NetApp FAS Series Reviews

I am using NetApp FAS Series for file backups.

We're supposed to have used NetApp FAS Series for replication, but then one of the nodes failed, and then it's taken us some time to bring it up.

The management console and disc partitioning could improve.

I have used NetApp FAS Series within the past 12 months.

The solution is stable.

I would rate the stability of the NetApp FAS Series an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We have not done much scaling but we know it can.

The support for NetApp FAS Series has not been great.

The whole installation wasn't done right from the start. I think that's where the problem started.

We are on a perpetual license.

I would recommend 

I rate NetApp FAS Series a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

You can use different protocols at the same time. Monitoring is also very easy in NetApp FAS Series. There is a free tool for monitoring. 

Its licensing cost can be improved.

It is very stable. We have a lot of customers in Turkey, and we haven't got any major issues or complaints from our customers.

It is easily scalable. You can easily scale up and use old and new products together. NetApp products are very scalable.

Their technical support is very good. They work very tightly with us.

The initial setup is very easy. It can be set up in five to ten minutes. We have a lot of technical knowledge of this product.

It is expensive.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

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.

• 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.

Our company is based in Myanmar. I'm formerly a system engineer and we are a NetApp service provider company as well.

This is a good product. I like that the NetApp FAS Series can use both SAN and NAS at the same time, and that's what most customers are looking for. Especially, the features like Metro Cluster and Snap mirror are also really good.

For long term partnership in Myanmar, The local warehouse should be built in Myanmar that's something I'd like to see. We have some issues with supply so there is sometimes a delay in getting the hardware.

I've been using this solution for over three years. 

The product is stable. 

The product is scalable.

We have good support. 

Positive

The initial setup is relatively easy but we have a lot of experience with it.  

Licensing costs are reasonable for our customers. We're generally dealing with enterprise-size organizations - mainly the banking and government sectors.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

• 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.