NetApp FAS Series Reviews

It is used as filer, for centralized file sharing. You use it, for example, for network drives from your Windows file.

Performance is very good. It's reasonably fast, probably not the fastest. 

What the customers, the end-users, like is they can rely on the Snapshot technology so they can do their restores themselves. 

• Ease of use
• Robust Snapshot functionality
• You can use it in two datacenters with SnapMirror-ing.

It has a very good implementation of the Active Directory services, so implementation into a Windows network is easy. 

One thing that was missing for quite some time was the support for flash, of solid state disks, that has now improved. Another issue is the price which, compared to competitors, is quite high. The reason for switching to a different manufacturer is mostly because of the high price that NetApp has for the product.

The stability is good.

For the use cases I have had so far, scalability has been sufficient. But I don't know where the limits are. If you go into hundreds of millions of objects, you will probably see limits. Also, performance-wise, it's probably not the fastest solution on the market. 

For the simple NetApp filer solution, we didn't have to use support. But for more complicated setups, MetroCluster for example, we had to call support.

I would rate technical support at eight out of 10. Support is responsive, and we could then solve our issues. It took some time. It's not the perfect support that you would get with, say, Pure or Nimble, where they collect telemetry data - they always know what's going on with the system. I think with NetApp that's not possible.

Reasons for choosing NetApp include that it's probably the most solid, robust, and easy-to-implement solution.

For file servers, one alternative is Microsoft using standard Microsoft Windows Servers. Another solution is Huawei OceanStor; with the latest, version 5, they support mouse functionality.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are to see that it has good market share already established, or that it has a robust roadmap with interesting products in the future, or that I have had a solid feeling with different products from same manufacturer.

If I were only rating the NetApp solution without considering the price, I would probably give it nine or 10 out of 10. If the rating includes the price, it's more like a seven.

If you're aiming for the easiest solution which will work, more or less, out-of-the-box and has lots of features, I would definitely recommend NetApp. If you're also bound by budget restraints, you should probably look at other vendors.

NAS part of standardized virtualization platform, ranging from size from 15TB on-site solution to more than 500TB twin core datacenter.

• Cost effective storage for all performance levels (including all-flash)
• Integrated snapshot and backup capability
• Many protocols
• Good service

• Integrated backup functionality (SnapVault and SnapMirror)
• Option to mirror synchronously

• Automation readiness
• API exposure
• Adaptive storage quality of service

NetApp, as a design group, builds solutions that are reliable. Other companies don’t have the fortitude of NetApp. They have a very strong commitment to the multimedia industry, for example.

Other products lose performance over time, but NetApp OS is speed-optimized.

NetApp is also a very stable company that offers various storage options at the highest level of build and reliability. Products will be supported for the duration of a customer’s needs.

With NetApp’s dedication to the market, customers aren’t dealing with a fly-by-night organization. The company will follow through with support which, with FAS, is for multiple petabytes of data. For example, in the government and medical sectors, they are well provided-for.

My ability as a VAR is solely connected to NetApp, my value is solely connected to the commitment of NetApp. In any particular vertical, NetApp is technically superior, price conscious, and superior at price-for-performance.

They provide a lot of expertise on marketing and technical teams, and helps make our customers look good.

There’s always areas for improvement. For example, it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer.

My primary selling point is stability of the solution. It provides ongoing performance, which is proven to have no degradation.

Scalability depends on how it’s ordered, which is the job of an integrator and dependent on the customer's needs.

I work with their technical team, but not on a day-to-day basis. The teams I do work with are great, but there are so many of them it’s sometimes difficult to find correct teams.

It’s complex because there so many areas where you can make a mistake. For example, the site survey may not have enough power and something as simple as that can ruin an installation.

It loses points because of the price, but it can’t be everything to everybody.

Make sure you buy the product that’s right for you. If it's competitive to NetApp FAS, great, but just know both products before making a decision and do a point-by-point comparison.

• Reliability
• Snapshots
• Ease of tooling
• Integration with our systems
• It's multiprotocol

We are an online hotel reservations company, so if our website goes down we lose money at a very high rate per minute. It has been many years since we have had an outage due to storage because of FAS.

The performance needs to be improved. Due to the performance issues, we're moving to NetApp Flash FAS as it provides almost infinite performance.

We've used it for nine years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is excellent.

It's scaled well for us.

It takes a long time to resolve most cases. It requires an extensive amount of troubleshooting and tends to be very time consuming on our end in terms of collecting data for the engineers to work on.

It's straightforward. I'd say, though, that it's medium complexity because it is not done in one day.

We used a mixed team of in-house and vendor personnel.

I wouldn't know how to begin to calculate it.

That was a long time before I joined the company.

Do your research on clustered Data ONTAP as it is a very complicated product, much more complicated than the previous version.

The performance allows me to provide backend storage for large number of VMs and databases at a competitive price point.

Unified Monitoring v6.2 loses a bunch of functionality that previous versions had. For example, I took a cluster out of Unified Monitor, but Storage Monitor was still alerting me about it. 6.2 is not as comprehensive, but Unified Monitoring 6.2 will only be useful when it does everything. Insight’s price is just too expensive and unreasonable.

It's pretty stable, even if it runs into something freaky, it keeps going. For example, mysterious a reboot, and nobody notices. It keeps working.

It scales to a point, and then you buy more hardware. Doing a head swap (swapping out controllers) is not as easy as it used to be.

It's better than Oracle, but actually pretty good. They're responsive, and help resolve situations. We have had a couple of issues, but 99% of the time, they get me an answer, although it may not be what I like, but it’s a definite answer within a reasonable time frame.

It's complex, not a trivial task. We can unbox it and deploy. There are many unpublished tech tips that NetApp engineers get that customers don’t (for example, how to save a disk).

The price-per-gig makes it the most expensive storage, more than EMC VMAX. So I’d like to see more aggressive pricing.

It's losing points on its value. The performance is nearly perfect, but it’s really expensive.

The primary use case is for regular databases and file systems. So far it has been good. The performance is solid, it's robust, availability is solid.

We're able to keep data for a longer time because we are able to manage it well using the features that NetApp provides. It has also helped us to quickly deploy our test environment and finish all of our testing before we deploy on the customer side or the customer systems. It has really helped in our operations and our productivity.

One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. You can experience two disk failures and still be up. Another feature is the deduplication. It saves a lot of space. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage.

I want to see the system automatically tier; we call it auto-tiering. When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives.

The stability is solid. You can go over 3,000 days without a reboot or any downtime. It's so stable.

The scalability is also good. You can scale on the fly, just connect the cables. If you're adding a controller or you're adding big shelves, it's easy to move. It's excellent.

I'll give technical support a "good" rating because sometimes it's slow in getting people to respond, other times it's okay.

When I arrived at the company they were using NetApp, and we are still using NetApp.

When selecting a vendor, I first look at how robust the solution is that they're proposing, and how available they are to answer calls if there are any issues. This is very critical. The robustness of the solution and the availability of the vendor to attend to queries are important components of my selection criteria. After-sales support is also very key.

The initial configuration is very straightforward. You just cable up your system, power up, connect your power cables, connect to the console, boot up the system, do your system configuration, IP configuration, and all the other configurations, and the system is up and good to run.

If I were to advise someone researching NetApp FAS Storage or a similar solution, I would want to understand what they really want. I would advise them to go with NetApp because it's unified storage. It supports both NAS and SAN environments, so whether you're doing block storage or you're doing file storage, it is a good solution. Also, the operating system that it runs is called Data ONTAP, and is cloud-ready, so in the future the file storage that you have can be deployed to the cloud.

I rate this solution a 9.9 out of 10 because it's never failed me so I'm very comfortable with it.

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.

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.