NetApp FAS Series Reviews

We are using NetApp FAS for some encrypted projects and to provide home direction for our users.

NetApp FAS is highly stable and reliable, especially under a heavy load. That is what I like most about the NetApp.

I would like to see NetApp add incident support.

I've been using NetApp SAS for three or four years.

If we needed to scale beyond what we have now, we could do it. I would say NetApp's scalability is sufficient for our needs. We have hundreds of users accessing the file system on a daily basis.

NetApp support is helpful, and their technicians are knowledgeable. They usually respond fast. I would rate NetApp support eight out of 10. 

We previously used a Dell product. I think the two solutions are very similar. I also worked with Visionet, but that is apples and oranges. I wouldn't compare NetApp FAS with Visionet because these are very different site systems—parallel site systems.

I rate NetApp FAS Series eight out of 10. I recommend NetApp FAS because it's reliable and easy to manage. NetApp support is helpful. I encourage anyone to choose NetApp.

Better performance and lower costs.

It is a great help.

It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays.

Over 10 years.

Nothing special.

Not really.

No.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Cool.

EMC.

Straightforward.

Vendor.

Three years.

Be careful.

EMC.

Keep up the good work.

• Snapshots
• Mobility of data
• High Availability

It saves a lot of time and minimizes downtime, which is important because we're a hospital and we can’t afford much downtime. If they can stop all downtime, it would be a big benefit for us and our patients.

I have a very small feature request: more automation of the expanding aggregates and discs.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

The stability is very good.

We have six PB of data, and have had no problems with scalability.

The technical support is good.

We have had NetApp for a long time, and were one of the first customers in Belgium.

If you are new, you have to learn the system, but once you know how it works, it doesn’t take much time to expand or install a new system. It was not difficult at all to learn the first time.

Over the past few years, they have evolved a lot in manageability and automation, so we are happy with the direction they are going in. They haven’t lost their eye on stability as well. Lots of new features without sacrificing anything.

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.

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.

It’s a decently mature product that has a lot of documentation and standards and is something to be relied on.

Predictable behavior during failure. In terms of performance, if you have two machines, you know they’re going to perform the same.

It needs better built-in monitoring. We can’t afford Insight, and v6.2 seems like it's a purposefully inferior product to make people buy Insight, which is way too expensive.

It's not on Cisco’s stability level, but it’s a 96/100.

It’s scalable, but it could be easier. Just adding shelves might require additional cards and cabling, which can be difficult.

I’m happy with the support, as they’ve been able to solve whatever I throw at them.

It’s complex as there’s a lot of variables involved. Not for the weak-hearted, if you haven’t done it before.

It loses points because of failures.

Management, for a person who’s not a storage administrator In a couple of weeks, you can get the basics of createing virtual storage, and carving out chairs and LUNS.

Doing more with less. I can do multiple protocols, storage efficiency, data protection tool, everything is in one solution/ecosystems. There aren't many vendors who can provide that without adding third party software and apps.

Our major issue with FAS was not having one pane of glass with all products attached to it. Other major issue is the free performance monitor doesn’t provide enough information. They want you to buy Insight, which is very expensive.

It's rock solid.

I love cluster ONTAP. Being able to scale out and being able to increase performance by adding more heads to a cluster and being able to do hybrid with regular storage on same platform is huge. You can move out easily too, they provide you the tools to do that, adding a lot of value.

Great, I cannot complain. They’re there with you until problem resolved.

It's straightforward setup. Depending on how you deploy, full SAN is complex, with NAS not so complex. You have to follow best practices when building out infrastructure. So, it’s not so different than deploying it with other vendors.

With storage, what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Call your NetApp rep and tell him you want to test the solution. Get it on the floor and beat the hell out of it. Do a very thorough Proof of Concept.