NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

It gives us the ability to report on all our storage environment. It gives us a way to monitor, visualize, and pinpoint problems.

We can focus on and project usage growth. We can also monitor and measure performance of all the stores. We can compare, use it for capacity planning, forecasting, present usage.

We can also compare performance over several years. Compare different products from different vendors and see how they perform against each other. There are many things that you can do with it.

It gives us a lot of data that, years ago, we didn't have. We can present that in order to prepare, when we're going to buy new equipment. We know, when we create a lifecycle, how long it's going to last, the current equipment, and what are we going to replace it with.

We use it for troubleshooting and to identify the root cause of problems. We also use it for proof of concept and comparisons.

We're in telecommunications and media. I would say OCI is uniquely valuable to us because it give us the data and it provides a more visual a way of evaluating our current storage environment.

I would like to see more performance features on the flash storage and also on the backup appliances.

Also the ability to analyze NAS, NFS and CIFS protocols and cloud protocols.

At least four years.

It is stable. It is mature. I have had issues, but I have resolved most of them myself.

On the reporting piece, sometimes I get a corruption in the database, but since we protect it and back it up constantly, we can always go back to before the damage is done.

I have upgraded, maybe four times, different versions. The very first upgrade was not that easy to do because we had an old version and then it required being in a different version to upgrade automatically. But after we did that first one, they've been easy.

Tech support is real good.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because of the features that it lacks and the stability, although that is getting better. It's still an eight but it's getting better.

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'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.

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.

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.

Scalability: If you're from a large enterprise, it's easy for us to go into customer environments and pull the data out. It's very security-friendly. There's also the reporting suite, and the extensibility of that is fantastic. As well as we can replicate charge reports, so when you go from account to account it's always the same data. You're not looking at form A here, and form B there. We can actually have a standard set of reports globally.

The one thing that NetApp has done a very good job of is keeping up with the current technology out there, not just with what they're doing, but with what the industry is doing. When we have had to deploy something very quickly, this was several years ago, EMC released a new product, and we were the first people to have a functioning chargeback report in the industry, because they actually brought developers in, wrote the code, and allowed us to produce it. This ended being in the product.

Definitely, the single pane of glass for capacity management. Every customer has multiple vendors of storage, which allows us to bring those into a single report, deliver those, not just to engineers, but also to the operations level and business owners of those organizations as well, so they can make sound business and financial decisions.

It's uniquely valuable, because it's really at the top of its class. Everybody else who's doing storage, monitoring, and reporting, they don't have a standard base for doing this. They customize it for every vendor who's out there, whereas the NetApp approach was to build a base and a solid foundation, so regardless of what vendor you actually bring in, or new data source you add, it's always the same information. Therefore, you really can have a homogenous view.

The UI: They have been growing and changing. There's been some growing pains with that, but they are moving into the new HTML5 interface, which is fantastic. They are hitting on all the right points, but it's never going to be a perfect because there's always going to be something new, which means there's always going to be something that has to be improved.

About seven years.

It's very stable, but it's software and software breaks. That's just how it is. Overall though, we generally do not have issues with the software itself. It's usually some underlying infrastructure issue that causes an outage.

The architecture allows us to put the LAUs and roll them into a single reporting engine, either regionally and/or globally. Even though we have to add compute to monitor more storage, we don't have to go to different places to get that data, it all comes from a single point.

They're great. Fantastic. We generally deal with the same people, so that tells me that the way they manage the teams that people enjoy being there, and they stay. Also, they train their individuals, because when they look at the different data sources, the technology, they understand it. When they get into the product, they are very knowledgeable.

The instrumentation wasn't there, and that's what we deployed it for: storage, instrumentation, reporting, then accurate chargeback.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.