NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

It's probably the performance trending and the analytics that we have on that. We didn't have good insight into what our systems were doing until we had that product.

We also started installing the anomaly piece of that, so that's neat to see, and source. We're still just learning about that.

The benefits are just allowing us to get a better view of our environment, because today we just don't know what's happening. I know it's going to help us change our services that we offer today. Now, we're going to be able to set up different tiers and service levels based on our actual usage.

It has a lot already. But if they would just continue the platform support for other vendors besides NetApp on the OCI part. Just to get more of our storage vendors involved.

The UI is friendly. But I think we'd like to see more graphics on it, more graphical reports for management and the like, so we don't have to actually put stuff together. Anything we can pre-generate or that is canned is a lot better.

Like I said, we're still learning about it. I don't know if there are any features that they can improve right now that I know about.

Six months.

So far, it's been stable. No issues whatsoever. Knocking on wood we won't have any.

It scales to our environment, so I would say it's fine.

I think we have used the technical support. I haven't personally, but I know the guy that's setting it up has. We love it. They're very responsive and they follow up. We get the results we need. They're knowledgeable.

We've had lots of outages before. Like I said, they came back in and they followed up, gave us the right technical stuff. A lot of times, they'll do it proactively. There will be a bug out there and we won't have hit it yet, but then they'll tell us about it beforehand, so we can proactively fix it before it happens.

No. Before, we were just using the native tools on ONTAP. We needed to have a way to look at our performance statistics.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

In terms of upgrades, when I was doing it a long time ago, it was straightforward.

We're in the Finance field. But I wouldn't say this solution is uniquely valuable to finance. It's just good for all the storage environment.

The ability to get reports out, to see what OCI is doing for us, and we can see what our capacity is. We can also see performance reports.

So capacity and performance are two of the big things we use it for.

We're in the telecommunications industry and we're an actual service provider as well. I work in the service providing part . We have all of these external customers that have their pay-for-storage on our storage arrays. We're able to see through annotation how much each of those customers is using and we can use it for billing purposes.

It's given us a better concept of what we've got out there and where our hurt points are, where we need some more work in the different areas, where we might need to move volumes around to get better performance, and also definitely to see where that capacity is, see if we need to add more storage.

We would like to see the ability to produce more complex reports without having to go to Professional Services.

About two years.

Very stable.

Very scalable. We've recently just got the two servers for data warehouse and collection and we've haven't even hit capacity on them yet.

We've used it extensively. They're awesome, very good.

Fairly straightforward, but after that, it's very complex to use and to learn and understand.

It's a good, single place to go to see the storage performance on all of our clusters.

It's able to simplify looking at performance on all of our clusters, all of the nodes, all the volumes, in one place, without having to log into each individual storage array and look at it.

Right now it monitors our entire datacenter, all the different Pure Storage as well as NetApp. It does multiple vendors. Its only drawbacks are it's expensive and the upgrades are somewhat difficult.

It would be better if they could simplify the upgrade process. It's long and tedious. You have to be careful, or you could shoot yourself in the foot.

We've had it for about three or four years and it's very stable, no issues.

You license it for whatever you need. It can scale out whatever you need to monitor.

We've added additional licensing to it. It's licensed by the amount of storage that you use, so we've purchased additional licensing.

It's very good. The guys are sharp, they know the product very well and get back with you in a quick amount of time.

We've had no issues whatsoever with escalating.

It was complex, and that's why we brought in Professional Services to get it up and running for us.

The product is very involved. There are a number of different modules so it takes a little bit of a learning curve to get up to speed on it.

Primarily we use it for chargeback, but we also get some performance out of it as well.

When selecting a vendor to work with the most important criteria for us are

• dependability
• honesty
• good integrity
• reliability.

I'd say go for it. OCI is a good product if you can afford it.

The most valuable feature of OCI is the ability to correlate a lot of different data sources together. It's very difficult to get a picture from just looking at the storage view. The fact that it allows you pull in your VMware information and the like, and see it all together, helps when you have an incident. You can correlate all that data together, and that's very valuable.

It's improved the organization in that, when people complained about an issue in the past, we had to go to all these different systems to look at the performance data; going into vSphere, going into SolarWinds. This ties it all together in one place so that we can get to the root of the problem more quickly. That makes the business happy because then we're not churning on trying to figure out what caused their performance problem.

I think there's still a piece of it that's external, the Java interface. I think that's all starting to get integrated into the whole HTML5, and once it's all integrated together, I think that's probably going to be better. I'm looking forward to that.

I think one of the weaknesses is pulling in systems outside of virtual environments, of physical hosts, and the like. I think it's something they're working on from what I've heard. But being able to look at some other things outside of what we typically monitor - we have some physical AIX environments. They can look into it a little bit but there's more that I can see being done in some of those outside-systems for virtualization. For virtualization and NetApp it's great, but for pulling in other sources where we're using NetApp storage, we're looking to get a little bit more data out of it.

I think in the most current versions it's been improved considerably. We did have some hiccups in some of the earlier versions with data collection getting missed sometimes, but I think it's definitely been improving over time and getting better and better.

With the latest version of OCI which we just installed, we haven't been seeing any of that anymore, we're not seeing any data collection issues, so it's been much, much better. The experience is better, the UI is getting better, it's all slowly getting better.

I don't know if I can say too much about that. We have a very specific size, we're medium size. I can't see us scaling up very fast, but from what I've seen, it seems like it should be able to.

I haven't personally used tech support for OCI but I have colleagues who have. I don't think they have any complaints about it.

We had used some solutions in the past, SolarWinds, just looking at vSphere monitoring, and we didn't have any one solution that pulled it all together. While SolarWinds is pretty good, the polling intervals are quite long, so if you want to get to a real fine-grained time period, where you want to look at a problem and have all these different systems, we really need something that would have like BI capabilities to get more data into it.

I think it was pretty straightforward. I think it was very quick to pull in data sources from all the different things that we monitor. I don't remember having any hiccups or trouble getting all the data in and getting it set up.

We were looking at - I believe it's now Brocade - but it was Riverbed that had a solution, and that had some dynamic performance monitoring. But I think OCI probably just made sense because we're using NetApp and vSphere most heavily, and it seemed to tie into it the best, of everything that we looked at.

When we select a vendor, we look for somebody who is innovating in whatever their marketplace is, and that has a good forward thinking strategy. Somebody who is leveraging good interface technologies, because interface is super important when you're just trying to get in and get something quick; somebody who is using HTML5 and that has fast response time, that's really important to us.

I gave it an eight out of 10 for some of the reasons I said before. The interface isn't fully tied together, there's still some pieces that are outside of the web interface. But, with all the other improvements, I can't complain too much about the actual functionality, setting up dashboards and looking at the performance data.

I would just day be aware of everything that you're looking to monitor, to see if it makes sense to use it. If you have a lot of systems that don't fit into the OCI infrastructure, then you might want to look around a little bit more. But if you're using NetApp specifically, and you're looking at a lot of the technologies that integrate closely with OCI, I think it's a good fit. But really, the best thing to do is to look at something that fits the technology that you have.

It is the reporting functionality. We haven't gone to the extent where we are using the anomaly detection, but from a reporting perspective and single-pane-of-glass perspective, to look at our heterogeneous infrastructure, it is doing a great job.

Right now, it's our single pane of glass to monitor our entire infrastructure. It is the first point of troubleshooting where we go to see any anomaly, or for troubleshooting any performance issue. It's doing a good job so far. We're happy.

With a single pane of glass to look at, regarding any outage or any disconnect or regarding any TDP issues in our vSphere environment, we can go back and look at the data warehouse and see any changes in the infrastructure; like a port going offline or a port flapping. That's something that we haven't had the flexibility to do before, so that's the number one addition to our infrastructure.

It's the interop matrix. And if there was a chance to orchestrate on a heterogeneous structure using OCI, that would be a great start; or at least a plugin to each one of them, that would be a great start too.

Also, right now we don't have any management functionality using OCI. It's all about monitoring.

We have floor automation but I don't think we can include heterogeneous components into that. If there was a solution or plugin on OCI which could give us that functionality, where we could manage heterogeneous data sources, that would be great.

We had some issues when we upgraded OCI. Right now we are having an issue where the reporting functionality is looking at the numbers of other vendors in a different perspective, and we are having some issues with interpreting them. So our usable, on-the-storage array is different from what OCI is reporting to us.

We are an 18 to 20 petabyte environment. So far we haven't hit any issues where scalability was a issue.

We grew from 14 petabytes to 20 petabytes as of now. Maybe it's because of our relation with NetApp, we haven't had an issue with that so far.

We're happy so far. Whenever we are dealing with NetApp products, we have really good success. But when we are talking about other vendors like ENT or UCS - even now, UCS isn't supported on the interop matrix. That would be something which would look forward to be because we are a highly converged infrastructure. We have like 60 to 70% of our infrastructure on UCS so we thought that it being complaint in our OCI data sources - we're kind of missing a major chunk of our infrastructure.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for us are support and its foothold in the market. If you're talking about storage arrays, it's the federation and the high availability components. Recently we had some mishaps where we had outages. So, high availability of the array is a big decision-maker for us.

I gave it a six out of 10, not because the company is doing anything bad but taking simplicity into consideration, it's not simple. OCI works such that you get out of it what you invest in it. So if you know what to make out of OCI, you can get really good reports and really good insight into your infrastructure. But it's not that simple. It needs to be simple, more intuitive.

We have had great success with OCI from the reporting perspective, but when it comes to other heterogeneous data sources, there might be some disconnects. So we need to look at both OCI and the vendor-specific tools to get the actual numbers and get some understanding of it.

The ability to have insight into how our systems are being used.

The benefit is that it is not just the storage itself. It also covers our switches. It is multi-vendor, therefore we are not just talking about NetApp. We also have the ability to report on VMs, which is pretty important nowadays, because almost all our systems are VMs.

The ability to better manage the graphs and the dashboards: Resizing them, positioning them, and the ability to publish them outside of OCI to websites or SharePoint.

Sold differently, the user interface (UI) would be easier. At times, it seems a little bit slow. We find when it draws data that there is a lag.

The reporting tool is very cumbersome, and it is difficult to create reports out of it. That is the most complicated part of the tool and how to use it.

I have been using it for six months.

We suffer a little bit from stability. At each batching cycle, we find some services that needs to be restarted. It has its moments. Even restarting the services does not help with the restart. I think there is work to do there to improve it.

It is fairly scalable. We have not hit the limits yet, but we believe that it will be fairly easy to scale.

We have used the tech support. Unfortunately, every time we try to get a technician specialized in the solution, it seems like we always go to the wrong department or wrong area. There needs to be improvement to direct our calls to the right place, so we can talk to the right person.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was fairly complex. Due to what this tool is capable of, I think that is expected.

It is a great tool.

It's not vendor lock-in so I can collect data from different vendors, which is important for us. We are collecting data from Brocade, HP, NetApp, and EMC.

It gives us a better view of into what is happening with the environment, like performance issues or predicting problems. This is the most important part for us.

We can predict when storage will be out of space, so we can start buying before something bad happens.

It would be helpful if it were easier to create queries. It's not very intuitive.

We're still implementing so it's not in production yet; so two months only.

I don't know yet. We're still testing. For now, it's stable. No crashes.

It's just software, it's not a hardware, so I don't see that there will be problems in the future with scalability.

We haven't used technical support yet. We're still implementing so we haven't understood the architecture.

No, this is the first one. We needed to get a better view of our environment. Now we have a tube for collecting data and showing the manager the results.

We had NetApp on in our environment so we know it.

It was complex. It's new for us so there are a lot of requirements that we haven't had yet in other products, especially all these servers that we need to set for this application to run. That is not something that we usually do.

We need to prepare our environment for this product.

Our industry is healthcare but I think this product is valuable for everyone. I don't think it's uniquely valuable to our industry.

I like the performance side the most. When we have an issue going on currently in the environment, the graphing of all the data helps pinpoint where the issue might be.

For the reporting side, the data warehouse side, if you're good with that, it can get really detailed reports that are good for showing people, at any level of the company. For the performance side, obviously it's good for troubleshooting.

I'd say for the cDOT side of it, yes. We had a solution for 7-mode, but for cDOT we didn't really have anything yet, so it helped by making sure that our NetApp source is staying healthy and our implementations are working.

They've already got better stuff coming out. I don't know what else I could need, honestly. Before, they had the fiber channel for switches on there; I think they are already coming out with ethernet, the other boards. That was what I wanted and they're already working on it.

One thing they could improve is making the data warehouse side easier to use.

A little over a year.

It's very stable once you get it into place. There were originally some issues; NetApp was very helpful in working through them, getting patches, and it's pretty stable now.

In terms of those issues, It wouldn't connect to some of the NetApps sometimes, so we would have incomplete data on certain NetApps because there were bugs with certain ONTAP versions. But, they will come out with patches if you need them.

You can add as many NetApps in there that you need to, I think. As many NetApps that you can put in there, even EMCs. We have our EMCs in there, SAN switches, and even VMware. So it's definitely scalable.

They were really helpful, they helped to troubleshoot the issue and to get as quick a fix as we could.

We initially invested in OCI to improve our reporting in our environment because we wanted to be able to predict purchases in the future. So that was what the tool seemed to be good for.

We chose NetApp because we have something like 50 NetApps, so it seemed like the right way to go.

I felt like it was complex. They said it was simple but, they have a guy who will come out and help you through the process. He gave me a slight tutorial. Like I said, the data warehouse side is a lot more complex. So it had more of a learning curve, versus the performance side, which is pretty straightforward once you learn everything.

Regarding upgrades, the first one was complex, I think because we didn't have a lot of space on the server. But the backup wasn't working, so they wanted to back it up and then you restore from the backup to the new version. But the last one we did was very easy. So it's getting better.

We do web.com, basically web hosting. I don't think this product is uniquely valuable in our industry. I think its pretty much good for anyone that has a NetApp, if you want the performance, or however you're doing it. It helps us maintain up-time for our customers, such as websites; that's why it helps there.