NetApp FAS Series Reviews

• Software features, such as being able to do snapshots and file system optimization
• High Availability -- components fail so this is a nice feature to have when failing over. There's no downtime, so we don’t lose data.

Good bang for the buck. Also, we use NFS generally, but FAS has the capability to use SAN, so it has a broad spectrum of use.

Tough for me to answer because I’m limited in my role, but the one thing I’d like to see most is more cohesiveness with a unified manager. I like the end product, but it’s not really all integrated and is convoluted with different managers. I would ike a single pane of glass, a single dashboard.

We see a lot of bugs in roll outs, and sometimes I think the first GA are late-beta deployments. My impression is they could have let it bake a little longer. But it could also be because of some of the environments it deploys in.

Snap Manager v3.3.1 is a little buggy and NetApp doesn’t offer training course on it. So it could be what I’ve been taught by other people, or it’s in fact buggy, but likely a little of both. Hopefully they made improvements on 3.4.

7-mode scales very well. I’m even more impressed with where they intend to go with cDOT, but it may be rolled out prematurely.

Tech support is usually pretty good, but occasionally there are some things that occur only on our site that tech support has issues.

Plan ahead and make sure you right-size it. How much head room do you really need? How many spindles are you going to attach? Are you really going to share workloads or do you want to separate some of those? We don’t segregate our infrastructure, which I don’t like, but all that costs money. But you should make sure that you have failover.

We use the solution as a home directory for our HPC cluster. The users store important and reliable data on it. We are not using it for IO-intensive operations but as a reliable storage.

The solution is very stable and reliable. We guarantee our users' snapshots and the long life of data. Also, the support is professional and nice. It is simple and powerful.

As a company, NetApp may consider working with ARL systems.

I have been using NetApp FAS Series for around five years.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable to some extent.

We have 400 nodes in one cluster and 1400 nodes in another cluster. Around 800-900 users are using the solution.

The support is professional. They provide answers in a very short period.

Positive

We've used Dell solutions. NetApp is easier and simpler to manage. It's more reliable and stable. The basic features work more consistently on the NetApp website.

The initial setup is easy.

The tool is very easy to maintain. Even for desk sales, they have some automatic workflow to send an RMA, place the desk and ship a new one.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product has been pretty stable. Though we have had a few issues, not on the ones that we are going to replace, but on a couple of other ones. On the ones that we are going to replace, we usually use them for file storage and Exchange. The others are mainly used for interface and iSCSI.

It has been a pretty stable environment, but over time our requirements have changed. Therefore, I don't think it's an issue with the system. We have put a lot of load on a lot more than what it can handle. So, it has taken a performance hit. I wouldn't put it down to there being an issue with NetApp. It's simply because it has more load on it than it can handle, so it has taken a performance hit. 

The only downside is in ease in management; it is not easy to use.

It is good to have a unified storage where you can have block and file level protocols. It has been pretty stable, but the capacity requirements have changed overtime. Our utilization has been very high, so the performance has taken a hit, which is why we are replacing it.

• Ease of management needs to be improved.
• The power consumption for the FAS is a lot more compared to the new SSD arrays.

Going forward, I don't want to be using the FAS again. I want to be using AFFs more.

It has been pretty stable. It has been pretty good, and when we have issues, the support has been great as well. 

I am pretty happy with the system, and the performance issues that we are experiencing have nothing to do with the NetApp system. It's simply because it has more load than it can handle.

The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive.

Technical support is cooperative and good.

We were previously using an old IBM SAN. We switched because we wanted to moved to a unified system.

We had a reseller set it up for us, simply because it was a little too complicated.

It's not a cheap system. It is very expensive. The pricing has been ridiculous every time that we had to renew the support. Initially, we have a three-year support contract when we bought the system, but the subsequent renewal of maintenance was ridiculous. This is why we have not been too keen on NetApp.

I wouldn't recommend NetApp FAS. I don't understand why anyone would go for NetApp FAS when you can get the NetApp AFF, which is an SSD array, for almost a similar price or probably even cheaper.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Cost effective solution
• Performance
• Reliability
• A good roadmap.

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.

• Dedupe
• Also, our customers look for fast connectivity and cost efficiency.
• It's TCP/IP vs. fiber channel, which tends to be more costly.

• Single unified-type architecture for block-and-file-type data storage
• Ease of use
• Being able to hand off things like snap shots directly to customers

They need to improve the go-to-market for all-flash and converged infrastructure. What is your goal-to-market vision, and when to get there? They’re too slow compared to others and what they’ve done in the past. They were the leader in dedupe, but now, it’s not such an innovative edge.

It lacks flexibility in failover and failback, so we cannot granularly failover pieces. It's not easy to move one piece over to the other side.

Also, from the overall workload standpoint, all protocols are handled in just one physical architecture. So if I'm running dedupe, fiber channel, and other protocols on the same CPU core, I can’t load-balance. I’ve seen issues specifically with EMP, one core is maxed out, and I can’t use the other cores to handle it.

Fairly solid 5-9 array. FAS is a solid architecture in 90% of the environments.

Scalability especially in SMB range has been well-received. So long as the environment is sized correctly, it’s been good.

I have had both good and bad experiences, depending on what tier I get to initially. Now it’s tiered, whereas it used to be one senior guy.

If historically you’re a NetApp customer, it’s not as complex as cluster mode. It requires a lot more complexity – command line is not so friendly for storage admins. I’d recommend also sticking with what you know.

Today we use it for replication of our transaction data, and for storing data, for which we use the snap mirror feature. Primary and disaster recovery storage centers are connected. Snap mirror backup software does block level copy from primary site to the disaster recovery.

We’re going onto the cDot platform, which is already an improvement. The controllers are faster so we have more processing efficiency.

We’ve been using it for the last six years.

Stability has been very good. As far as we’re concerned, we update our systems (firmware, OS) consistently, so we don’t face any problems in that regard.

We've had no problems scaling. Our business has grown two and half times in size over six years, and we’ve added more disks and shelves, as well as upgrading controllers. We’ve done it without any down time.

Quite good. Recently we deployed micro-clusters with cDot, the first bank in India to do it.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it, although we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with a combination of FAS and vSphere.

Configure it properly. Today we have HA with any data loss because we did it nicely, and took our time for the beginning. We got terrific support.

We are mainly using this solution for file sharing, virtualization, and database storage.

The most valuable features are the NAS features and NetApp's excellent support.

It's user-friendly, and I am happy with the dashboard, customization, and security.

For the most part, we don't have any problems. There is no NetApp infrastructure set up here in Greece. We don't have a representative with a technical department and someone who will help you in order to understand the product better.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

It's very stable.

It's scalable. You can scale as much as you can have.

We have approximately 500 end-users in our organization.

We have contacted technical support either by phone or via email, and sometimes they have contacted me first because they have noticed something in their systems.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used an integrator to help us with the deployment.

I don't recall the price, but in general, pricing can always be better.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) an eight out of ten.

The flexibility to use in OpenStack with multiple data types, Cinder, Swift, etc.

Feasibility to use multiple protocols to talk to device, be it direct attached or Cinder/Swift, and the ability to use it as storage behind guest instances on cloud (commonly known as boot-from-disk).

When speaking with the NetApp CEO, we told him that we need better documentation for customers to understand automation of APIs. We want it all there and robust. Boot-from-disk allows me to use disk from Netapp, and understand how to set that up should be documented so I can teach my staff how to do that.

We've been using NetApp products for 15 years.

No issues encountered.

As we continue forward, we can add additional heads with same IOPS.

I've never had to call tech support, but we’ve had them call us to tell us we were about to have a problem.

It was very straightforward with OpenStack, very well-documented, and supported. I wasn’t an OpenStack admin when I started, so the ease of use was critical to me. Straight from the horizon dashboard from OpenStack and I was up and running in 15 minutes

1. Define use cases because we’ve come across where we didn’t do so correctly, and we had to go back and re-architect everything. This was our failure.
2. Really engage with NetApp to understand how you use the nuances of things like the APIs.