NetApp FAS Series Reviews

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.

We recently upgraded our NetApp environment from 7-Mode to Clustered ONTAP v9.3. Primary use cases are NFS and CIFS. NFSs are used for VMware data store while the CIFSs are for corporate file sharing.

Using the built-in Snapshots and SnapMirror technology, we were able to have better working data protection locally and off-site. The storage efficiency also provided maximum savings in our storage utilization.

• Snapshots
• SnapMirror
• Storage efficiency

Other tools, like OnCommand Unified Manager and Config Advisor, help us a lot in managing our environment.

None at the moment for the box itself. We are very happy with the current capabilities of this hardware. 

Hopefully, the AutoSupport can be improved to be more proactive in certain cases.

When getting new hardware, always tell the account manager that you are also considering other brands. They will be forced to adjust the price lower.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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