NetApp FAS Series Reviews

• Deduplication
• High Availability

It provides us with a very effective storage solution.

The virtualization technology.

I've used it for over three years.

Absolutely, it’s just some compatibility variance with some of the production environment aspects, like AV, and Archiving systems which needed to be integrated with.

Not at all as the HA features are great.

NetApp comes with an OS developed by its engineers, and its clustered data ONTAP, which supports clustering and scalability to a high level.

The support team supports us as vendor partner with a lot of tools. And the auto-support feature is just as amazing as the product, whenever a disk fails or any issue occurred the features sends alerts to you and to the customer, and send you a replacement of the disk right away, in a very effective manner, and quickly, that you may do not notice that there’s an issue in your that disk.

10/10.

I deal with a lot of solutions similar in the concept with NetApp FAS, but when it comes to NetApp, there are too many features that means it worth it.

It was clear and straightforward, as you console the device, and it boots, you configure and initialize the product, and as soon as that is done, you are ready to create your aggregates, volumes, and shares.

We are an integrator, and we also have an in house device that we run our test labs on.

The NetApp technical team is very supportive, and they can, in some complex and large projects, come and share the in-site implementation with their partner.

We can't calculate this.

Prices may seem to be a little bit expensive, but the features just makes you happy that you took the step, and licensing is all included except a very few features, with a high end and complex environment.

EMC

Enables us to handle business critical data with HA.

• NAS stability
• Simple customer support

Needs more SAN support.

No stability issues yet.

No scalability issues yet.

Eight out of 10.

Works on administration, not implementation.

Not overrated, though there are products available in market with comparatively lower costs.

Good for NAS and unified solutions.

• Clone – we updated to Dynamix AX 2012, and not a week has gone by that we haven’t fired up a clone to test a user, code, etc.
• Disaster Recovery suite of functions
• Quick backups that don’t impact system
• Refreshes test environments quickly

• Reliability – hardware performs well, we’ve never had problems
• Great support from Sirius
• We’re able to recover a file if we need to

We use mirroring a lot, and if it had snap manager for SQL included, we could do that from one location.

Rock solid. I’ve been at Wilson for three years and have also used it before at another company. We have a disk go out every once in a while, but no issue with FAS.

In the last growth, we went from a 3250 to an 8020. We’ve set it up to grow out easily by just adding trays.

Lately, a little slow to respond, but once you get someone, they’re very knowledgeable, although I haven’t had to use it a lot.

I was familiar with 3250’s from another company, so I knew how to use the software, but Sirius helped us. So in that regard, it was straightforward.

Snapshot, because so much of it is on our end-user storage, our users often delete things they’re not supposed to. Having snapshots to revert these deletes quickly and easily is very valuable.

Our greatest advantage with it is ease of use, flexibility, and reliability.

Knowing what’s coming down the pipe, NetApp is headed in the right direction. In their five year roadmap, it provides what I need it to do.

It's extraordinarily stable. We had one outage one-and-a-half years ago when batteries were bad, but that was a known defect on that particular model. However, that was our fault for knowing this was an issue. We've had two outages in 10 years due to something other than operator’s error.

Incredibly scalable. Not even touching what it could do. Between scale up and scale out, we’re not even close to reaching its highest potential. We have a four node NAS with the potential for 24 nodes.

It's fantastic.

Once you’ve done one, it seems very intuitive. However, the first time seems very complicated.

Of all storage technologies I work on, it’s the easiest to learn and one of the most powerful. But you need to spend your time taking classes before digging in too deep. Get educated.

• Clustered data ONTAP
• Data compression
• High Availability
• Snapshot technology

It helps us reduce costs because its data compression saves a lot of capacity we'd otherwise have to have.

It could improve by better integrating with other technologies like VMware, as there are some version conflicts. When you are using the newest storage virtual console, you cannot use VM Wall, the VM-specific firewall.

We have been using it for a year for SQL databases.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's very stable and we've had no problems in the year we have used it.

It has scaled to our needs.

Customer service is good; we've had no problems with them.

Technical support is good; we've had no problems with them either.

We used HDS before NetApp and we switched because of the snapshot technology and high-availability function.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, the implementation of the system was easy, and we had great support from the NetApp team.

We used a vendor team who had strong expertise, and we are happy with the implementation. It’s important to have NetApp technicians implement the solution because it is helpful to have some experts.

No other options were evaluated.

The integration with VMware is the most valuable feature for us because we run a lot of VMs and the backup is very good when you run your VM in NFS.

We had a case when they had to restore a lot of data. We went back one hour and got back everything. The restore itself only took about an hour.

Some of the tools could be improved like NetApp OnCommand. This has been a lot better recently, but they could make it faster.

We've been using it since 2005.

It's very stable and I’ve never experienced any problems in 10 years.

It scales to our needs.

8/10 - only because it is impossible to have a 10, as there is no one that good. We’ve had a good experience with their customer service.

The solutions that are present on NetApp’s website are enough usually, but when it is tough for me to resolve it on my own I go to our consultant.

We did a long time ago.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We started on a small scale and built it up.

We implemented it in-house, but we use a consulting company to help. Now, we run it on our own.

It fulfills the needs we have for storing data well. We had a lot of storage spread out over many devices from many vendors and now everything is consolidated. It saves a lot of time.

Ask other people who use it as references are really valuable.

• Redundancy
• Snap technologies (snap mirror, snap shots)

The snap products allow the end-user to make restorations and perform offsite replications. Also, it gives us secure multi-tenancy.

Nothing that I can think of right now.

We've used it for seven in years.

It's pretty stable. We've only needed NetApp engineers to help with an issue once since we started using it.

Very scalable, haven’t reached its limits.

Generally goes well.

Very straightforward from rack stack to configuration.

With FAS and other NetApp tools, they make for a very intuitive solution. It's simple to manage, very scalable, one-stop shop and many native things that make it very powerful.

We have clusters, and can do non-distruptive upgrades with cDOT and can spin up VMs as needed. We have the flexibility to give people NAS storage.

With NAS storage in general, we can give people large amounts of storage for projects, and then remove it. For example, for SLS, they can spin up large amounts of storage to hold the output of modeling data, and when that’s done, they can delete it and move on. In that case, they don’t need the throughput.

We have thousands and thousands of file shares and we’re able to offer up to one terabyte of storage, and this gives us high compression and dedupe.

For cDOT in general, improvements could be made to the little things, such as the translation between 7-mode and cDOT. If there’s some kind of backward compatibility or translation of certain functions from one to the other, that would be an improvement.

It's very stable.

With cDOT, it's very good. It scales horizontally well, but not so well with 7-mode.

It’s top-notch support, very responsive and highly knowledgeable, very attentive to us as we have a monthly meeting with our TAM.

It's straightforward in 7-mode, but using cDOT, it's terrible.