NetApp ONTAP Reviews

Our primary use case is for serving the file server files. File storage is for the member offices and accessing that data.

From the capacity perspective, it has helped us because of the thin volumes, deduplication, and compression features.

ONTAP provides the ability to dole out Qtree shares as needed. Team volumes is a benefit.

The cloud features, the ability to go into the cloud would be a feature I'd like to see improvements on.

They could also improve on their ability to back up storage.

It's stable. It has good monitoring tools to help monitor activity and take action if necessary.

The scalability is good. 

We do look at tech guides and the Knowledge Base articles and then engage support. The account teams are always available.

We were using Dell EMC. We did an initial evaluation with the reseller consultants, based on that we went forward. We wanted to diversify everything so that we could get more benefits from the features.

The initial setup was good, flexible, forthcoming, and straightforward. 

We used CopperTech. They were good to work with and very responsive. They look at every scenario.

The deduplication and compression features have helped us save storage costs.

We have been able to save about 10 to 15% on space using the space consumption features. 

The approximate cost per IOP is around 50 cents. 

I would rate this product a nine because of its ability to upgrade easily and the scalability.

Definitely look at the compression, deduplication, and the ability to grow into the cloud, consider any product that has these features. 

ONTAP runs our Tier 1 data center. We use it for running all our virtualization, backups, etc.

Where the DBA is doing all the migrations and testing within our database, we have Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centers and do a lot of testing across them. The ability to create a FlexClone and immediately test everything which needs to be done then revert back within minutes, if needed, is phenomenal for testing.

FlexClone has been great for R&D. We've been doing a lot of testing, implementing Oracle DBAs and getting them into the thick of things.

I would like more diagnostic generation. Right now, it's a pain to go into the controller and do a full diagnostic and export. If that could be streamlined in any way and not be so tedious, because it's a pain to go through all the different steps and have the command memorized or have to look it up. If there was some way NetApp could incorporate it into the native ONTAP command center, that would be great.

I've never had an issue with it. Same with the upgrades, we have had no issues from 8.2 to 8.3 to 8.4. The stability has been great for four years.

We are in the process of doing a huge data center refresh. We will find that out very shortly about its scalability.

The technical support is great. It's the best I've ever encountered. I can email and have everything resolved at three in the morning within half an hour. I have had some late night calls to their guys techs, and it's been phenomenal.

I probably leverage NetApp's engineers too much, but we have a good working relationship with their contacts. They usually handle everything within a few messages, so it has been great.

The initial setup was straightforward for me. I am a storage engineer, so I'm familiar with it. Even our network engineers that have to set it up using NetApp diagrams had no issues with it.

We have used CDW in the past. However, we are now going with NetApp directly.

CDW was great. We didn't have too many issues. However, for our work particularly, there wasn't a enough value-add to stick with a third-party. Therefore, we are now doing everything directly with NetApp.

I have seen ROI. NetApp is streamlined, reducing costs. ONTAP is the best.

If you start narrowing down NetApp versus price point, then comparing it to the feature set and take away all the bloat that other companies will try to add on, there is no other option. It comes down to just NetApp.

We have some strict requirements because we are a defense contractor. It came down to NetApp and one other big company (Dell EMC). ONTAP's ease of use and our familiarity with it along with the reps, who are great about keeping us informed about training, etc. It made it a no-brainer for us to go with the solution.

We chose NetApp because of price and it's a no hassle solution. We're doing a trade study, so we asked all vendors for quotes, etc. We asked our NetApp reps, and they gave us what we needed within a timely fashion. 

Dell EMC sent us eight people, who insisted on a two hour meeting. They keep trying to oversell us crap that we don't need. It felt very forced. Whereas our NetApp guys, they would rather undersell us than have us buy stuff that we don't need. I appreciate their upfront and honest attitude.

You can't switch out a hard drive without an EMC rep coming out, where NetApp is streamlined.

There is nothing it can't do. It satisfies all my needs. It is straight to the point and has great updates.

We are doing a trade study right on all the things that we would like to have and everything we have hard requirements for, and NetApp meets both.

We use it for both our all-flash FAS and traditional FAS systems. We have a relatively large FAS 9,000 cluster.

It's easy to manage and has a good CLI, API, and GUI. It also has good role-based access control, allowing me to grant specific commands to users without full administrator privileges. It's a mature product that works well.

ONTAP encompasses the entire operating system, including the file system layout on the backend is valuable for me. 

There is room for improvement in areas related to hardware constraints—for example, more storage efficiency, especially in terms of deduplication. You don't have a global database for deduplication like some competing systems do. So, you can benefit from storage efficiency when you have a large-scale data system.

Another area of improvement is pricing. Pricing can be complex to decipher. It's not just about ONTAP; it involves hardware costs and capacity licenses.

There are some somewhat obscure features like managing QTree's and other relatively obscure things. So, I would like to see more clarity on that front.

I have been using this solution for eight years. The previous cluster data was also on top of ONTAP, but just an older version, called ONTAP 9.

Currently, we use version 9.12. 

I have seen an ROI. It's extremely reliable, very easy to manage. I've been able to reduce the number of people I have managing the storage systems because of the software.

Our pricing with discounts is reasonable, but it may vary for others. If you're paying rack rate, it might be a different situation. But I think with our discount level, the pricing is reasonable.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use ONTAP to take care of the filers. We have quite a few filers and we use it to increase and decrease storage and make new volumes. All the stuff we use Data ONTAP for makes managing all the filers very easy to take care of.

The reason that we use Data ONTAP for everything is that we have it on all of our systems, we have a lot of customers. We use it for our virtual environments in which we make a big data store. Our way to tell people is to just pop in VMs and they use it. We have a cloud environment and a lab environment. We either do NFS VM stores, people just pop in VMs or we put them on iSCSI, they connect to the VMs and poof they're there. We have NetApp and then the networking, so we're right on top as an oxygen service. It's used everywhere, production, development, whatever you got, we're there.

The way it has improved our organization is that we get a lot of requests for new volumes and new data structures. We go and talk to the user and tell them what we can do with it. We also find that we're a very diverse organization and they want to move data around. We provided SnapMirrors for them and they put data in one location and then we SnapMirror it to the other, and they can do their data. They get it, no need to worry about it. Just poof it's there. I call it the conveyor belt of data. You put it here, we snap it, it's here, it's available, and they love it. They love that feature and that they don't have to worry about shipping it, they don't have to worry about commissions, it's just there. They love the speed of use. 

We look at the numbers because we make sure everything has been provisioned and deduped. There are other products that we've put into Data ONTAP. We have the OCUM, the On Command Unified Manager, which helps us figure out when we do things for Data ONTAP. We put all of our tools that go into Data ONTAP and we have the unified manager where we can see any of our alerts or anything. Then we can do our performance manager. All the tools that we hook into Data ONTAP make it very easy to run because it's a tool that can feed other products and it's the tools that we get from NetApp that makes it very easy to figure things out. It makes it more efficient, we can see things. People complain that their NAS is slow and we're able to bring up the performance manager. It makes life a lot easier because these are tools that we don't have to pay for. Management loves that, they're free tools, we just install them and away we go. 

Ease of use is the most valuable feature for us. We brought a new storage person online, he knew another product, we easily taught him what he needed to know using Data ONTAP. He came up quickly, became very valuable to our team because he could use Data ONTAP. It was poof, he was done and became a valued member of our team. It didn't take him months and months to spin up on the product, so it's very nice. It took longer to spend on all the names we had and where all of our locations were. Data ONTAP was no big deal for him.

We know how much space we'll save. We have compression. Within provision and dedupe, one volume that we have problems with is we do 30% and it's around 12 terabytes. It's a very large volume and we dedupe everything and we get huge savings. We over-allocate our aggregates and it still works, it's great, it's fun. We dedupe everywhere, we get huge savings. We went back and deduped the whole thing again, we could get more, so that's what we do. We go back and look to see if there's an option we can set and do it from the beginning, but still 13 terabytes, that's a lot of dedupe savings. Sometimes we get 50% or more in our savings, so we love dedupe.

We're at 9.3 so when we go to 9.5 we would like the synchronous SnapMirror because our users would like that, especially the ones that do the conveyor belt of data. We'd like that. A lot of the other ones, I'd like just to see go to HCI, but that's just another investment to go to. I'd have to go back and look at everything else. For ONTAP 9, 9.5, we like to keep up with everything that's going on because we don't let anything lag too much.

Stability is great. It's very stable. A couple of times we've had to reset some of the settings. We just go look on the web and it tells us that we just have to turn certain settings on or off and everything's back up for the web. That's the only time we've only not had the web interface come up, but all the other times it's there. If it's not there, the NAS is having problems, we have bigger problems than just ONTAP. Otherwise, ONTAP is very stable, it's always there. It's great.

ONTAP scales because it's always on the NAS, and our NAS scales. Right now our business is growing so we keep hearing that they need more storage. We tell them that they need to buy some shelves and we just keep connecting shelves onto our NAS. With ONTAP we have more shelves, more disks, and aggregates. We just go click, click, click and it does, and we're good. It makes it very easy to use the product overall. It's not a big deal to scale out on Net App ONTAP. Then it tells you on the shelf, if the disk goes bad, ONTAP knows about it, it'll send auto support off to NetApp because we have the maintenance contract. Then NetApp points out that they need new shelving. 

I'd rate it about a nine because I just don't want to give anything a ten. We love it. We also have production on the backup filers that we use. It's great, it's easy.

I would advise someone considering this solution to take the classes and get some education. Especially if it's cluster because cluster's a little bit different, you need to know how to take care of that. Make sure you know all the networking parts of cluster ONTAP and go take the class and then implement it. Then if you have problems, call up and find out what the problem is and go forth and do it because it's great.

Our primary use case is network-attached storage.

It's much easier and faster to deploy our storage with ONTAP than some of the other solutions that we have.

We use it for everything from payroll to home directories.

• Availability
• Resiliency
• Ease of use

It stays up. My people can easily manage it. It just works for us. It has been very stable. Upgrades have worked. We've had very minor to no real problems with it.

We would like to have additional cloud integration and the ability to Snapshot directly to Amazon. This would help us reduce costs, provide us additional disaster recovery, and give us a site that's not owned by us.

It has been very stable. Otherwise, we wouldn't have put our mission-critical applications on it.

We can do upgrades without taking it down. We have had nodes fail and people just kept working.

It has scaled really well for us. We started off with several nodes and are up to about 16 node clusters now.

Support has been great. We also have professional services in our offices, and our professional service guys have been awesome. They are super-fast in finding problems and fixing them.

We switched solutions because were at capacity as far as size. NetApp was also cheaper and easier for us to deploy.

The initial setup was very straightforward and simple. Put an IP on it, give it some passwords, and we configured from there with strips and other stuff.

We deployed with an in-house. The experience was great. We had enough experience in-house that it worked.

This solution has helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. We're part of the NetApp OnDemand, where we lease it. Also, it doesn't take as many people to administer the solution as some other products.

Because of its manageability, we have fewer people managing it.

Our short list was Dell EMC and NetApp. NetApp was more familiar to our people, and they came in cheaper per gigabyte.

It has been amazingly easy for us to use.

We hope will be using this solution for machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics in the future.

We are not using NVMe yet.

We use it for enterprise storage. We use data ONTAP to solution and enterprise storage for our core data centers. We use a lot of SnapVault and SnapMirror features for disaster recovery and daily backups to meet SLAs.

From a service level of perspective, we can restore it from a snapshot in a very short period of time. Whereas, traditional backups from some of our larger databases could take many hours to recover.

We use this solution for our mission critical applications, like SAP.

• Snapshots
• SnapCenter
• The ability to take an instant point and time capture of an application's consistent backup.

The PowerShell scripting capabilities right now are all over the place as far as which rich operating systems are supported. They all support Windows, but the HCI product with the SolidFire integration also supports PowerShell on Mac and Linux. It would be nice if the rest of the NetApp APIs caught up with PowerShell on other operating systems besides Windows. Because we're deploying more non-Windows operating systems, it would be helpful if we would be able to use that utility.

We have not been able to save space by using this product.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is a bit of a question. If we're only doing file-based storage, scalability is fantastic. If we are doing block-based storage through iSCSI or Fibre Channel, there are some significant limitations in the number of volumes and clients that you can put on a single data ONTAP cluster.

Technical support is very good.

We knew that we need to invest in a new solution after we did a total data center architecture. This is the product that we sought afterwards. We chose NetApp because it was the best fit for its price performance.

We started out in 7-Mode and evolved into cDOT. The initial 7-Mode deployment was very straightforward. Migrating 7-Mode to cDOT was much less straightforward.

We worked directly with NetApp for deployment, and our experience was good.

The solution has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage by doing an OPEX agreement with NetApp, we are paying based on utilization. Instead of fronting 30 petabytes worth of storage, we are paying for what we're using.

NVMe over Fabrics is a very interesting proposition. However, it's probably always going to be in a leap frog position with NVMe over traditional Fibre Channel infrastructure. Because if you look at a lot of the research data running NVMe over an Ethernet-based fabric, as the fabric gets congested, the total amount of footprint goes down significantly. Whereas the footprint is very consistent for the Fibre Channel fabric from start to finish, no matter how congested it becomes, and you're still capable of pushing it at reasonable speeds very close to the theoretical maximum.

With the Ethernet fabric, you also have to take into account that you only get the best speeds for NVMe over Fabrics if it's a dedicated storage Ethernet environment, and more than 90 percent of the people implementing it are going to share it with other things because they don't want to have a separate Ethernet infrastructure just for storage. If they were going to do that, they would have stuck with Fibre Channel. Theoretically, it has an off a lot of promise, but practically, not so much.

We do not use this solution for machine learning, AI, or real-time analytics at this time, but we are investigating them.

Make sure that you test it with your own data set. No one else's test will look remotely like what you will use it for.

We use pretty much every part of the product in our company. The core of our company is in the United States and Germany and we are using MetroClusters usually for that kind of workload.

The product helped improve the way our organization functions because we are able to centralize mission-critical applications on the MetroClusters. Previously they were spread out in our environment and now it is easier to use and administer them.

The high availability is one of the most valuable features. But it is also nice that it is easy to do snapshots and to recover things using SnapVault. Those are great features.

I think everything can be improved, really. The IT world is evolving all the time, so there's always a new challenge and always a new thing to improve. It is harder to say what that could be. In a perfect world, there should exist some kind of guide as to what kind of workloads you would be able to mix within the same cluster or aggregate. That would be something really good and useful for us because we have centralized everything in just one MetroCluster. Now we are not sure if that architecture is actually giving us a few headaches or if it is something different. We have more than 15 petabytes of space use and we have a really low percentage of failures. In the boxes that are not really I/O (Input / Output) intensive, they are working very well.

The standard allowance for HA (High Availability) is really good. We do not have many usage problems with that. For the MetroClusters, we have had some problems with latency related to some calls on the backend. But besides that, it usually is a very stable environment in the MetroClusters.

The scalability is good. We started with a two-node MetroCluster, then a four-node MetroCluster and then an eight-node MetroCluster. The eight-node MetroCluster is giving us a lot of headaches. The four-node MetroCluster — if it's correctly sized and configured — it is really good.

Usually, technical support is really good. Most of the time they have a really good response. I really like the Zoom sessions because we can solve everything right away. That has been a great improvement from their support services.

We do feel that they have been supportive with the bigger issue that we had. In this case, we understand that a lot of people are involved. The thing is that I think there are some technical challenges for support and other cases being driven by the engineering level. So I know it is a difficult case and eventually, they will resolve it.

We never needed to invest in a new solution because we were always using NetApp. We were using Windows Servers before for NAS (Network-attached Storage) environments.

The initial setup was very simple. It is just making the purchase and getting up and running with a technician. We already have WFA (Workflow Automation) workflows for that and to deploy our standards, so it is quite easy. In just two or three days it was done.

We have to run proper procedures for discovery, so we invited every vendor in the market and then we continued working with them until we narrowed down the solution to only NetApp. The reason we ended up choosing NetApp is that it has great features other products don't have all of together. Features like Snapshot. 

The support is really good also. Usually, the releases of firmware are not that good because we usually get a lot of bugs that we need to address. We like the hybrid models and the all-flash modes. We have all kinds of sizes and flavors, but those are the ones that really work. We haven't implemented anything for block-level yet, but maybe in the future, that may be on our roadmap.

The solution's Snapshot copies and VIN clones work very well and they are easy to use for recovery. We have a huge environment. We are running around 15 petabytes of data, so doing backups and restores is a daily job and these features have done marvelously for our environment. It speeds things up and it is really easy for us to manage, especially in that size environment.

Snapshot copies and VIN clones also affected our application development speed and made it way easier. We are not using containers so that has sped things up a lot. We love that feature, really.

Consistency of storage management affected our storage operations by helping to reduce our organization's data footprint. All the space savings — on-prem, of course, because we do not use the cloud — is honestly really good. Overall, we experienced around 30% savings.

Apparently we have a lot of latency but it is not related to the protocol. It is something within the operating system of data on top. It is still a question we have open with support and we have no answer so we do not know what the problem is yet.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight. The eight is only because of the problems that we already had. We would expect that a MetroCluster would be able to provide huge performance and we had so far three outages during this year. That is quite a lot really. Overall I think it is still a really good environment and using NetApp has been a really good solution for us. But outages hurt our experience overall. It would be a ten for us if we had 100% uptime.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to be very careful about the kind of workloads they are running. Keep a really close eye on things. It is best to use all the features of NetApp rather than just buying isolated boxes.

Our primary use case for ONTAP is that our whole platform is running on ONTAP. We have all the client data that we're using on the files, in our data center.

It's hard to say how this solution has improved our organization because we've been using it for 18 years now. It works great, it really does what it should and we've been really, satisfied customers. 

Our whole platform is so big that this solution is mission critical for our company. We also have a metro cluster internally where our virtualization stuff runs on.

ONTAP has really reduced our costs because we learned that we could use our storage with fewer machines and drive down data center costs.

The most valuable features are stability and performance, and that with the cDot feature we can move data around without any interruption. Also, the hardware maintenance is really, really, easy and fast. 

We are discussing ONTAP for AI. We are having a look at it, but we haven't used it yet.

We have been using deduplication on our web volumes and have seen about 25 to 28% data reduction. That's not that much because mail storage is pre-compressed by the clients, and we do not save anything there.

Synchronous NetMirror and FlexCache features will be back again. This is really great. It will help us be more efficient but it will take some time until it really comes down and we can use it.

We hope that SSD's will be cheap enough so that we can consolidate and save reg space in the future.

Stability is really great. It's awesome. Of course, we have hardware failures, but they really work great. The failover mechanisms do what they should do and, we are very satisfied with that.

cDot only scales to 24 notes so scalability should be better, bigger, but we are one of the only customers that are facing this problem.

Their technical support is mostly very fast. Our system account manager takes really great care of that. Sometimes, parts are shipped in the middle of the night, when nobody is on site which could be improved.

Our FAS9000's do, 150,000 IOPS per head which is less than around one dollar per IOP.

I would rate this solution a ten, especially the cDot version because it really helps focus on our real problems, and storage is, not the greatest problem anymore and really works great.