NetApp FAS Series Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

VP Systems Integrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 22, 2015

We can add additional heads with the same IOPS, but we need better documentation for customers to understand automation of APIs.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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).

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using NetApp products for 15 years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.
Really engage with NetApp to understand how you use the nuances of things like the APIs.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Akram Omer

IT Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 9, 2022

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Overall useful features, highly stable for production, and effective high-density volume services

Pros and Cons

"I have found all the features useful in NetApp FAS Series."

"We are not able to connect to the support of NetApp from Sudan. We have to go through many agents for support, which makes it difficult."

What is our primary use case?

I use NetApp FAS Series for servers. I have a lot of virtual servers connected through it using a Brocade switch.

What is most valuable?

I have found all the features useful in NetApp FAS Series.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using NetApp FAS Series for approximately eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is highly stable.

NetApp FAS Series is stable in production storage and for the high-density volume services.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

NetApp FAS Series is scalable.

We have approximately 500 users that use this solution in my organization.

We use NetApp FAS Series extensively in our organization and plan to upgrade it for SSD to be faster. We are running our production server on this storage and we use it every second of the day.

How are customer service and support?

We are not able to connect to the support of NetApp from Sudan. We have to go through many agents for support, which makes it difficult.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used NAS storage and it was not stable.

How was the initial setup?

NetApp FAS Series is very expensive for us here in Sudan because we cannot purchase it from the vendor directly.

What about the implementation team?

We have three or four people that do maintenance and support of NetApp FAS Series.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is a one-time license charge for NetApp FAS Series to run and we pay annually for upgrades and support.

What other advice do I have?

I rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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NetApp FAS Series

November 2024

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it_user332616

Director of IT Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 14, 2017

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It provides us with redundancy and security, which is important because we hold a lot of customer information that must be secure and reliable.

What is most valuable?

Redundancy
Snap mirroring
Home-drive capability, which looks at a user name and gives the correct rights to folder

How has it helped my organization?

Rendundancy
Security

We hold a lot of information for our customers, so the information has to be secure and reliable.

What needs improvement?

I'm not sure, because every time I’ve gone to them, they’ve said “yes, we can do that.”

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I sleep well at night because of its redundancy. I hardly even know when it has a bad drive. The Call Home capability sends a message automatically if there's a bad drive to NetApp who then sends a new drive.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazing how scalable it is. As a comparison, we looked at EMC vBlock as well, and if you want to upgrade, you have to use a forklift. With FAS, you just put in new shelves or heads.

How is customer service and technical support?

They’re extremely technical. Everyone I’ve talked to has been very knowledgeable, and I can’t say anything bad.

How was the initial setup?

It was complex. There's a lot to do, but I had their assistance and went through everything step by step. So while complex, it was also simple.

What other advice do I have?

One thing that burned me, is that it surprised me how much overhead it uses, like 30% right off the top. So don’t forget the overhead. It’s not usable space, but that percentage is coming down. It all has to do with deduplication.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user350622

System Administrator - Backup & Storage Specialist at METRO SYSTEMS Romania

Feb 21, 2016

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It provides very good storage High Availability and data protection. The thing we'd like to see the most is the possibility of pairing LAN/SAN ports from different nodes.

Valuable Features

What impressed me the most about these systems are their excellent reliability, ease of administering (both in GUI and command line), and their very good documentation that is easy to access and understand. It provides very good storage, High Availability, and data protection by employing the use of two separate storage controllers that can take over each other's role as soon as any of them goes down. The technology has been improved even more after the introduction of the cluster cDot ONTAP OS.

Improvements to My Organization

NetApp systems are a good choice if you want a versatile unified system that's also capable of delivering performance. Our company has been using NetApp filers both as file sharing solutions (CIFS over LAN) and also as block storage (LUNs) for VMware ESXi hosts.

Since we switched to the newer 2552 models, we now benefit from better data protection and improved storage capacity thanks to the clustered Data ONTAP OS.

Room for Improvement

The thing we'd like to see the most is the possibility of pairing LAN/SAN ports from different nodes. Currently, the systems only provide pairing (and thus redundancy) only at same-node level. Also, it wouldn't hurt having this sort of cross-functionality when it comes to choosing disks for aggregate structures. Right now, you can't integrate in the same storage aggregate disks from different shelves.

Use of Solution

I've had the chance to work a lot with NetApp FAS 2552 series and also have some experience with older models such as 2050, 2040, 3240 and 2240. I think it's a pretty reliable unified storage solution. The FAS 2552 model, especially, offers good performance and excellent reliability. My experience with similar storage systems is, currently, somewhat limited however.

My company has been using NetApp for a few years now, over four I think, and I have come into contact with this technology for over a year.

Deployment Issues

When it comes to deployment we had our share of issues. Some of these issues are to blame on the vendor's lack of experience with the new models and ONTAP versions, but sometimes the systems themselves were faulty.

Stability Issues

The most recent issue we had involves a LAN card that couldn't be set on the correct bandwidth setting. In consequence, the vendor had to replace one of the node's motherboard.

Scalability Issues

There have been no issues with scaling it, other than during the actual deployment of new devices.

Customer Service and Technical Support

If you buy NetApp systems from third-party vendors, then you would be surprised that their technicians aren't exactly up to date with the latest ONTAP versions. NetApp releases new versions (with great improvements) so often that it's hard for some vendors to stay up to date with their technical knowledge base.

However, when it comes to technical support from NetApp directly, they tend to have a very competent team and the reaction time is pretty decent. Perhaps their biggest strong point in this chapter is their public knowledge base which helps you solve on your own most of issues you can encounter with configuring and administering.

Initial Setup

All I can say is that if you take your time and study the NetApp documentation, you shouldn't have any issue, provided the initial setup was done properly by the vendor technician.

Implementation Team

Initial setup is usually performed by NetApp or the third-party vendor from whom you purchased the devices. Our experience with third-party vendors isn't the best due to reasons stated above. All other configuration and administration is done in-house.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

When it comes to software licensing, I think that NetApp promotes a very fair system. Basically you only pay for the features you need (eg.: Cluster Mode, SnapMirror, SnapVault, etc.).

Other Advice

The best advice I can offer is to try and purchase it directly from NetApp in order to have a better chance of having a successful initial configuration from the first try. Also, make sure you purchase the system with a General Availability OS version as Release Candidate ones tend to be bugged.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user332652

Storage Adminstrator at SRPNet

Oct 29, 2015

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It has the capability to use SAN, so it has a broad spectrum of use. I'd like to see more cohesiveness with a unified manager.

Valuable Features

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.

Improvements to My Organization

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.

Room for Improvement

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.

Deployment Issues

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.

Stability Issues

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.

Scalability Issues

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.

Customer Service and Technical Support

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

Other Advice

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user330081

Principal Computer Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 22, 2015

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Since implementation, our performance has definitely increased, but they're upgrading the performance monitoring tool, which is the main thing I think needs improvement.

Valuable Features

I think that the flexibility with the volume, resizing, and performance.

Improvements to My Organization

I think that our performance has definitely increased.

Room for Improvement

I think that they are upgrading the performance monitoring tool, which is the main thing I think needs improvement. From version to version they are changing, and you want to see things improve – I think we will continue to see more and more benefits.

Use of Solution

We have been using it since 2013.

Stability Issues

Pretty solid in terms of stability.

Scalability Issues

We haven’t really grown it but I see a roadmap, the only problem there may be cost. It’s not an expensive product per se, but because of budget issues. People sometimes don’t evaluate the cost correctly.

Customer Service and Technical Support

NetApp overall has been really good in terms of technical support.

Initial Setup

Initial setup was hard a year ago, but now we just did another setup and everything was smooth. It’s gotten a lot better in the last year we’ve been using it.

Other Advice

If you are on the fence it’s been a very good product, you don’t want to build your own solution, you want to use the appliance for the flexibility. Overall performance has gotten a lot better.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

May 10, 2015

The interesting thing about VVOLs is that not all implementations will be equal. It puts more responsibility on the array by moving storage operations to it that were previously handled by vSphere.

More information on VVOLs is being released every week and it is only now that we are getting a chance to play with the full release code that we are able to dig into the detail of how it works. Let’s start off by exploring the benefits of VVOLs that are likely to make it game changing technology:

Granular Control of VMs

Enable VM granular storage operations on individual virtual disks for the first time including control of the following capabilities:
- Auto Grow
- Compression
- De-duplication
- Disk Types: SATA, FCAL, SAS, SSD
- Flash Accelerated
- High Availability
- Maximum Throughput: IOPS & MBs
- Replication
- Protocol: NFS, iSCSI, FC,FCoE

Enhanced Efficiency and Performance

Off-load VM snapshots, clones and moves to the array
Automatically optimise I/O paths for all protocols
No VMFS, therefore
- Virtual disks natively stored on the array
- Datastore space management is not required
- Size limits are dictated by the guest and array
- Zeroing, either on disk creation or use, is not required
- vSphere UNMAP, when a VM is deleted, is not required
- Guest UNMAP commands are passed directly to the VVOL
- Thin-provisioning is managed by the array
Minimise LUN and path consumption, NFS mount usage, and LIF count and IP address consumption

Automated Policy Based Management

Create a library of reusable storage profiles
Match the profiles to storage capabilities
Provision VMs using storage profiles
Alert when a VM no longer conforms to the profile

To get VVOLs up and running you need cDOT 8.2.3 or above, Virtual Storage Console 6.0 and VASA Provider 6.0 – for more background information see A deeper look into NetApp’s support for VMware Virtual Volumes.

The On-Demand engine

One of the best kept secrets of cDOT 8.3 was the inclusion of the On-Demand engine which consists of the following new commands:

Single-File Move on Demand (SFMoD)
Single-File Copy/Clone on Demand (SFCoD)
Single-File Restore on Demand (SFRoD)

When a command is triggered, data access at the destination begins immediately, while in the background the data is copied or moved from source to destination. The commands cannot be directly invoked, rather other operations take advantage of them (i.e. VVOLs and LUN moves). So when the policy of a VVol is changed that results in it needing to be moved from one volume to another (even across controllers) the On-Demand engine non-disruptively moves data access from the source to the destination instantly. All writes go to the new destination and, while the data is being copied from the source, reads are redirected back to the original volume as required. If a VVOL is migrated elsewhere in the cluster, a rebind operation automatically changes the I/O path to the new closest PE, maintaining optimum performance and reducing complexity and latency.

Not all VVOLs implementations will be equal

The interesting thing about VVOLs is that not all implementations will be equal, as it puts more responsibility on the array by moving many storage operations to it that were previously handled by vSphere – you therefore need an array that provides efficient:

Thin-provisioning
Snapshots
Clones
Non-disruptive VM mobility

The current snapshot technology in VMFS is to say the least very poor – best practice is to have no more than 2-3 snapshots in a chain (even though the maximum is 32) and to use no single snapshot for more than 24-72 hours – the reason is simple, storage performance will suffer if you create a snapshot on a VM. So if an array supports VVOLs and we can off-load snapshot and clone creation to the array then we have surely solved the problem and we can then keep 100s of snapshots. As always it is not so simple – if the array uses inefficient CoW snapshots then you will not gain much over the standard vSphere snapshots. Thin-provisioning is another area whereby some arrays do it very efficiently, but many suffer a significant performance drop unless thick LUNs are used.

The nice thing about FAS is that it has excelled at the first three points above for many years and the last point has been introduced with the On-Demand engine in cDOT 8.3 – there are plenty of arrays on the market that will be enabled for VVOLs, but they will not be able to claim efficient support for these features without massive re-engineering work.

Other points of note

It is essential to backup the VASA provider VM, this can be achieved using the in-built backup capabilities of the array using one of the following options:

The backup and recovery features of VSC
The built-in scheduled FlexVol snapshot copies

NetApp All-Flash FAS has emerged as the first storage array to successfully complete validation testing with Horizon View 6 with VVols.

The VADP APIs backup vendors use are fully supported on VVOLs therefore backup software using VADP should be unaffected.

For a detailed breakdown of vSphere product and feature interoperability with VVOLs click here

Get hands on with VVOLs on FAS

If you would like to gain a detailed understanding of how the technology works we have created, in conjunction with VMware and NetApp, a series of demo café events – to find-out more click here.

VVOLs is certainly interesting technology and I am sure what we have today is only the beginning of the journey and it is going to be interesting to see how it develops over the coming years – we know for sure that NetApp will be making improvements to cDOT to enable things like replication to be set at a VVOL level.

What do you think – is VVOLs as game changing as VMware thinks?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are Partners with NetApp.

it_user3396Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services

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Jun 3, 2015

Saluting Mark:>)

Henry

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

May 10, 2015

We have flash caching, but it would be nice if we could move data between flash, SAS and SATA drives.

As we move into the world of Software-Defined Storage it “sticks out like a sore thumb” when an array vendor only makes new software releases available on their next generation hardware. The problem with this is that even if you purchase at the very beginning of the life cycle of a product, at best you will get one round of feature enhancements, after that all software development is focused on the next generation product. This often even includes support for new drive types – again they are only supported on the latest generation hardware.

This problem is very evident when it comes to support for VMware Virtual Volumes – any array vendor that will be releasing new hardware next year is unlikely to provide support for Virtual Volumes on their currently shipping product. My view is that the industry cannot continue like this and instead they need to make sure new microcode versions and drive technologies are supported on the current shipping product and at least the previous generation – without this there is a real danger that your new storage array becomes obsolete shortly after purchase.

The good news for NetApp customers is that Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) meets my criteria above, so the recently announced version 8.3 will not only work on 2014 generation hardware (2500 and 8000 series), but previous generations as wells.

So what’s 8.3 all about?

Major features

MetroCluster support – to enable continuous availability
SnapMirror to Tape (SMTape) – simplifies and speeds up backup to tape
Virtual Volumes support – enables native storage of VMDKs (requires vSphere 6)

Efficiency enhancements

Combined SnapMirror and SnapVault – so that you only need to send the data once, rather than having separate SnapMirror and SnapVault copies
SnapMirror and SnapVault Compression – traffic can now be optionally compressed to reduce bandwidth requirements
Root Drive and Flash Pool Partitioning – no longer requires Root Vols and Flash Pool drives to be dedicated to a single node therefore provides better capacity utilisation
Flash Pool enhancements – caches overwrites larger than 16K and compressed blocks, increases the usable capacity, and supports much larger pool sizes (up to 4x)
Inline zero write detection and elimination – so host disk zeroing activity does not consume I/O or capacity
Significant performance improvements – further multi-core, SSD random read, CIFS, replication and cloning optimisations

Migration and Administration Tools

7-Mode Transition Tool – now supports SAN as well as NAS
Foreign LUN Import (Offline) – to simplify 3rd party (EMC, HDS, HP) SAN data migration
LUN migration – whereas previously an entire volume could be non-distributively moved around the cluster it can now also be performed at the LUN level
Disaster Recovery fail-over – to a specific point-in-time snapshot copy at the DR site for recovery from mirrored corruption
Automated Non-disruptive Upgrade – requires just 3 commands to upgrade an entire cluster

8.3 is a milestone release for NetApp as it is the end of development for 7-Mode as 8.3 only includes the cDOT build. Overall I think NetApp are finally in a good place with cDOT and they can now put the 7-Mode platform behind them and focus on innovating.

So what would we like to see in the next version of cDOT?

SnapLock (for retention and compliance) – the last remaining major feature to be ported over from 7-Mode
Erasure coding – to enable rapid drive rebuilds
Sharing of drives across controllers – we are already starting to see this with the new drive and Flash Pools partitioning features
Detaching of the drives from the controllers – so that the failure of an HA pair within a cluster does not result in downtime
Controller based Flash modules – in place of Root Vol drives
Advanced QoS – to enable setting of Service Level Objectives rather than just limits
Automated Tiering – we have flash caching, but it would be nice if we could move data between flash, SAS and SATA drives
Integrated file archiving – to move older files to secondary storage or the cloud
Encryption – provided by the controllers rather than drives
MetroCluster granular fail over – so volumes or even Virtual Volumes can be “moved” between sites
MetroCluster IP replication – either using FCIP bridges or native IP connectivity
MetroCluster Active/Active – so volumes/LUNs can be active on both sides of the cluster

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are Partners with NetApp.