NetApp ONTAP Reviews

My primary use case is we have both Windows and Unix and they share file systems for compiling code. The big advantage with NetApp is the ability to file Linux symlinks in the Windows environment. 

When I came on board they had NetApp and ONTAP was old and the system was getting to its end-of-life and corporate wasn't sure which way they were going to go. They couldn't quite make a decision on whether to buy a very large unit or a small unit because we were gonna become a central hub. They decided to scrap, and what to choose landed in my lap. I decided to go with a smaller NetApp that would fit the main requirements that I needed NetApp for and I use other types of storages for VMware. My volumes, that are NFS and SIFS, there's a lot of stuff that's used both on Windows and Unix so I need the ability to maintain the permissions between the two. I get better security with ONTAP and I get better control of users space requirement because I have qtrees and quotas and then I have the masking of user accounts, NIS to AD. The other thing that's a really good bonus is that ONTAP has a deprecated NIS and a lot of other vendors are deprecated NIS.

Critical applications are not as critical as like you'd normally experience because I am R&D and it is a production environment for R&D, but I have time to build a recover. I can recover hourly from snaps, everything else I recover from tape backup because my backup uses MDMP and it'll be just as fast as Snap and storage are cheaper.

Cost of storage hasn't reduced but it's more cost effective because the very specific requirements drop the ball. Especially when it comes to user account translation from Unix to Windows. ONTAP and Dell EMC are the only two real vendors that know how to do that properly.

For me and my users, the most valuable feature is the ability to mask Unix accounts to Linux accounts.

Stability's perfect because I have two nodes, I'm not overloading the nodes because it's just R&D and it's very specific lines, so it's a lot of terabytes but we're not in petabytes. For what I do it's very stable.

Scalability is perfectly fine. Right now I only have the two nodes and one shelf. I'll be able to easily upgrade additional shelves. They gave me plenty of cabling when I got the unit so all I have to do is disconnect and reconnect the cabling and that's it.

Tech support has been pretty awesome. The only thing is that 9.4 has been presenting a couple of challenges and there was one case, for example, where I didn't want Snaps. There's a command to be able to disable the scheduler, but with 9.4 that command doesn't quite work. I ended up using a workaround which tells the scheduler that it has zero snap capability on all snap jobs.

The initial installation could've been quite easy, but there was a lot of miscommunications with professional services and there are a lot of details that they didn't quite provide which caused a very complicated installation.

A lot of Windows builds have been failing simply because when they go through the file system they can't file the symbolic links that are created on the Linux file system. Now they will resolve because ONTAP supports that.

I would rate this solution a ten. It's very easy to use. What I really like about it is it incorporates the same thing as CentOS and RHEL 7 which is the Tap commands. If you have an idea of what commands you want to use, you can tap through and figure out what you need without having to go and look for the full syntax.

I work for an oil and gas company. We go out to the field and get oil from the ground. The primary use case is for development and preparation for production. 

We're able to gather information, and put it all together to find out where the best place to drill would be. Also, speed. Our databases work a lot faster, probably 18 or 20 percent faster than previously. The speed has increased the performance. 

My colleagues get their information files without bringing down SQL.

It's very fast, NetApp is always dependable, so if we have an issue, they're very responsive.

The new release has a lot of features that will save us space and therefore, money. The inline deduplication and compression are really nice. 

They could lower prices so my management doesn't complain about cost. Other than that, I'm always happy with the releases. 

It's 100 percent. We've never had any issues with it. 

It's 100 percent. It's easy to add additional storage disks. 

I would rate tech support at nine-plus out of ten. It's not a ten because I have to wait when I call. I can wait for 20, 30 minutes before I get to somebody who can actually help me. Normally NetApp identifies the issue before I get out of bed and has a solution already planned. 

We were coming to end-of-life with our old solution, and this was the next generation that was available, so we would have upgraded regardless. This was the best option.

It was straightforward. It's built on previous NetApp operating systems. I understood it without knowing the new generation. 

We used NetApp Professional Services, and it was very good. I worked with them beforehand and gave them my plan. Any corrections were made beforehand. We've done it twice and it's been very good.

I know they have saved time, and time equals money. We also have more space in the data center. It's a smaller footprint by half a rack. That's a lot less money and a lot less cooling.

We looked at Dell EMC, but we would never go with them. They don't have good support and it's gotten worse over the years since Dell and EMC merged. Instead of two bad support systems, they have now combined it into one huge, bad support system. NetApp's technical support and proven stability are a lot better than them. We've been using NetApp for around 15 years and we've always had good results with it.

It's an advance from what we used before, and a lot faster. It doesn't take a lot of learning to start using it.

Take a look at NetApp and get the Professional Services involved. If you're coming from a different vendor, they'll be able to assist with getting the data moved over. That would be my main point.

It is the easiest way to backup, restore data, and access data along with keep it secure. It has an easy interface to manage all the data.

It has made it easy to deal with the scalability in our organization along with the mass increase of data. We avoid loss of important data and can recover it completely. NetApp has made this challenge for us easy.

• Saving data and backing up it, up to the minute.
• 100% guarantee restoring data. 
• Saving money because of the dedupe technologies.
  

I would like more security against the malwares, spyware, and ransomware. I feel like ONTAP is a bit lacking in this area.

It is very stable. You can trust NetApp almost 100% that it will work fine. The disks are stable and our data is safe with NetApp.

If we want to change things in models, such as add, replace, and adjust to another client, it is very easy. This is a good thing.

They have very good tech support who always answers our questions and troubleshoots our issues. They're great. It is easy to escalate, and they have friendly people. They will help you all the time, every hour in a day.

NetApp was our first storage solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used Encore Technology Group. Our experience was not very good as they lost data, which was a critical mistake for us. They also did not respond in time.

Because of the dedupe technologies and Data ONTAP servers, we have saved 20% on hardware. This is a lot of money for us.

While it is going to cost a lot of money, their technologies is worth it.

We also considered HPE and IBM, but NetApp was the cheapest, friendliest, and most accessible.

It is friendly to use and manage. They are very good in backup and restoring 100% of things up to the minute. It's very easy for regular users. 

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.

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.

We use ONTAP for systems management, running and managing storage appliances.

ONTAP, for us, is underpinning all the software that sits on top of our hardware. We manufacture the infrastructure side of NetApp appliances. We use the capabilities of ONTAP for our customers. It's a case of implementation of that software and using that software to manage the storage arrays we're putting into our clients' environments. We also use it for PoCs. We'll deploy the software and demonstrate it for customers.

When you look at traditional, simplified storage, you would have a lot of manual command-line toolsets, you would have a lot of simple features and capabilities. With ONTAP and features like SnapMirror - the ability to have these more advanced capabilities - NetApp is leading that space. There are a lot of stats out there about what NetApp is doing around storage features and it's making it easier for our customers to consume rich storage features more easily.

The customers we work with absolutely use this solution for their mission-critical apps. For example, we have a university customer where NetApp underpins all their corporate systems. For them, that's mission-critical because they have to pay and manage, from an AP perspective, all of their internal customers. Without that system in place, without it being robust and reliable, they have no business, effectively, as a university. For them, it is absolutely mission-critical.

We have customers who have had ONTAP deployed for each of machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, and similar groundbreaking applications. Our university customer is a good example. From an SAP perspective, they have a lot of rich analytics being done on that platform. ONTAP provides the best value for them. How the system gets architected is key, ensuring they have the right solution in place to get the best performance. The fact that NetApp performance, in general, is better than a lot of the competitors anyway has helped the university immensely.

In terms of helping us reduce the overall cost of storage, efficiencies such as Flash Cache and Flash Pool allow us to make better use of slower, cheaper storage and have some faster storage sitting up front taking a lot of the caching and the reading. The way that has been optimized for the NetApp platform is better than the competitors. It has reduced our cost of storage because we're buying cheaper storage, for the bulk capacity, which is really effective.

Storage efficiencies in ONTAP have been fantastic. For things like Snapshot-ing, when you are rolling out multiple clones, having good storage efficiency is really key.

Valuable features are SnapVault, SnapMirror, all the capabilities around Snapshot-ing. 

Also, the ability to then spin up copies of data in other data centers, on other storage appliances, is the most valuable for us and the one that we see the most interest in from our customers.

I would like to see more in the public cloud space around things like object storage. A bit more granularity around how that gets deployed would be nice, but other than that I think they've got it nailed.

The trend is heading in that direction, where more and more customers want to deploy applications that leverage object storage. It would be nice to have a more seamless integration, although it's not bad at the moment.

ONTAP is now in its ninth version. It's the most robust software on a storage platform on the market at the moment. I don't think anyone else has the same capability with the same level of flexibility.

The fact that you can have large clusters, you can keep bolting on more and more nodes, more and more appliances, makes it a lot more flexible than a lot of other providers. Normally, with a traditional SAN, you put a big SAN in the corner, stick some stuff into it, and leave it alone. Compared to having to buy another SAN with a different workload, the fact that, with NetApp, you can cluster and spread workloads across, makes it more scalable.

From what limited exposure I've had personally, our local support is fantastic. In terms of the process of raising tickets, I've not heard of customers having issues with the support mechanisms that NetApp has in place.

What typically drives the solution is the outcome for the customer. The customer will naturally follow down the path of needing a particular feature set to achieve some sort of outcome. We work through that list and figure out what that looks like. ONTAP seems to tick more of the boxes than any other product.

For the average person, it might not be straightforward but, in my opinion, the setup is more straightforward when compared to other storage platforms. Active IQ and the tools you have access to are a lot better than the competitors'.

Typically we work directly with NetApp on all our installations. Our experience with them has been fantastic. Really good guys, really good to work with, extremely knowledgeable.

We haven't measured ROI, but I guarantee there would be some. The cost per IOP is different for every customer environment so I can't give a figure for that.

IBM, since we're a partner. The reason I would go with NetApp is their products are a higher enterprise-grade than the IBM products, which is saying something. IBM is more of a mid-market play. The NetApp stuff is a more holistic, feature-rich set. It has more capabilities. The price points are roughly similar compared to competing products. NetApp is just a richer experience.

Do your research. Undestand what NetApp can offer. Talk to local NetApp resources and you'll find out a lot. One of the challenges a lot of customers have is that they don't know what they don't know. The more you talk to people, the more you will understand. I would advise talking to the local resources first, see what they've got. They probably have a solution, as far as ONTAP is concerned, that would fit into your requirements, the outcomes you're looking for.

I sat in on a session about NVMe over Fabrics this morning here at NetApp Insight 2018. Reducing the latency, getting storage to the application as quickly as possible, is phenomenal. That becoming the new standard, instead of the old-school SCSI approach, is going to become the next big thing. The fact that they're reducing that controller piece in it, the latency drops so significantly - traditional Fiber Channel is missing out on an opportunity to improve performance.

In terms of using NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fiber Channel, the good thing is that if customers already have investment in Fiber Channel networks, they can still take advantage of new technology from a storage perspective, without having to worry about upgrading and forklifting in new, specific equipment for that particular purpose.

As a software set, from a storage perspective, I would rate NetApp at eight out of ten because the maturity of the product is so much greater than the competition. I don't think anybody else has the level of flexibility and feature sets that ONTAP has.

We use it to manage storage for our customers. 

Our customers use it for mission-critical applications, such as backup circuits.

We use ONTAP as a managed storage for customers. It helps our customers with all its features.

There is a faster release cycle now. Also, they are doing all types of cool stuff in their cloud volumes, replication, and tiering.

The fabric pools in the newer version is cool, though we don't use it yet. It provides tiering to cloud and fabric pools.

• We would like full automation of deployment.
• The ability to scale out.
• The lack of an API is a big thing for us that needs to be improved. It needs proper API support.

It is very stable and never crashes. During maintenance, it's easy to do. If you lose connectivity, it has one-sided redundant connectivity on the back-end for shelves, which is good.

It doesn't scale horizontally since there are a limited number of shelves. Other NetApp solutions are way better at scaling. This needs improvement since the future is in scaling horizontally, similar to what SolidFire does.

NetApp's technical support is always perfect. They go above and beyond when trying to help.

We generally upgrade when a solution is end of life or moving out of support.

With older versions, it was a little complex at some point, but this was back in the day. It's still a bit challenging, but when you have the right versions, it's straightforward. 

We're trying to automate the deployment process, and as far as I know, you cannot do that with ONTAP systems today. This may not be true with the newest 9.4 or 9.5 systems. 

What makes it complicated, there is no API available to automate a task. Now, they have released a lot of Ansible playbooks to automate a deployment, which might have significantly improved it, but I have not had a chance to try them.

We did the deployment ourselves.

I would recommend ONTAP, because I like the platform. With the most recent stuff, like the fabric pools which blow my mind, it is a really good solution.

There is something interesting stuff coming out in the future, like NVMe over Fabric, which has a different rate over Fiber Channel.

We use it for cloud. We have a big VMware environment with CIFS, NFS, and other applications. Most of the data is on NetApp.

It has the ability to bring up disaster recovery quickly.

• High availability
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption

The toughest thing that we have right now is a cabling issue. There are so many that you need to connect.

I would like to see more S3 integration with other vendors, objects, or instruments. We are a big Dell EMC shop and would like to have this integration.

It is very stable. Given you have so many nodes in a cluster, the volumes, connections, and lifts can be moved anywhere within the cluster.

It is better than some of the other solutions that we have used. It is easy to expand nodes.

We are a premiere customer. When we call, we get someone on right away.

We have grown with NetApp. As they grow, we grow.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there is some complexity. 

We used professional services from NetApp for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression.

We have a mixture of NetApp and Dell EMC.

NetApp does NAS well and better than other vendors.