NetApp FAS Series Reviews

NAS functions, as it's primarily used for all our file shares. We have other NAS devices, but this is easier.

Also, High Availability is a valuable feature.

Snapshots are good, especially the snap mirror, which we use for disaster recovery and backups. Also, we have a lot of data centers (seven primary centers) and we deploy at each of them.

I miss their old support structure. We used to be able to call up and get an answer pretty quickly, but now it’s more arduous.

It could be cleaner for dedupe, and I wish we could do dedupe for the entire system and not just a specific volume.

It's highly reliable, but has had the occasional bug. We install patches or shut off features.

Depends on how you’re scaling. If wide, it works well. Vertical scaling not so well because we’re primarily SMB. No matter how brief, people don’t like being offline (e.g. baby monitors).

I’ve worked with them for over 10 years. They used to be stellar, but in the last three to five years, not as reliable. The quality of information you get from them is less specialist, and they've not broken it up so that you get routed to a particular technology, it used to be one senior guy who knew everything.

There’s always networking issues, but not related to NetApp.

Other than tech support, it loses points because it could always be better.

It depends on what you’re implementing. Consider carefully what you want to do – for example, have enough vLANs because you don’t want to be adding more later.

Being able to run any flavor of files and block storage. It's easier to manage, and we’re looking to phase out legacy systems and to go with FAS.

It's easy to manage regardless of how you’re utilizing platform. It’s a Swiss army knife of capabilities. Flexible platform and software features are added benefits (thin provisioning, compressioning, dedupe), which help with capacity utilization. Still get a lot of return even if going with best-practices application.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, with occasional issues that surface, but are quickly resolved. No one’s software is perfect.

It’s good, but you have to do a lot of homework to scale horizontally and vertically. You need to have sales and engineering to expend effort to do that homework.

We've frequently used it, and the quality will depend on which level of support you purchased. Premium support, I have no complaints as we get the right person who’s knoweldgable. Higher level guys take great deal of personal ownership over issues. I used their support as benchmark for our organization.

It's easy. The more planning you do, the easier it gets.

The monitoring is key, and you must keep track of what’s going on. Be sure to use auto-support and have strong monitoring scenario in place.

SyncMirror (for legacy to new platform migration, prior to CDOT availability), SnapManager Suite (for application aware data protection features, namely Oracle and Microsoft), FlashCache & FlashPools (for accelerating workloads, volumes and/or entire aggregates).

A customer was running legacy FAS3140's, 5+ years old, and began deploying VDI clients on their 10GbE network. Their storage became a bottleneck and seamlessly migrated to FAS8020's w/ FlashCache and all performance concerns have been removed, and users have complimented the performance improvement of their desktops!

I'm a VAR and have been recommending FAS for 4+ years

None

None

None

Very high. Local field support came onsite to the customer not to sell anything, but to introduce the support system at NetApp, and how everything works under the covers.

Not much was needed for this particular client; however, tech support when needed has been very responsive and knowledgeable.

No

Client handled, but very straightforward.

Long time NetApp customer, very happy with the solution.

It takes your standard IOPS in your drives and it gives you much greater performance out of that aggregate. You can run a smaller aggregate with SSDs in the flash pool, and it'll give you the IOPS of many more spindles. What it does is it brings your SATA disks aggregate up to the SAS speed, depending upon how many spindles you're running, and your SAS aggregates perform much better.

We had an IOPS problem earlier. We were running Citrix and we were having boot storms. Part of the problem was the aggregates that we had were too small. The boot storm would basically fill up the NVRAM. It was unable to write to disk because the disks were running full. The problem was solved by going to flash pools. It was great.

I have not given the FAS a perfect rating because the All Flash Array is probably going to beat it down, in terms of performance.

I would give it a perfect rating if there wasn’t any ceiling. When you have some systems and you increase your disk IOPS by adding either All Flash Array or you add a flash pool, sometimes you move the bottleneck; you move the bottleneck up to the CPU. We did have that problem briefly. That was solved by basically moving some of the workload. That happened one time and we fixed it.

By moving to cluster mode, it's going to be a lot easier to move the workload. We are moving in that direction. We're doing the first assessment and planning right now.

We do not have any stability problems, whatsoever.

NetApp aggregates are scalable. You can keep adding shelves.

Technical support is very good. I've never had a problem.

Usually the problem is being able to hear them in our data center. :)

I did not previously use a different solution. When I started working with the county, they already had the NetApp FAS.

Go with NetApp; I haven't had a problem with it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and, for technical support, being there.

• 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.