NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use it for all our storage requirements.

We use it for mission-critical applications. A lot of our users don't want any downtime, they don't want any kind of failure or bottlenecks. They want low latency, they want fast I/O, they want fast throughput - and it delivers.

It has helped us reduce the overall cost of our storage. We were able to consolidate a lot of the storage that we had in the past into a much smaller footprint, using less rack space and power. It has been great for that.

We have saved space using ONTAP, in some cases it's 30 to 40 percent.

The most valuable features are the data deduplication, the inline compression/compaction, and the encryption as well, the security aspect of it.

Overall, for us, it's the stability, it has a solid infrastructure. It's easy to use, easy to rack and configure and start utilizing really quickly. It's been very stable, it works great, and it does everything we would want it to do.

I could see the GUI being a little bit more refined, the presentation layer being a little stronger, a little less sluggish.

We're happy with the stability and performance. They are very powerful machines.

The scalability is very good. It's much more than what we can imagine using.

Tech support is very good. They're great at following up, as well, with emails or calling you. It has been very good so far, very quick responses. It's easy to escalate and whenever we have had to order replacement parts, it's been very quick. No complaints at all.

We used a reseller for the deployment, OnX. Our experience with them was very good. They were very helpful. They really helped with the purchasing, refining our requirements to get them where we needed them to be. They have been very good.

We have considered other options but they either don't have the same kind of architecture that we're looking for or the performance isn't quite the same. We'd have to look at them a little more in some cases, part of our job is to see what the other vendors are up to. But, for now, we're quite happy with NetApp.

Go see a NetApp presentation or get a referral to a reseller for consultation. That would probably be the best way, because they can speak to the whole line of products. We're only familiar with some of their product line but they would be able to do a good job of showing all the products that NetApp has to offer.

In terms of NVMe over Fabrics, that's something we're going to see a lot of in the future. It's going to change storage. From now on, it's not going to be the same. When it comes to speed, compared to other Fiber Channel gear, there's nothing that compares, it's pretty amazingly fast. When it comes to NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fibre Channel infrastructure, the sky is the limit. It's pretty robust, it is a pretty amazing product, and the performance, especially with things like AI applications, will be pretty amazing.

We, as an organization, do not use ONTAP at the moment for machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics or those kinds of groundbreaking applications for storage, but it has a lot of potential. I'd like to use it for those kinds of scenarios, I'd like to see that happen.

We're definitely going forward, we're going to be growing with NetApp and with their products. They've improved a lot over the last couple releases, and I hope to continue to see that. There are a lot more features, advances in things like deduping and thin-provisioning. They're always improving their product.

I would rate ONTAP a nine out of ten at least. It's a very solid product, great architecture, great service and support, and very responsive.

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.

We are using it for the cloud and storage: NAS and SAN.

• SnapVault
  
• Snapshot
• Deduplication
• The replication progress
• It is easy to migrate data from one storage array to another storage array using SnapMirror technologies.
  

If they could come up with some more automation, this would be helpful.

I have never had an outage.

Scalability is good. You can expand the storage with disks, which is good.

I haven't had to contact technical support, but their support is 24/7 if I needed it.

We were previously using NetApp MetroClusters. We have tested in the lab, NetApp MetroClusters, and have run into issues. I have come up with tie breakers, which are like witnesses our virtual storage arrays. One storage fails and another storage array will be active all the time. In this case, if a tie breaker is down, NetApp doesn't know how to deal with the data. It gets confused. NetApp should come up with a solution for this, such as a physical witness.

It's very easy. It's not complex.

We used NetApp for the deployment. They know how to deal with issues and follow best practices. It's always better to have them install the storage.

With other vendors, we need to buy a separate license for a third-party storage, but with NetApp, you don't need to buy a license, as it will come up with the storage. 

I can recommend NetApp. If you need a solution, use NetApp.

We deployed it for storage consolidation, core banking solutions and to host core banking applications. We have also deployed it for disaster recovery replication solutions. We have a combination of on-premises and ONTAP Cloud for data protection, replication, and instances.

We also use this solution for databases on flash and DFF deployed for core database systems to manage call database systems.

It is a unified solution, and you have all the licenses for all the protocols available on the ONTAP. It also has easy management, so if somebody's running ONTAP 8, they can still manage ONTAP 9. It's the same commands, just a few syntax changes. It is very easy to manage in terms of system and GUI management. You can set up the system in under 15 minutes, and it will be up and running. Also, regarding system administration, it is fascinating that we can manage the smaller systems the same way we manage the bigger systems. There is no difference in terms of system administration and creating logs. The simplicity of the OS is a key selling point, and mixed customers appreciate it.

It's a perfect system, we have been using it for many years, and many changes have been made, but the rate of technology could be improved. It takes about 60% of the raw capacity to get a user to capacity. It is a lot, and competing solutions don't take up to that in terms of the rate.

I don't think anything needs to be added in the next release. The ONTAP 9 is perfect, and none of our systems have upgraded to the new updates. The updates usually address significant failures. We don't have any technical issues with NetApp ONTAP's system, and with no updates, it is still perfect. However, it needs to be monitored due to security threats, so most updates ensure that security is well managed and handled.

We have been using this solution for 11 years and are working with the latest updates. It is a hybrid environment and deployed both on cloud and on-premises.

It is stable and reliable.

It is one of the most scalable storage solutions.

The technical support is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

We've worked with Dell and HP products. The scalability in NetApp ONTAP is the best. The technology is almost the same across solutions, and you can create volumes, logs and maps. In addition, the NetApp ONTAP is unified, and you can do all protocols on a single controller. For other solutions like HP, you have to buy system licenses. For NetApp ONTAP, if a customer starts with a very small system and grows, they can buy bigger ones and integrate them with smaller ones with no issue because they are running the same operating system.

The setup is straightforward, and our company provides all the implementation services. If all information is available and there is a power supply, the system is set up in less than 30 minutes. I rate the setup a ten out of ten.

Maintenance is the function of the customer and the kind of application that is deployed on the product. Usually, the system comes with a minimum of three-year support by the OEM, and NetApp ONTAP takes charge of doing that for patch replacements, patch upgrades and access to software updates. In addition, they have the next business day and four-hour support. However, four-hour support is unavailable in our region in West Africa due to resources, so we sell next business day support.

Weekends are challenging to provide support, but partners intervene during the weekend before NetApp ONTAP comes up on the next business day. So, we have various support, but West Africa has limited choices due to the cost and contract business. However, most of our customers enjoy it and don't have issues.

Everybody can work with NetApp ONTAP. I have customers with very low budgets running NetApp ONTAP, which is where the NetApp ONTAP Cloud comes in. It doesn't have to be hardware. NetApp ONTAP is software that is now a commodity like VMware so that you can buy it on Amazon, Azure, and as a commodity. If you're a big company, you have access to bigger platforms, and if you're a small company, there are smaller platforms.

The price is relative. Once the value is appreciated, price is a much simpler issue. In terms of licensing, I feel NetApp ONTAP is a bit pricey compared to other solutions, but it has value, and the total cost of ownership of the NetApp ONTAP system is cheaper than the others. The initial cost might be a bit high, but over a period of time, it's cheaper. I rate the price a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. Regarding advice, if you are looking for a unified environment where you can use all your protocols anytime, you want NetApp ONTAP to be the answer. If you want scalable storage with good OEM support where you can deploy on a hybrid environment across multiple clouds and on-premises, NetApp ONTAP is also the answer.

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 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.

Deduplication, data protection, and NetApp block are some of the valuable features of the product.

The GUI of NetApp ONTAP is an area with certain shortcomings that need to be considered for improvement.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for over three years. I am using the solution's latest version.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company has a dozen users of NetApp ONTAP.

I rate NetApp ONTAP's support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate my experience with NetApp ONTAP's setup phase a ten out of ten.

The product is deployed on-premises.

The deployment process took a day to two to be completed.

Two people look into the software part during the deployment process of the product.

I rate NetApp ONTAP's pricing a seven out of ten.

In NetApp ONTAP, both the hardware and the software are the same. The only thing with NetApp ONTAP is that you can't buy it separately because it comes with the box, which is its hardware.

I definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. It's a very friendly and usable tool with lots of features, majorly storage.

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

Our client's primary use case is for the storage aspect of the solution, mainly for the block size.

The reliability of the storage is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The hardware of the solution is very reliable and there are hardly any issues at all. There rarely are failures, especially when you compare it to other vendors, which have a higher failure rate.

For example, HPE tends to be more prone to disc failures. In the case of ONTAP, this is extremely rare.

The OS is very user-friendly. Due to the fact that the architecture of the system is the same, once we learn ONTAP, we don't have to worry about drastic changes. Other vendors tend to change their products, and then we have to re-learn everything again, including the complete UI and configuration. With NetApp ONTAP, once you learn it, only a little bit of updating is required.

The solution is very easy to configure.

The solution is more for mid-range companies. 

The integration could be improved. There used to be an integration product called Snapper Tech, however, it's not available anymore. The vendor-partner relationships need to be improved across the board.

The back-up side of the solution could be improved, as could the archive. We still have to rely on third-party backup programs and other archiving solutions. If it was offered by NetApp itself, it would be much better.

The solution seems to be changing and moving towards the cloud and it will require many changes in order to be able to adapt to this shift.

I've been dealing with the solution for almost ten years at this point. It's been a long while.

The solution is easily scalable. It can, due to the features itself and the Cluster ONTAP features it supports. There are additions that need to be purchased so that the customer can scale, however. Other than that, yes, you can scale it well.

The solution best suits medium and enterprise customers. The price is small compared to other companies. 

So far, we've been very satisfied with technical support. They are quite knowledgeable and responsive.

The initial setup is not complex at all. In fact, if you compare any other storage, ONTAP is easier to install, implement, and manage than other options. 

We deploy it for our customers.

In order to scale, you do need to purchase add-ons.

I'm on the partner side, and therefore not an end-user.

I would recommend the solution. Its cluster and storage are quite good.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. We enjoy working with it.