NetApp ONTAP Reviews

My use case for the solution includes both business and personal aspects. Personally, I run a lot of file and storage activities at home, managing database operations, and I prefer using NetApp as my backend storage to store data in the cloud instead of relying on third parties storage. 

For the business case at my company, we utilize it effectively, and I support it myself by troubleshooting NetApp issues. In our organization, we mostly use NetApp ONTAP. We also use some features that come with NetApp, such as Cloud Insights and Systems Manager.

NetApp ONTAP has addressed key challenges for our business, especially because our cloud organization provides technology for customers. Our clients have requested multi-protocol support over the last few years. Before NetApp ONTAP, we had services that only supported a single protocol. Now, we have a product that allows customers to launch a single service usable by multiple and different clients, rather than needing to deploy two different products. That's the main game changer for us.

NetApp ONTAP has significantly improved our customer satisfaction and enabled faster service delivery at my organization. It makes it easier to launch and scale for customers. It performs better than other storage systems we've had before, and it supports multiple protocols. Big enterprise customers want storage systems that accommodate various client machines, including Linux, Windows, or Mac. It helps ensure that users can access the same backend effortlessly. Previous services were limited to a particular technology focus, but with NetApp ONTAP, this is no longer an issue, leading to a big win for us.

In choosing NetApp over other vendors, the primary reason was its accessibility and integration capabilities. It works well across various machines, whether they are Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or different types of servers. The hybrid usage is also beneficial for backups and disaster recovery, whether on-premises or in the cloud. I utilize the SnapMirror feature for disaster recovery, and its multi-availability zone support allows customers to launch in different zones to maintain access to their data even if one goes down.

When considering the evolving cybersecurity landscape and the increase in AI, NetApp ONTAP stands out with its own security features. It offers SnapLock for extra security and integration with Active Directory for user authentication. It helps manage secure access for customers in their organization while ensuring that users can authenticate using their username and password. We have never encountered any security issues because NetApp ONTAP includes security defenses built into the service, allowing end users to secure their data effectively.

NetApp ONTAP has absolutely been a game changer for our organization. We support and use different storage services, but this is the first time we have a service and storage that supports multiple protocols, such as SMB, NFS and iSCSI. It has been very helpful, especially for big enterprise customers that want to use these protocol services. It has been a big game changer for us and a big boost over the last few years.

The best features of NetApp ONTAP that I appreciate include its security and compliance aspects. It supports Active Directory for access authentication, requiring users to be domain members authenticated by the domain administrator. There is also antivirus integration for added protection. NetApp ONTAP complies with numerous certifications, such as PCI and HIPAA, which are critical in our industry.

NetApp ONTAP supports different protocols and gives very good performance. It scales very well and can integrate with different client machines. It also works well for backup and disaster recovery.

They can make it more accessible to individuals beyond just enterprises. Many everyday users gravitate towards storage solutions such as Google Drive or OneNote, so making NetApp services more user-friendly for everyone would be beneficial.

They could focus on making it more user-friendly. Currently, many users need a certain level of NetApp knowledge to operate it effectively, often relying on command-line interfaces that demand IT or technology skills. While there is a GUI available through Systems Manager, a lot of management still occurs at the command line, so enhancing the GUI for better usability could be a key focus area.

For our next technology investments, I believe that the AI aspect will be significant. Given the current landscape, many companies are investing in artificial intelligence, and we aim to do the same. I envision having AI or some form of service integrated with our NetApp ONTAP solution in the coming months or years to facilitate easier data searches for end users.

I've been using NetApp ONTAP for three years. When we launched it in my organization, I started supporting it.

There's always room for improvement for every service. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It scales very well for me. I always use it, and I've enjoyed using it. It has very low latency. It gives the maximum throughput possible. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability.

We have 500 to 1,000 users. Our clients are small, medium, and enterprise businesses.

My experiences with NetApp's support team have always been very positive. Their engineers know their stuff and perform well, so I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

When it comes to return on investment and time savings, personally, I've saved a significant amount of time because of NetApp's multi-protocol support. I don't need to set up different services for Linux and Windows. Considering this, I would give it a nine out of ten.

The price could be a little bit cheaper, but you get what you pay for. I would rate it an eight out of ten for pricing because it reflects the quality of the service offered.

We work directly with NetApp ourselves to expand and add different features. There are a lot of features that we add on top of NetApp based on our customers' requests. We talk to our customers and ask them what else they would like to see. If it is a feature demanded by multiple customers, we work with NetApp to see if such a feature can be added to the service itself.

Overall, I rate NetApp ONTAP a nine out of ten. To elevate the solution to a ten, I believe adding AI integration would be crucial.

We're a software development firm, so we use it internally. We have two NetApp ONTAP systems at the office, and we have a DR site where we replicate everything. For client purposes, we are using CVO in the cloud to host our clients on it, using our software.

We saw the benefits of NetApp ONTAP almost immediately. Snapshots are amazing. The auto-grow on the volumes and SnapMirror are also notable features. There are so many things that make it a good product.

There are more than one features that I appreciate, but what I appreciate the most about it is the ease of management of the volumes.

There's a feature called multi-tenant approval. Currently, it's one size fits all. I cannot specify that one person is allowed to work on certain volumes, a second person on different volumes, and a third one on everything. It's all or nothing, so I would prefer it to be more precise regarding who could do what on which volume.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP since approximately 2008.

We encountered a downtime once for about two or three minutes, but it didn't crash; it was my fault due to a misconfiguration.

Scalability is quite easy. You just add nodes and grow your cluster, and it's good.

The quality of the support is quite fast; I have never had an issue that was not resolved. Our issues were more about how to do specific tasks or what's the best way to accomplish something. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have never used any alternatives to NetApp ONTAP. I have seen others, but why we selected NetApp ONTAP was that it was better.

It's quite easy. If it's physical, the time depends on the size of your environment, but when we used CVO in the cloud, it was up and running within the same day. The learning curve is not that long. It's quite easy, but it also depends on your experience.

It does not require any maintenance after the deployment. The first NetApp ONTAP that we had, after maybe six or seven years, had some drives that were spinning, not SSD. When one of them failed, we placed a service call and received the disk the next morning. We just swapped the disk, and everything got rebuilt by itself. The new system we got two years ago is all SSD, and so far, nothing has broken. Everything's running smoothly.

For its deployment, one person is enough. You do not need a team.

At first, it's expensive. Once you start using it, it's not that expensive. When you see all the benefits, it's acceptable. It could always be better, but you get what you pay for.

My advice for new users is to take the time to learn and have a good plan for what you need to do. It's so easy to use, and you can do many things with it, so there's no secret to success. You just plan whatever you need to do, and you go forward.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

There might be multiple use cases in my company, but in my specific area, we are using it for doing asynchronous sync between the production and the DR servers. We have a financial trading system that needs to have a common storage space so that the servers we are running can access the same storage in the HA mode, which is the high-availability mode of the Artemis and FIX engines. We are using NetApp storage to be accessed by those servers.

It is perfect for the requirements we have. For our product requirement and our users' requirements, it is one of the perfect network storage solutions we are using. It's reliable, synchronous, and we are not losing any data when using it. That is the main requirement we have as of now for our product.

It was a replacement for the SRDF system. NetApp ONTAP gave us the benefit that we could have a single storage, single mount across all three servers, and they all could write to that location and read from there. That was the immediate benefit we saw, but the synchronization of the messages was very much the same as what we were using before in SRDF. I cannot speak about the performance metrics, but in the last seven years, we have never seen any downtime. We never saw any issues when doing the DR failovers. We have not lost even a single message, and access and everything else is very much in our control.

Our previous solution, SRDF, was a similar kind of product based on old technologies. We were looking for a change because SRDF was not giving us what we needed, which was basically three servers in high-availability mode. All three servers needed to have the same path and the same name for the storage. SRDF was not giving us this feature. It could only be accessed by one server at a time. That was the limitation. With NetApp ONTAP, we conducted research and a PoC, and we really liked it. It was very fast in terms of performance, and it met our requirements exactly the way we needed it in our production environments.

From the implementation point of view, I do not see any issues, but one thing I want to see is expanded support beyond Linux environments. In the future, we are going to migrate to Windows-based platforms. I want to see if we can achieve similar control and implementation with Windows, basically installing NetApp ONTAP onto a Windows machine and not just onto the Linux machine. That is something we are going to explore in the coming year because we are moving into more Windows-based implementations going forward.

Currently, there are limitations with Windows for this product. While I personally work more with Linux environments, which are more controlled and secure, our third-party trading system is moving to Windows as its core product feature. We want to retain NetApp ONTAP, but we need to see how we are going to implement it with Windows. That is the PoC we are going to do in the coming days, but from what I have read, there are certain limitations with Windows for NetApp ONTAP use.

We started using it somewhere around 2018-19.

I have not observed any issues in seven years. It has been perfect.

Scalability is really good. You can spin up new servers and do the same kind of mounting and create the storage. Scalability-wise, you don't need to stop anything that you already have; you can just keep adding. That is one of the features for which we picked NetApp ONTAP. If we want to scale it with more servers, it is very easy. We just create the same replica of that node, and then we are ready to go.

Before NetApp ONTAP, we were using SRDF. SRDF was pretty much the same platform, but with certain limitations that NetApp ONTAP doesn't have. After moving to NetApp ONTAP, we see that SRDF is not of much use in the new world where you have DR within your production server. The high-availability mode is not from production to DR, but within the production, you have multiple servers that can support. If one goes down, the second can support, so this product fits perfectly in that area.

That was easy. It took around four to five hours initially to set this up, but then we had some initial challenges with the access. After we overcame that part, it was easy. There might have been a slight misunderstanding on our part on how to install it. We did some tests and fixed the issue. After that, it was working fine.

Maintenance-wise, the only thing we need to keep doing is managing the VM infrastructure. The underlying VM infrastructure is changing, and in the coming years, with Broadcom buying the VM side solution, we might see changes that could lead us to move away from the VM base to something else. That project is in the initial phase, so we will do assessments on how we can implement it onto the new infrastructure, including evaluating costs and feasibility.

The deployment of NetApp ONTAP was all done in-house. There is an expert with whom we work within our company.

Deploying NetApp ONTAP required multiple people's team, but we have a subject matter expert. Since we have implemented it, we have never seen any issues with it. We have automated all the processes. For example, we do DR every quarter, so we have done the scripting to do the failover of NetApp ONTAP as well. All those things are automated. From that perspective, we do not see the need for more people in that area.

Its pricing is handled by a different department. We buy at the enterprise level, and then the cost is equally distributed.

The only advice I will give for new users is that the first basic thing is that your infrastructure needs to be on a Linux or Unix-based system. That is mandatory. If you are Windows-based, you will struggle sometimes. If you have your infrastructure ready, it is one of the right products to choose, especially if you want to have synchronous or asynchronous file transfers, or you want to have your data files or any kind of access control in place.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP an eight out of ten. It meets 100% of my requirements at the moment, but due to the Windows compatibility limitations, I deducted two points.