is there. We don't have to pay that cost in having humans watching things, so it's a fairly reasonable trade. The service has increased our cloud infrastructure spend by a reasonable amount, but I'm perfectly comfortable with it.

We use it for shared volumes in some environments as well as for high availability.

We use the Snapshot systems to store the backups for security. 

The service allows us to fine tune storage and capacity on the fly, as our needs grow and shrink over time. 

The service enables us to share data across VMs. It is mandatory to share these volumes with multiple VMs, so we use it for shared volumes.