NetApp FAS Series Reviews

It changed the way we do Disaster Recovery (DR) around NetApp replication.

• Cluster mode needs to be more ubiquitous.
• The process for going to cluster mode is expensive.

Unexpected costs and some systems were not compatible with cluster mode.

Yes, we encountered stability issues with the LDAP integration and with user logins on the web front-end.

Nope.

The customer service is awesome.

The technical support is great. The partner company (Bytes) has a close relationship with us.

The initial setup was straightforward, though there were a lot of hidden costs going to cluster mode and the amount of usable data was way lower than expected.

We used a vendor team, and they were excellent.

EMC.

Double up on the amount of storage that you expect to buy.

NetApp, as a design group, builds solutions that are reliable. Other companies don’t have the fortitude of NetApp. They have a very strong commitment to the multimedia industry, for example.

Other products lose performance over time, but NetApp OS is speed-optimized.

NetApp is also a very stable company that offers various storage options at the highest level of build and reliability. Products will be supported for the duration of a customer’s needs.

With NetApp’s dedication to the market, customers aren’t dealing with a fly-by-night organization. The company will follow through with support which, with FAS, is for multiple petabytes of data. For example, in the government and medical sectors, they are well provided-for.

My ability as a VAR is solely connected to NetApp, my value is solely connected to the commitment of NetApp. In any particular vertical, NetApp is technically superior, price conscious, and superior at price-for-performance.

They provide a lot of expertise on marketing and technical teams, and helps make our customers look good.

There’s always areas for improvement. For example, it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer.

My primary selling point is stability of the solution. It provides ongoing performance, which is proven to have no degradation.

Scalability depends on how it’s ordered, which is the job of an integrator and dependent on the customer's needs.

I work with their technical team, but not on a day-to-day basis. The teams I do work with are great, but there are so many of them it’s sometimes difficult to find correct teams.

It’s complex because there so many areas where you can make a mistake. For example, the site survey may not have enough power and something as simple as that can ruin an installation.

It loses points because of the price, but it can’t be everything to everybody.

Make sure you buy the product that’s right for you. If it's competitive to NetApp FAS, great, but just know both products before making a decision and do a point-by-point comparison.

• Multi Protocol
• Scalability
• Homogeneous hardware

There are various modes and protocols you can use at the same time. For customers who use NetApp 7-Mode, I would rate Data ONTAP 8/10 and for Clustered Mode 7/10.

• Centralization of protocols within the same appliance
• Software defined storage
• Easy management
• Scalability
• Support

Migration from 7-Mode to Clustered Data ONTAP need improvement. It seems NetApp didn't know how to solve the main problem of migrating data from an old OS (7-Mode ) to Clustered.

I've been using it for nine years, both using and implementing NetApp FAS series.

Deploying NetApp appliances is hard work. A lot of experience is required, mainly when your project runs a MetroCluster solution.

There's an issue when you have a mix of a low-spinning disk (SATA 3TB ) and multi-protocol access (NFS, CIFS and FCP, and iSCSI). Data ONTAP performance with WAFL goes down on mid-range solutions with multi-protocol access.

We've never had an issue with Clustered Data ONTAP, but we did with 7-Mode solutions and large amounts of data in the PB range.

They have really good customer service.

They have a good level of technical support when you escalate cases.

I've used EMC solutions in different companies.

The initial setup was complex and you need experience.

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.

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.

SyncMirror (for legacy to new platform migration, prior to CDOT availability), SnapManager Suite (for application aware data protection features, namely Oracle and Microsoft), FlashCache & FlashPools (for accelerating workloads, volumes and/or entire aggregates).

A customer was running legacy FAS3140's, 5+ years old, and began deploying VDI clients on their 10GbE network. Their storage became a bottleneck and seamlessly migrated to FAS8020's w/ FlashCache and all performance concerns have been removed, and users have complimented the performance improvement of their desktops!

I'm a VAR and have been recommending FAS for 4+ years

None

None

None

Very high. Local field support came onsite to the customer not to sell anything, but to introduce the support system at NetApp, and how everything works under the covers.

Not much was needed for this particular client; however, tech support when needed has been very responsive and knowledgeable.

No

Client handled, but very straightforward.

Long time NetApp customer, very happy with the solution.

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.