NetApp FAS Series Reviews

The NetApp FAS series is unified storage and can be used for the NAS or SAN environments. We had a customer that needed multiple protocols.

The solution has allowed the consolidation of multiple storage boxes inside the organization. This has reduced the footprint on the data center. From a management point of view, the organizations do not need to manage multiple boxes, they only need to manage one.

The solution has tiers inside which means we do not only need to use SSDs.

The user interface could be improved.

I have been using the NetApp FAS series for approximately one year.

The solution is stable and has good performance.

The solution is scalable and can be added on to easily if needed.

The technical support is very good and supportive. Their technical support is very helpful and they are engaged from the beginning with the customer and until the project is finished.

I have used other solutions in the past.

The implementation of the solution was not that difficult.

We used our internal team with the help of the NetApp professional service team to complete the implementation.

By using the NetApp FAS series solution organizations are able to reduce the power, cooling, and space required which reduces the overall cost of operations.

The NetApp FAS series price is very competitive compared to other solutions on the market it is a good choice.

NetApp FAS series solutions have advantages over their competitors because they support multi-protocol, all the levels of the software, such as duplication, compression, and replication. It is an all-in-one solution, the customer does not require to have multiple solutions to get SAN and NAS environments.

I rate the NetApp FAS series an eight out of ten.

We use it for storing our database data and for our virtual machines.

The best feature is its ONTAP product line for Ransomware protection. Another benefit is the hybrid and unified model. It also has features for file storage and block storage.

I was a little skeptical about the model. I wonder why the replication is included in the ONTAP One bundle when some customers may not require additional features. It should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle, even if there's a slight price increase.

I have been working with this solution for approximately two years now.

The solution is stable. We've had no issues with it.

The tool is scalable and meets our requirements for TVs. It handles beta bytes well. We are happy with its scalability.

The technical support and the supporting partner are great.

Positive

I work with HPE and Huawei OceanStor, too. HPE is great, but I'm not satisfied with Huawei OceanStor. I'm comfortable with HPE and NetApp FAS Series.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is a SaaS solution. and very easy to maintain. It’s not a high-maintenance device. It runs smoothly. We use it within our university and have up to a hundred concurrent user sessions. 

The deployment was handled by the partner from whom we made the purchase.

The product is on the expensive side, but the feature set is excellent.

I recommend the solution. Overall, I rate it a perfect ten because I haven’t encountered any issues since I’ve started using it.

The input and output per second performance are satisfactory.

The solution can improve on the replication features.

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

The technical support is satisfactory. They need to invest more into the service.

We work with Dell EMC and Huawei.

I recommend NetApp on top of the Dell EMC since it's less complex.

The initial setup is not that complex compared to the other vendor. It's in the same level of complexity.

When we need to implement a less expensive solution we use Huawei. NetApp FAS Series is a little bit expensive compared to the average of the market.

I rate NetApp FAS Series a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case was NFS. It was used for designing chips.

The file sharing feature is most valuable.

Its operating system is very cumbersome. However, after you set it up, it runs pretty smoothly.

Its file system is not very dynamic. It is very static.

It is pretty stable. I would probably give it a six out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable to some extent. There is a limit, but then everything has a limit. We were using it at three sites across the US. We ran into this issue of hitting the limit just once in a while. When you are growing a cluster, you usually hit that limit.

Their support was okay. I wouldn't say it was very great, but it was there. Occasionally, they would just go round and round in circles. They didn't know what to do with the case.

They followed the sun model, which is followed by almost every company. If you open a case and the person is one hour away from his break or the end of his day, he would just say that he will have to give the case to someone else, and then you start all over again.

We have had different NetApp models. FAS has been around for a long time. The newer models are called AFF, and I have used AFF 300 and AFF 400.

Its implementation was complicated. It takes a couple of hours if your network and DNS are ready. 

There was a NetApp SE on the site to help us.

We purchased it for four years, and it wasn't expensive. It was reasonable. 

Every company has a different agreement with NetApp. We got everything we wanted with all the bells and whistles and all the features and functionalities.

Its operating system is a little cumbersome, but it runs pretty smoothly most of the time.

I would rate NetApp FAS Series a seven out of ten.

• High Availability – most important thing with all big storage systems
• Flexible – it uses all different kinds of protocols (SAN, fiber channels)
• Virtual Management Console – helps with and integrates with vSphere. I’ve deployed it, but haven’t configured it. Looks really promising.
• Snap Drive – integration with Windows for SQL exchange is critical
• Can update without taking the system down

It’s a High Availability environment in which I haven’t had problems. We’ve only had one disk fail in a year. Quality of product is good.

Tegile offers live deduplication. And NetApp can only be scheduled to dedupe in the background or for later.

Also, the web page for downloading software could be more efficient (for example, getting instructions takes a few clicks). Make it easier for customers to download software.

The instructions didn’t provide for re-configurations from scratch and tech support were stuck too. The person who configured before had installed NetApp 8.2 on 7 mode. 8.3 didn’t support 7, which I wanted to do, so that’s why I had to reconfigure from scratch.

First, make a lot of calculations of how much data you’re going to use and how much you’re using now. Compare the two and look into how you configure storage solution. How much data, how to split, etc. If you can’t spend that much on storage, you need to determine how to follow best practices to get as much storage as possible for the money. For example, if you have five shelves, you don’t need to worry about LUNs going offline. But if it’s just two shelves, like I have, you must be very careful about provisioning storage and use as much as possible.

NetApp FAS Series provides all the essential capabilities of E-Series. It is a complete package and even more reliable than E-Series.

They should add all features from Flash Pool, Flash Cache, and other new features into the product.

I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability an eight out of ten.

NetApp FAS Series is simple to set up.

We deployed the product with the help of our in-house team.

It is a moderately low-priced platform.

If you are looking for a solution with good scalability options, go for NetApp FAS Series. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We used NetApp FAS for both block and file sharing but we have now switched to another product by HP.

The most important features are SnapVault, Snapshots, and SnapMirror.

Netapp closed their local offices in our country leading to no technical and sales support representation.

We've had issues with scalability because the product that we were using went end-of-life many years ago, and we were not able to expand because there were no spares available.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment took just a few days.

We had in-house experience for implementation and deployment.

Before choosing this product originally, we evaluated others and were ultimately impressed by the Snapshots, ShapVault, and SnapRestore features. These were what we really wanted, and at the time, we could not find another product that had similar capabilities.

We had been using NetApp for quite some time, but the equipment was quite old and we wanted a new system. Between NetApp and HP, we chose HP because the NetApp support is not very good. They used to have partners in the country, but they have left.

My advice for anyone who is considering NetApp FAS is that it is a good product and our only real complaint is the lack of technical support. If they live in a country where technical support is available then I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Snap mirror as it gives us a way to snap to our two disaster recovery sites to instantaneously bring up VMs
• Dedupe helps us to save a lot on OS files for VMs

It provides a relatively cost-effective solution, as we have all our virtual infrastructure on NetApp.

They should provide more specific how-to guides. For example, I want to implement Sharepoint, but how do I do that?

Upgrades are always hold-our-breath situations. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve heard horror stories. I’m also dead-ended.

It’s been good. We haven’t had a complete outage (other than when our network the went down). We’ve had some challenges with hardware, but this was done non-disruptively with failover.

We’re still on 7-mode, but it still scales fairly well as the 6240 is a hefty machine.

It's used for repairs. We got outside help with set up and to put processes in place. Once done, it was seamless.

Very straightforward. We’re using 7-mode, so nothing fancy, and I had no difficulties. There were a couple things I didn’t know, but our partner, DataLink, helped. Specifically, I didn’t understand the rate groups and when you expand aggregates, you have to do a full regroup, which wasted a lot of space. I had 16-disk rate groups, added five disks, and it unbalanced things.

Six to eight months ago, I would have said go for it, but now I’ve been getting a lot of doubts about the stability of NetApp itself as a company.