NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We manage all of our storage with it. In terms of the version, we're in the process of going to the newest version. It's probably 9.12.

Resiliency is the big one for us.

Its ease of use, for the most part, through the interfaces is valuable.

It's very expensive.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability. It's being used by the entire organization of about 400 people and probably 300 or 400 systems.

We have plans to increase its usage. I just bought up a whole bunch of new equipment.

I'd rate them a 10 out of 10. If possible, I'd rate them even higher.

I didn't use any other solution previously.

It was largely handled by NetApp themselves with me watching. So, it was pretty simple for me. For the actual software or system deployment itself, there was one person.

We have seen an ROI.

It's very expensive.

I'd advise others to go for it if they can afford it. It's very expensive, but I like it because of the support and because of its ability to just work without me having to touch it very often.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We manage our data systems with NetApp ONTAP through either the command-line interface or the graphical user interface.

We implemented ONTAP because it provides a unified management interface for all storage, simplifying administration by using the same language for both SAN and NAS environments.

NetApp ONTAP is user-friendly.

The auto-completion feature now simplifies ONTAP management by streamlining command-line operations. When entering commands via the CLI, auto-completion suggests relevant options, improving efficiency and reducing errors. This enhanced functionality has proven effective in managing various storage environments, consistently delivering the expected performance.

We have tested ONTAP in several environments, and its performance has met our expectations.

ONTAP reduces human error by providing helpful auto-completion features, eliminating the need to memorize all commands.

ONTAP helps improve our cost savings because NetApp products are competitively priced compared to IBM and Dell.

We realized the benefits of ONTAP immediately.

Our organization is short-staffed, and ONTAP's ease of storage management is well-suited to our small team.

ONTAP's GUI does not encompass all the features available in the CLI. Some functions can only be executed through the CLI.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for about eight years.

I would rate the stability of ONTAP eight and a half out of ten. There are bugs from time to time, especially in new versions. If we upgrade, there might be issues with some features, but it is generally stable.

Our previous product faced scalability limitations requiring a complete replacement. However, recent systems, particularly the new NetApp systems, demonstrate significantly improved scalability compared to their predecessors.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Our company used various storage solutions from vendors like Dell, IBM, and Hitachi. However, NetApp ONTAP stands out due to its consistent core functionality, even with feature updates, maintaining simplicity compared to other complex solutions.

The complexity and duration of a NetApp ONTAP deployment depend significantly on the chosen approach. Building a new ONTAP environment from scratch typically takes around two weeks, while migrating an existing storage infrastructure from another vendor to ONTAP can increase the deployment time to two months due to the added complexities of data transfer, compatibility considerations, and potential application downtime.

In my experience of almost 25 years, ONTAP was less time-consuming than most other products I've worked with.

NetApp ONTAP is moderately priced. The tag price is more competitive for the value we get.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP nine out of ten.

We have NetApp ONTAP deployed in multiple locations with 2,500 users.

NetApp ONTAP requires maintenance for upgrades, adding features, and replacing failed disks.

I will recommend ONTAP. It is advisable to consider a proof of concept.

ONTAP is Netapp's data management solution for on-premise and cloud datastores.

ONTAP itself hasn't really "improved [our] organization", but the Netapp IP that we leverage THROUGH ONTAP is a cornerstone for our data management and disaster recovery and business continuity programs.

The solution is extremely stable and easily scalable.  The snapshot capabilities protect against data loss due to corruption and human error, the snapmirror replication methodology provides efficient disaster recovery, and the data compression/deduplication technologies provide amazing storage efficiency.  Add to that the seamless management of hierarchical and object storage on-premise and in the cloud and you have a compelling solution for broad data management under a single platform.

The ONTAP UI is constantly evolving, and it is always a work in progress.  Several management constructs (e.g. disk aggregates) have been removed from ONTAP and relegated to the command line only, seemingly to streamline the UI.  It would be nice if future releases would allow us to turn the features we actually use back on.

Since 2005.

Rock solid and bulletproof.

It's scalable. You can have many, many nodes in a cluster. You can have multiple clusters as well. It can scale up or out.

Overall, my experience with Netapp support has been excellent.  Like all large tech providers, they have had occasional lags in their support services, but I have had very few major problems, and I have never had an issue that they could not or would not resolve.

Positive

Many years ago, we were an EMC shop, but we moved to Netapp in 2005, and have never seen a reason to leave the Netapp platform since.

The initial complexity really depends on the architecture required to support each customer's data needs.  That said, once the systems have been set up, ongoing maintenance is very straightforward.

We absolutely used a vendor team, and I would recommend that most Netapp customers do so.

We've never really calculated the ROI, but the value of Netapp's compression and deduplication technology should not be underestimated and will become all the more important as we increasingly move workloads to and from public clouds.

Great enterprise-grade IP is never inexpensive, but Netapp successfully delivers a lot of value for the money.  Netapp offers its data management solutions in an ala carte fashion which makes licensing a bit nebulous, but there are valid arguments on both sides.

Find a good channel partner.  If you are in a very large shop with plenty of storage experts, then you might go it alone.  For the rest of us, having a capable partner to help with architectural and technical considerations is a total game changer.

We use it for SMB and CIFS for different departments. It is also used for HIPAA and FTC compliance.

Management, deployment, and compliance are much easier. We're doing NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE), so it has increased the security model as well.

We use ONTAP for our mission-critical applications. E.g., at our pharmacies, we started loading data onto our NetApp systems.

• Ease of use.
• Ease of expansion.
• It doesn't go down and is very reliable.
• It is quite fast. 
• Since we have a hybrid solution, we can accommodate for the performance that we need.

We would like more building performance monitoring. Right now, we have to buy separate products. 

It has been very stable. We haven't had a significant outage. We do take time and test as if we were going to go down, but we haven't gone down yet.

Because we are using ONTAP Cluster Mode, if we want to increase, we add nodes or pairs of nodes. It is that easy.

I would rate technical support as an eight of ten. Sometimes, we have had some delays, on holidays and weekends, getting the right resource for a specific problem.

When we need to escalate an issue, there can be a delay when they have to find somebody. Besides that, our experience has not been bad.

We used and still use Dell EMC.

We used NetApp for the deployment. Right now, we are using a VAR, World Wide Technology, for NetApp operations.

Our experience with World Wide Technology has been good. It's a fantastic company. Whenever we have had issues, if NetApp is not prompt, they almost immediately try to resolve them. They have their own resources. We have increased our support by having them as a middleman.

We have seen ROI, especially with the deduplication. We have a high ratio of deduplication and are way past 70 percent of our VDI, as we have almost 400TBs on our VDI. We have been able to save at least a quarter of a petabyte of space.

The solution has helped our organization reduce its overall cost of storage by allowing us to have multiple sites using the multi-tenant security model, segregated from each other, while at the same time using the same resources.

Our cost per IOP is three to four dollars, but we have a hybrid solution. Therefore, we have SSD and spinning disk running together.

In the past, you didn't have to buy separate products. They were mostly included with the purchase. In the end, it's more expensive to buy it separate than together. If you are going to need it, one package at the beginning is cheaper.

I don't like this nickel-and-diming. I like an all in one solution.

NetApp is a lot better at replication and easier to set up for replication than its competitors.

Dell EMC is expensive in comparison to NetApp, but its reliable as well. We like them too.

We looked at Pure Storage and some other vendors, but were not convinced it was the direction that we wanted to go.

Do a PoC and compared against your current solution. ONTAP is very intuitive.

We use the solution for analytics and monitoring. Our monitoring system uses both Splunk and Log Insight and the analytics are tie into NetApp. 

We haven't used NVMe, but are looking forward to it. To my understanding, it is not ready yet to be implemented on NetApp or any other product. However, we're ready to start testing it as soon as the product's available. 

I work at an educational institute that conducts medical research. We use NetApp for unstructured storage, including both SMB and NFS file shares. In the past, we have also used it for SAP and for Fiber Channel presented storage, specifically for Oracle databases. It is mainly for unstructured storage and research data.

It meets our needs by providing the necessary shares to store our data. It is reliable, fast, and always available when needed. It is also very flexible regarding provisions. It helps to serve our storage needs.

CIFS and NFS protocols have delivered the most value. NetApp ONTAP offers very reliable CIFS and NFS protocols. By and large, the product itself is very reliable hardware-wise. 

The aggregate system needs improvement. I understand how they are alleviating this issue with all the FlexGroup volume. I understand the concept and how they get past the limitations of how much storage can be presented to a user. Currently, it is capped at about 300 terabytes, but there are situations where more is needed. The aggregates, in our case, are capped at about 800 terabytes. A way to alleviate that is by using a FlexGroup volume, which can exceed 800 terabytes, but that opens up a whole new set of issues for the future.

I have used the solution since 2002.

It all depends on who I get on the phone. I would rate their customer service a six out of ten. Bringing it back to the US would be great because I do not like dealing overseas.

Neutral

We definitely plan on continuing to use NetApp, but we are looking at other options. We also use Pure for a point solution for some applications. Pure is nothing but solid-state, and it has always been very pricey. Unstructured data for the researchers does not necessarily need performance, so it has always been an expensive solution. Over the last five or six years, Pure has developed effective SMB and NFS protocols, so they are catching up to NetApp in that respect.

We evaluated other solutions. NetApp has the best software in the market. After that, it is potentially EMC. The hardware is not the selling feature; it is the software. It was way ahead of anybody else in the way you can move data.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is very good.

We're using it for all of our enterprise architecture. So, we use everything from CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel LUNs, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and iSCSI. Therefore, we're pretty much using the gamut. We have a little bit of SAS storage tier, SATA storage tier, and SSD as well.

It makes our organization more efficient with more scale. We have the ability to tier off the storage and ensure storage is efficiently utilized so we can get rid of idle data and data that is not required. Then, we can show and prove what needs and should be used.

We do use this solution for mission-critical applications.

Its flexibility is its most valuable feature. It has the ability to mix with the different requirements that we have to provide, such as some I/O intensive services and a lot of archive services. It has the ability to tailor tiers according to what we need and put the right services in the right place.

One of the things that we were looking at being able to do a FlexGroup NFSv4. Right now, 9.4 goes up to NFSv3, but if we could get the NFSv4 solution on a 9.4, or a future release, that would be awesome.

Stability is great. We have a six-node cluster. We've done head swaps. We've had failures and the cluster has always stayed up and the data has always been available. We haven't lost any data either.

It is very easy to scale, so we started with a four-node cluster and added it to a six-node cluster. We've also done some other modifications in between.

This solution helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. Because idle data which was residing on high cost tiers, once we sifted the ONTAP, we were able to scale and place it where it should be, then offload the data which was unnecessary to different locations.

Technical support is awesome. We call them up, and they're there. We receive answers and get what we need right away. We have four hour delivery, as it's based on our contracts, but we do receive outstanding support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There was a guide of how everything goes together. Therefore, use the guide, put it together, and you're up and running.

During the initial install, we had a reseller who came in, helped us build it out, etc. They were awesome getting us up and running. Now, that it's up and running, even though they don't have access to our systems, but we can still call them and get assistance, look into different changes, opportunities to scale in or our, and upgrade as we need to.

We have been able to save space by using the solution.

Look into the product's reliability. You will definitely see an increase in your business performance if you use it.

We don't current employ any NVMe. We have SSD. We're looking at NVMe potentially on some of our higher IOP operations, but we don't deploy it right now.

We use SaaS and also have a Hadoop cluster which are backed up by ONTAP storage. These are for doing a lot of data analytics and analyzing different data streams. AI is soon to come.

We use this solution for Hyper-V, VMware, SQL, Enterprise Vault, and Commvault.

This product has improved the way our organization functions because everything is working so well and we don't have any disasters. Everything is perfect. Our SLA (Service Level Agreement) is in RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Everything just perfect. 

What I would like to see in the next release is the ability to combine all the clusters. Make it so that they will work not just pairs. If I have a four-node cluster, I want it to work for four and not just four pairs of clusters. This is what I am expecting as an enhancement.

My impression of the stability of the solution is very high. We don't have any problems.

I think the scalability of this solution is excellent.

The technical support is amazing. Amazing-plus. Technical support always answers. Whenever I need them, they are there. I don't have to wait or waste my time to get the answer by email. I just call them and they answer, and they immediately try to help us. So, if there is a 1 to 10, the technical support is an 11.

We switched to this solution because we always believed that NetApp is the best company for storage solutions. I don't think they have a real competitor because they have the perfect solution that is what the end-user really needs. Everything from the software to the hardware is very good. Other competitors have similar solutions, but not the same solution or quality. They have the hardware, they have the technology, they have a protocol, but not all the protocols. NetApp actually thinks about what the user really needs to dive in deep. They know why, how to make the customer satisfied.

The initial setup was straightforward. The technical guys came and deployed all of our operating systems. It was easy and maybe sometimes, not always, there was some small issue but in the end, everything is working very well.

We did not use outside help. We did the deployment ourselves.

The cost of licensing for our company is really not that much. We are a big company but we only use Fibre Channel SAN (Storage Area Network) storage. We don't use the others. So actually we did not need to use all of the licenses. So, the cost is really average for us.

Other competitor solutions that we were thinking about was mostly Nimble Storage. But it is not like NetApp.

We use the InLine Encryption solution for SnapMirror, SnapManager, SnapCenter, SnapMirror data protections, SnapVault, and that's all.

The Snapshot copies and Bin Clones solutions affected our application development speed because we run all this at the nights so we actually don't have any effects on performance. Even if we do it in the middle of the day, the users don't feel any latency. So everything is going well.

This solution has helped to reduce our organization's data footprint and reduced our organization's cloud costs by up to 100 K.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a ten. There is no competitor like NetApp. You cannot compete with them because we have what we need and what we want and we are so satisfied that we are sure NetApp is the best solution for us.

The advice I would give to someone considering this solution is first to ask him what exactly the solution is that they are searching for. If I can see that they are using or considering a different solution that they think is like my solution, I prefer to invite them to come to our company and see how NetApp works. I would show them how the solution works and how it runs without any problems. If they want they can get full protection — the full self-confidence we call it. It is confidence that you are actually choosing the right tool and not just the vendor. They need to know the product is actually working. 

We're using it as a file-based solution. The majority of our business users are file-based. We're also using it for virtualization for backup storage. Its programs are very good.

We are also evaluating the All Flash FAS solution. 

The group that I work with is media-based, so we usually use large files as compartments. 

We do use ONTAP for our mission-critical applications.

We save space through deduplication. While it depends on the application that we're using, we can save anywhere from 2G to 3G, which is really good.

• It is easy to manage. 
• A novice can use it.
• The Snap features of ONTAP.
• It has all the good features that everyone wants.

It takes them a few seconds to do a failover. I hope they can reduce this to milliseconds or at least drive it down to less than two seconds. Some of their competitors are already doing this.

Stability is very good. 

You can scale it however you want, depending on your data center footprint. I don't see higher limitation for how far you can scale. It's the same interface so you don't have to worry about managing it.

I would rate the tech support as a nine out of 10. We get the support when we need it.

The initial setup is straightforward. We did not have to worry about the configuration, as NetApp comes in and installs it.

We used a reseller, who was really good, for the deployment. 

We are seeing ROI from ONTAP. Within three years of using the products, we barely saw any complications with its usage. We have been using it for over ten years now.

ONTAP has helped our organization reduce its overall cost of storage (somewhere in the high millions).

1. 1. We receive the best support for a lower price point.
   2. The price point is very competitive and inexpensive compared to what you receive from other vendors in the market. 

We just started knowing NVMe over Fabric. We haven't used it but I think it's a great idea. They are trying to make the data closer to the CPU, so it will give you more confidence.

Our approximate cost per IOP is $0.18 USD to $1.00 USD depends on the scale of the site.