NetApp ONTAP Reviews

NetApp ONTAP is the obvious choice for what we're doing, which is the simplification of a hyper-converged environment.

The most valuable features of NetApp ONTAP are its data redundancy, performance, storage catering, snapshot technology, and NetApp Insight. From a reporting mechanism, the solution fits our needs perfectly.

With NetApp ONTAP, the technology is all there, but its management process needs some simplification. Compared to NetApp ONTAP, Pure Storage, for instance, is a better model.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for the last 25 years.

We've had just one failed disk in the last five years since I deployed the solution.

I rate NetApp ONTAP a nine out of ten for stability.

The solution's scalability depends on the environment you've got set up. For instance, if you're using NetApp clusters, it's easier to scale. If you're not using NetApp clusters, it gets more complicated to scale. Approximately 400 users use NetApp ONTAP in our company. These 400 people are internal users, but the customer base is much bigger.

I rate NetApp ONTAP a seven out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is complex.

We used the help of NetApp professional services and one of our other vendors for the solution's deployment.

NetApp ONTAP is a pricey product, but you pay for what you get. I rate NetApp ONTAP a five out of ten for its pricing.

Just one person is required for the maintenance of NetApp ONTAP.

I have a lot of experience with other vendors. I always choose NetApp ONTAP because no other solution meets our requirements. I would recommend NetApp ONTAP to other users.

Overall, I rate NetApp ONTAP a nine out of ten.

It's our enterprise storage solution where we keep 95 percent of our data.

We use it for our mission-critical applications: All our SQL, Exchange, data warehousing, and anything with heaving I/O processing.

Our company has grown so fast, we spend more in the process. At the same time, we have been able to shrink due to technologies, such as deduplication and compression.

We've been able to keep up with the demands of our business in terms of both performance and storage. Whenever the business needs something, we add it right away. Whenever they say, "Hey, we're gonna throw some big load at you guys. Can you this handle it?" We say, "Yeah, the system can handle it."

It's more intuitive to use as they are moving away from command line into more graphical interfaces, which are somewhat easier to use.

There is room for improvement in the stability. They have been trying to become simpler, and as a result, there have been road bumps along the way. I have personally experienced this.

We have experience a number of bugs recently. The company has also gone through recent changes which has affected stability.

It scales pretty well. It has a cluster interface connection with multiple systems clustering across the board. 

They are pretty good when it comes to critical support. Technical support is something they're still working on, but the critical support is good. The critical support will get back to you quickly and stay with you, so you always know who you are dealing with.

The performance was really bad on our previous solution. When we did an analysis with our tools, we saw how bad the storage performance was. It was a ten-year-old system. It was meant to run for a small company. It was never meant for where we were at the time.

Compared to what we had in the past, ONTAP has given us both visibility into performance, as well as, adapted to different changes. Where as before, we had a system that we couldn't do much with.

The initial setup was complex compared to what we had, since it does more. When we bought it a couple of years ago, it was more complex. Now, they are trying to become simpler at the setup.

The initial setup took a lot of steps. You had to know a lot of what had happened throughout the process. There were a lot of steps involved, where as now, they're condensing the amount of steps involved. Plus, its more graphically-driven now rather than being mostly command line.

We used two different consultants: 

1. We had one vendor for the architecture of the high-level stuff.
2. The other consultant was more to come in and fix it up or do the hardware physical stuff. 

We picked the best out of both.

With the duplication and compression, we have been about a one and half to two times savings since we are not running all-flash.

It pays to get the Cadillac. That's what we call ours.

Don't undersize it. We undersized our first one and ended up having to get rid of it, then buying a new one. We lost money in the process. We should have paid for more than what we needed at the beginning.

NVMe over Fabric is considered the next generation of storage in terms of how fast things move.

Our company chose this solution because they've known it from the past.

We are still looking into machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics.

We use it for the NAS solution. We have a NAS infrastructure with NetApp ONTAP.

The product is good at deduplication. Also, the new automation feature is good, as it saves us a lot of time.

• SnapMirror
• SnapVault
• Deduplication
• The compression.

I need to be able to validate how the host is performing from the storage, as I am concerned about the host performance and storage connectivity to the host.

They have to improve on the data and monitoring tools.

The stability is good. They have point in time recovery, and they don't have any single point  of failures. 

The FAS series is good. In addition, they have around 10Gs for management, which is nice.

I love NetApp's scalability. We started in three areas, and now, we have grown to 16 areas. It is that good at scaling.

Technical support is not in person nowadays. We have to wait a long time to get an engineer. Then, most of the time, their engineers are not good enough to understand our problems. While we might not be able to explain the problem well, or they are not able to understand the problem well, their solutions are slow to resolution. The response time for tickets is bad nowadays.

Half of the setup is straightforward. However, when we want to do customizations and networking configurations, it is quite challenging. The issue is that we cannot fit NetApp's configurations to our organization standards.

We have a NetApp consultant for all types of deployments. He has been wonderful to work with as he is always helpful.

The top two vendors that we considered were NetApp and Dell EMC. 

We are also considering some white labels for HCIs, but these solutions aren't shortlisted yet.

If you need something in the NAS area, consider or test the NetApp products.

On the storage and box side, NetApp is really good at what they do.

One of the classic use cases is the high availability for both block and file. However, many different technologies within NetApp are of interest to our customers.

NetApp has a variety of different features and technologies on offer. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

It's a stable product.

The solution can scale well. 

The integration with other products, both security and third-party products such as Lenovo and others doing OEM solutions, that would be ideal. We'd like to have these with ONTAP on top. We'd like integrations with different types of backup solutions and so on. 

The price could be lower. 

We have a good sense of feature sets in the pipeline for the product and therefore are largely satisfied with both its capabilities and the roadmap. 

I've been using the solution for five years or so.

The stability is great. I'd rate it ten out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product scales very well. I'd rate it nine or ten out of ten. It expands easily. 

The solution works well for large or mid-size companies. 

Within our company, none of us is using NetApp storage as we are providing our customers with solutions.

From our portfolio, we're selling a lot of Dell EMC and NetApp. We're selling Huawei, and we're selling other storage space as well, such as some IBM. With that said, if you compare Dell EMC and NetApp, it's mostly based on the integration, technologies, and flexibility where we see NetApp being a better fit for many of our customers, yet not for all.

We have been working with NetApp a lot. Doing implementations is not a problem for us. 

95% of the time, clients can handle the initial setup. However, we primarily work with enterprise accounts, and those, even with a simple setup, can often lead to complex requirements.

The pricing is okay. I'd rate it three out of five in terms of affordability. It is not a cheap solution. However, it is quite stable and offers good value. 

We did evaluate this solution against other options. 

I'm actually a partner of Lenovo and NetApp. We're integrators. We set the solution up for our clients. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

Based on my 20 years within the IT industry, NetApp is the best system out there. It is just not the cheapest. That said, looking at what it can do with Lenovo and other vendors make it a good option. 

The primary use case for this solution is the storage and backup.

Previously we didn't have DR, but ever since we purchased the NetApp server, we are able to use SnapMirror and then create DR scenarios, so that's been a huge benefit.

This solution has helped reduce the overall cost of storage space in our organization by allowing us to use one data center, instead of two, and then allowing us to replicate the data; so that saves us money to buy more storage.

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

SnapMirror. DR replication, it's very useful that we have backups.

I would like the ability to perform backups in the cloud. That way you don't have to worry about building the data center. Everything's already in the cloud.

It's very stable. We never had any data corruption or data loss, so, it's been very stable.

I would say we have platinum support, so they're really good for our work, so they're really good. You get what you paid for.

Previously, we didn't use any other solution. NetApp came out and gave us a demo and it just works. 

Yes. It was very straightforward. Very easy. The PSE came in and showed us how to do it. We followed the instructions and it just works.

EMC, Hitachi, and IBM. We chose NetApp because of its ease of use. 

Our approximate cost per IOP is at least a couple of million.

I would give this product a rating of 8 out of 10. There could be improvements, its proprietary software so it can be pricey.

I say give NetApp a try. Its very simple to install and easy to use.

We use it for network shares and being aware of backups.

It can restore from Snapshots. Our developers ruin VMs very quickly. It restores Snapshot and gets them back in a few minutes.

Deduplication.

Feature-wise, it does most of what we want. The only thing I don't like is that firmware upgrades require downtime. It would be beneficial if we could do upgrades without as much downtime.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it in six years of using it now. We have eight different devices and the stability has been awesome. The only failures we've had are drive failures and they normally have those shipped out before we even know there was a problem.

Unfortunately, we haven't scaled up much.

Technical support is very good. We haven't had a ton of issues but when we do - the drive failures - they're very easy to deal with.

It was pretty easy. They came out and helped with it and gave us a few days' training. It was pretty simple.

We used a reseller, Storage Assessments. Our experience with them was very good. We still maintain the relationship with them for upgrades and purchasing other software.

We had a developer get a virus in the Dev environment and, due to the Snapshots and backups, we were able to just blow that environment away and bring it back up pretty quickly. I would consider that ROI because it saved us a ton of money in machines and resources. We were able to do that in an hour, versus rebuilding the entire environment.

We also looked at 3PAR and HPE. We brought all three vendors in, met up. After doing testing and using them all, NetApp was by far the easiest and the deduplication was much better than the competitors.

Go with the NetApp. The ease of use and the deployment of it, by far, outdo every other vendor that we've dealt with.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. The ease of use is awesome, the support is awesome. The only thing keeping me from giving it a ten is that keeping it upgraded is a pain.

We use it to store email files, mainly JPEGs.

With ONTAP, we have peace of mind with double-parity protector RAID systems. Therefore, we can sleep well at the night, not thinking about crashing a RAID, because it's secure. We are confident with the technology. 

We use it for company websites using NetApp back-end. These are mission-critical applications.

• The capability to create no overhead Snapshots.
• The capability to restore from Snapshots: file and add volume. 
• FlexClone is a great feature. 
  
• All the features are great with ONTAP.

I would like to see more integration of the features with the CIFS and SMB Protocols. We also want integration with iSCSI. Right now, there are a lot of gap between some bleeding edge technology and the assembly protocols. Therefore, I want to see those areas improved in the future releases.

The data is always available. I haven't had a disaster using NetApp products, at least the NetApp FAS systems. It's very stable and highly protected.

You can add storage capacity on the fly with Clustered ONTAP. You can add nodes and increase the entire horsepower of ONTAP.

Technical support is hit or miss sometimes. Level 1 support is not very good. Level 2 and Level 3 (the escalation support) are very good. They are knowledgeable people, but sometimes you get some hiccup in the Level 1 support. After you pass Level 1, it is smooth sailing. There is a lot of room for improvement.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used an in-house team for the installation, and it went well.

In the past, we have used a reseller. Our experience with them was also good.

It helps us save money using compression and deduplication. No overhead snapshots and FlexClone (with no additional space) help us save space. We have been able to save about 50 percent of our space using ONTAP.

We did not consider anyone else besides NetApp.

If you are looking for something simple to manage, but an advanced storage array, NetApp is the way to go.

One use case is user files, when customers are trying to place their unstructured data and then access it remotely. A second case is is VDI. All the VDI uses have their home drives hosted in NetApp. In addition, we use NetApp for general-purpose, such as Unix applications, database archives, big data, when they need a lot of reads and fewer writes. That data comes into NAS. In our firm, we use it for tier-three and tier-four, which needs less than 20 millisecond response times. Those types of applications are deployed in NetApp.

In terms of VDI, pretty much every employee of our firm is a customer of our NAS infrastructure. Everybody's home drive is on NAS, so it's highly critical. Even a minimum outage would cause a lot of potential business risks to the firm. NetApp has come up with performance management devices to improve the performance. And it has all-flash and hybrid aggregates to improve performance in caching. It's really excellent.

As we scale more data, as we add more data into our data pool, we really need it for faster disk drives and quicker response times for our customers, to make sure they will get their data whenever they need it.

I love the replication technologies which keep a customer out of risk. At any time, we can do a seamless failover/failback, and have the latest data on it. 

The SnapVault is another excellent feature. It's used for remote disk-based backups so we don't need to depend on tape backups with their long restore times.

SnapLock is the feature we would like to see enhanced. As a bank, we store data for compliance for a long time: ten years, 15 years. The data would be locked. So they should enhance the SnapLock features. 

At the same time, the customers want a seamless failover and failback for SnapLock. As a bank, we want to look at the data availability, so every quarter we failover and failback. Today, we can failover but we can't failback. We'd like to be able to do both.

On average, the data that lives in the ONTAP hardware is there for four to six years and then it moves on to its end-of-support-life years. When it gets there, it tends to have a greater number of hardware breaks and failures. From a data perspective that's a big risk for us.

As part of tech refresh, we plan the data movement. One year before it gets to the end-of-support-life, we predominantly migrate it into a CDOT, or some other latest all-flash technology that NetApp provides us.

In CDOT, theoretically, you can have 24 nodes in a cluster, but we are careful about that. Right now, we have ten-node clusters. We feel CDOT provides scalability in terms of the virtual world. You can keep adding nodes, you can keep adding disk shelves, you can scale your volumes. And then you can virtually move your failover capabilities from node A to node B, whichever node you want. When you want to do maintenance, you can just virtually move your LIFs' interfaces to other nodes and then you can safely failover. That's great, amazing.

The only thing that they have to improve in NetApp is that they're still relying on padding each node in active-active in CDOT. That has to go away. They should look at the scalability on a platform level. The computer would have that one file system with multiple nodes on it. If even one node fails, any node in that cluster could take over the functionalities. But today, it absolutely relies on that active-active uncoupling it. That needs to be improved in such a way that it would be one namespace. If this node goes down, any node in the cluster should take over and run that environment. It should also have stability, high-availability, and data protection. It all happens today in the virtual world, but it has to happen in the physical layout as well.

Tech support is okay. We have given our feedback. What we have seen it evolve over a period of time. So far it's okay. It still has not reached a level I would call "great," but it's okay. It's going in the right direction.

We have performance issues and capacity issues, among other things. We don't get the right engineer, the right attention the first time, so it needs escalation. We need to raise the priority of the cases to make sure to grab NetApp's attention. Those situations have to be avoided. There needs to be a proactive solution instead of reactive.

We do see ROI from the capacity perspective, although I don't have data points at the moment.

I would rate ONTAP at eight out of ten. It's an industry standard. It pretty much supports all the protocols and it delivers what the customer needs. It's operating on the use case perspective. Instead of having thousands of features - what is the use of that if a customer only wants ten percent of it - NetApp is really focusing on the ten percent, and delivering what the customer really needs.

It would be a ten out of ten with cluster enhancement and support improvements. Those are things that they should improve. I hope in a couple of years, when I come to the next NetApp Insight conference, I'll be able to tell you it's a ten.