NetApp FAS Series Reviews

NetApp helps streamline our internal operations. I come from a background as a VMware administrator. For me, SnapCenter alone is a great product for when something goes wrong with a virtual machine, even though we have a separate data protection solution besides that. The speed at which you can recover from when it is all snapshot-based is good. You do not have to wait for copies across the network. It is a real game changer in a situation where we tried to do an upgrade but that did not go well and now that needs to be reverted back to where we were an hour ago. Usually, in 30 seconds, we get that VM back up and running. It makes the recovery quick. Even though we have another solution, which is also pretty fast, being able to take advantage of those logical operations inside the array is a real game-changer performance. The data reduction that we get is fantastic because some of our applications have so many copies of different versions as they are going through different levels of testing and development. Being able to deduplicate against each other saves a lot of the footprint.

The All Flash series in general has delivered the most value to our organization. That took care of the daily performance issues that we had. When I started with the company, there would be overhead announcements on the PA that some of our internal systems were running slow and asked people to stop using them for a little bit while they caught up. All of those went away overnight when we switched to the All Flash FAS solution. There has not been any performance issue with storage so far. It has been eight years. Our account exec says that if we go to BlueXP or Cloud Insights, we can look at all the performance data. I never go ahead and look at it because our latency is under a millisecond all the time, so all of our applications are happy. Our developers are happy. Our internal customers are happy. I do not spend a lot of time worrying about performance anymore because we just have it.

I would rate this technology a solid eight out of ten. I only have one criticism, which I have also shared with my account exec in the past, but it is not a strong criticism. I understood 7-mode very well back in the day. It was a pretty simple concept. When you are making a leap from there to cluster data ONTAP, there are so many more interfaces, and I have so much more going on in what I do in my job. It is like I do not have quite the mental map in my head of how the whole system works as I used to. Fortunately, we have a great partner we work with. They have helped us for over a decade. They are now CDW, but they used to be Sirius previously. They have a couple of great resources with whom we have worked for a long time. They have helped build our environment over the years, and they are always happy to answer our call if we call them. So, for me, that counterbalances some of that complexity. I do not understand it at the level that I would like to because I do not have the time to dig into and understand all the lifts versus the physical interfaces versus all of the networking that goes on in there. However, I can always call our partner that we work with, or even text them. They will answer my call even if it is eight o'clock on a Friday night and help us out. It is not that the solution does not work for us. It is just that I used to know how 7-mode works so much better just because it was simpler, but I understand that some of that complexity comes as a result of the flexibility and the power and the cluster data ONTAP unlocks. We can have multiple SVMs and the ability to have all these different identities and tenants contained inside of one platform, which we could not do with the 7-mode previously.

Because of the All Flash technology, we do not have any performance issues. Another benefit that we are seeing is the reduction in footprint when we replace the old spinning disk system. It was a rack and a half of a disk. The A700 that we are about to load in there is going to be 5U or 8U. It is really small. Especially, at the Colo facility where our DR site is, we pay by the rack. That saves us money every month on a reduced footprint. I cannot say how much money it saves, but I know it also saves us the power bill. Flash is so much more energy efficient. We do not have that cooling load and power load, and then, we obviously have the performance. Performance is not a concern that we have anymore.

A couple of years ago, we decided to make an investment in hardening. It is a little bit stronger against ransomware. We made the commitment to purchase an additional FAS 8300, and we are using SnapLock technology to take daily snapshots of our environment and send them over to that separate FAS 8300, which is in a separate authentication domain using the Cyber Vault concept. All immutable snapshots are over there. We have hardened our primary arrays too with MFA technology and everything else. If we are ever attacked or a victim of a ransomware attack for some reason, we at least have another copy locked away immediately that goes back several months in that other environment. Even if we lose some short-term data, we will still have more long-term copies of our data to go back to. That was another big chunk of spending for an array that does not do anything in terms of production. It just sits there. We hope we never need it, but at the same time, it is nice having that peace of mind that we have done the immutable technology in the NetApp's technologies, and we have done immutable technology inside our Cohesity backup product as well. We have two levels of immutable copies of our data, so we are fairly confident that we will be able to recover something.

It gives us the performance we need and the reliability we need to make sure that our systems have the uptime that our internal customers demand. It has been a very reliable solution for us. Especially since we have moved to the All Flash series, we have not had a single performance-related issue.

NetApp has greatly increased our ability to offer storage and data throughput for jobs and services we provide to our customers, enabling them to further enhance their development and modeling work.

Switching to NetApp allowed us to grow the ESXi environment we use as a backbone, increasing storage, throughput, and speed. We could also increase the number of virtual machines we could host, greatly increasing the productivity and speed at which customers develop and manage the software that they create.

We could streamline our operations by adding controllers to increase the capacity we could use. Our environment is isolated, so utilizing some of NetApp's tools allowed us to better manage the clusters, the management host, and the additional requirements for the system's inputs and outputs.

The most significant outcome for us has been growth. We can get the storage off the server, increasing our virtualization and the number of file systems we can offer our customers. There was a time when we had one site that would order 30 different servers to complete the mission. With the new setup, I can do the same with four servers and a single node.

One pain point that drove us to adopt NetApp was a reduction in staff. My team originally had four people to support 30 sites and 600 customers on average.  Now we're down to me, my partner, and a contractor. NetApp has helped us grow and keep pace with the requirements. 

We've been tasked to develop an AI base incorporated with the bigger company Okay. They want us to extend down and expand our site to 40 additional sites and company subsites. The company wants to look into developing that through 2024 and beyond. 

We expect to expand greatly. I have to be careful with our spending, so it's a little hard to get things approved because of how the company is, but this is the task we've been given, and the number of networks that we support will require us to increase our NetApp systems across multiple networks.

We hope to create a cloud simulation of what's out there so the technicians know that the cloud is somebody else's computer. However, we need to develop that so our end users don't confuse what they perceive as the cloud with what we are actually providing to them.

Our investments will focus on cyber security and data storage because the amount of information they need to store in that repository is tremendous. We also need to simulate what's out there regarding Zero Trust and duplicate what the broader company is doing on a smaller, isolated scale. 

For innovation, we expect to present to company leaders what things could look like for other mission providers and all the additional offsets they have in other environments. We must present a way forward for them to move in future developments and outlines of how they place the equipment and provide the equipment to their outside entities.

We had the 840 model, but it became outdated, so we brought in some fast 2750s, and we plan to add some 250s to step up with technology. The ONTAP tools make managing VMware easier.

We look forward to using NetApp's zero-trust technology. We've been looking into new ways to develop it, and we've got a hybrid FlexPod situation because we do not use Cisco UCS servers. However, we still use that capability due to security requirements that are tied to Cisco. It allows us to address the zero-trust architecture as we develop it for our site.

We use it for VMware ESXi, CEFS for shared user storage, and we use it for backup of all of these.

NetApp significantly improved our data management. The deduplication and compression give us more possibilities. We have some disk databases, and this model gives us the ability to improve disk space utilization.

NetApp has allowed us to get all of our storage onto one platform across various facilities, and it's eased the management of that storage.

It's enabled us to allow admins across the IT organization to more easily manage their own subset of data within our organization.

There are many different use cases, but the main use case for NetApp, as I know it, is NAS. It is among the top contenders when it comes to providing a robust solution for establishing a connection between applications and storage. NetApp is probably first or second in this field.

It provides easy integration between applications and storage. It helps implement storage provisioning services and protection services and automate everything from the application to the storage. That is the best outcome for the customers.

NetApp has everything when it comes to regulations, compliance, and security. When it comes to AI, things are not that simple, but AI can help a lot with preventive maintenance and anticipation of any threats.

We have a variety of things. We have, like, user home drives. We have just a lot of human-managed unstructured data. We also have a data store for an AWS system, which is an automated workflow system. We store millions, if not actually billions of images. We've got stuff all over the place, but we also host storage for Linux and Unix servers that have NFS mounts for multiple applications. So it's a hodgepodge of a lot of different things.

A lot of it is just the ability to dedupe the data and compress the data because we had some users that are trying to move out into the cloud, into AWS and Azure, and they're starting to realize that their data footprint out there, say in S3, for example, is much greater because it doesn't have the native ability to compress and dedupe data like NetApp does. NetApp is very efficient. For the most part, we love NetApp.

We are a big unstructured file data storage company. We use NetApp solutions like AFF for our unstructured data. NetApp is primarily for provisioning storage and maintaining unstructured data.

We love NetApp. We haven't had any significant issues, and it's a great technology. They are going in the right direction. NetApp has helped us serve data to customers through NetApp. We host multiple applications. One of them is next-generation sequencing (NGS), which is one of the critical operating platforms or applications, and NetApp has been instrumental in this.

The NetApp solution has streamlined our operations, incredibly improving the time it takes to deliver to businesses. Their cloud offerings are great. You can spin up the NetApp instance within a few minutes, reducing the total time it takes to offer service to the customer.

We plan to expand usage in the future. Our renewals are coming up next year, so we hope we'll have the greatest systems installed at our site. Our future investments will prioritize data storage, optimization, and cybersecurity. 

We are not doing AI now, but we look forward to it. From the ransomware perspective, it's excellent that NetApp offers a guarantee when you sign up for that feature.

We use the solution for multipurpose VMs.

The replication feature protects us from data loss.