NetApp ONTAP Reviews

Our primary use case is file storage. We use it for SMB CIFs and Fibre Channel LUN for Hyper-V.

Our administrative effort is lower. 

DR is much easier now. It is essentially just flipping a few switches, then we have replicated data up in our DR data center. We have done the tests, and it works perfectly. We also have file services which are DR, where we flip another switch and all our files are in another easy place to locate. 

SnapMirror is a good solution, because we can take our production data and replicate it over to our DR data center with minimal administrative effort, which is huge.

I would like to see FlexGroup volumes come to parity in terms of software features with Flex volumes. It seems like FlexGroup volumes have massive scalability, but their features set is not the same as Flex volumes, so we are currently unable to use it. 

The stability is perfect. Even when we are doing upgrades to the ONTAP cluster, such as rolling upgrades where one node will take over the other cluster's volumes, we have zero downtime. 

Scalability is great. We are in current discussions to obtain another two nodes to our ONTAP cluster. So, two more nodes to our already two node cluster, and we don't expect any downtime. We have seen how much it can scale in terms of numbers, so we are happy with it.

Technical support is good. NetApp's solution engineers are good at architecting designs which are standard, but also future thinking. I've only opened a few tickets, and they've answered my questions each time. NetApp takes less than four hours to respond.

We once opened a ticket to have a technical support person online at two in the morning for a cluster upgrade. The technical lead was online and supportive, and nothing went wrong with the upgrade.

They have awesome technical guides and documentation.

The initial setup is straightforward, because getting a storage system installed is not the hardest thing. It takes some know how, but it's not an impossible task. 

When we do a controller upgrade from a FAS8200 to a FAS9000, I want somebody there to watch over the upgrade because something can go wrong, and I do want technical help. However, the cool thing is while we're apprehensive and know what can happen, it never has. We're too cautious.

Meridian and ePlus implemented our solution. We had no issues and found them to be knowledgeable.

We look at the other companies, like Dell EMC and Nutanix. We decided to go with NetApp because they are an industry leader. We also liked their SnapMirror and SnapVault features.

ONTAP is easy and works. It most likely has all the features you need, and then some. 

Each ONTAP upgrade has brought us new features, like rest encryption.

The new solution is crazy small and compact.

We use it for electronic design automation, build, and regression.

• The management stack
• Performance visibility tools
• Replications

The product already has more features than we can keep up with. 

I'm looking for a performance bump.

It is very stable.

It is good from a capacity perspective, but not as good as we need from a performance perspective, but I'm hopeful going forward. At the moment, we are always running out of CPU on the controllers, even the high-end solutions.

The technical support is very good.

cDOT is more complex than 7-Mode, but we're hoping that NetApp makes it simpler as time goes on.

We used a VAR for the deployment. We have a good relationship with them.

NetApp has been our workhorse solution for more than 20 years now. It's our main solution that we use. We have been using other vendors for the high performance stuff, but I'd like to see a future where NetApp is an option in this space again.

We use NetApp for its capacity, mid-range performance in the management stack, and its features set are unparalleled. We go to Dell EMC Isilon and Pure Storage FlashBlade for raw performance on things that we can't do on NetApp today.

I would give it an eight out of ten on its feature set, maturity, and global product availability.

Up and coming vendors can provide performance or specific features. However, compared to Hardware Universe, Unified Manager, and replication, along with spectrum, from the FAS2000 that we use out our small sites to FAS9000 that we use for big regressions, these other company don't have the breadth to the feature set that NetApp has today.

We use NetApp ONTAP for many services concerned with banking solutions. 

The application and the application technology is really helpful to us. We find its use to be really good.

The licensing prices are really high. 

It would be nice if they make it so that one can operate the console without the need for interface-related comments. 

We have been using NetApp ONTAP for around three years.

The solution is certainly reliable. In the two or three years that we have worked with it we have not encountered any problems. 

As we are based in Iran, where there are many issues, such as sanctions, NetApp tech support has not been an option for us. 

We handled the initial setup on our own. 

I feel the licensing prices to be very much on the high side. I do not know how frequently these licenses must be renewed. 

In the three years that we have been using the solution, we have not encountered any problems with it and found it to work really well. 

As I have had experience working with EMC, PROMISE and HP, I would definitely recommend the solution to others. I find the solution to be really reliable and strong. Its storage device capabilities are very professional. 

I rate NetApp ONTAP as an eight out of ten. 

We use Data ONTAP to provide CIFS and NFS shares, as well as direct attached data stores for VMware.

Four years ago, upgrading a NetApp controller was a command line process which was very arduous. Today, because NetApp listened to their customers and improved their GUI, we can perform a firmware upgrade within minutes.

The most valuable features would be:

• CIFS environment sharing.
• The availability of NetApp to tie into the UCS FlexPod environment.
• Integrated monitoring with OnCommand.

I would like to see some sort of a free version of OnCommand: A stripped down version of OnCommand Unified Manager offering a bit better usage for enterprise users. We have found that it's very hard to get it without buying it outright. I wish they had a better marketing with the product. It's probably my biggest gripe with them. You really need OnCommand to do a lot of cool stuff with NetApp, and they make it hard to get.

It's not an all inclusive model. You have the option to purchase modules to make the entire ecosystem coherent. I would like the option to pay one price and get everything all inclusive, like OnCommand.

If you don't have a TAM or SAM, it can be difficult to get P1 cases.

We serve out data from a multitude of different properties through FlexPod environments, as well as a centralized data serving location in the Las Vegas area. We have had minimal downtime over the past five to ten years that we have been using the product.

Scalability has been less of an issue. 

Unfortunately, NetApp does forklift upgrades. This is probably the biggest negative that I have with NetApp as a whole. We found to upgrade a FlexPod environment, if we wanted to upgrade the UCS on the Cisco side, due to the interoperability matrix, sometimes we'll have to upgrade controller units. Basically, if we upgrade one part of our infrastructure, we have to upgrade another part. 

This affects our scalability. Instead of being able to simply add a couple of shelves, that controller may only be able to hold four shelves. However, we already have four shelves, so now we have to buy a new controller unit. Whereas, some of other companies, you can just add another controller unit and an HA pair, then you are off to the races with more shelves.

The technical support is good. We had a TAM for a long time. Now, we have a SAM, and working through them we found that our cases get risen in priority level whenever we need it. We haven't had to fight for quite some time to get P1. It is easy to escalate.

We were previously using DAS-JBODs, but this was in 2007. We pretty much followed everybody else when the industry went to NetApp. We have been using NetApp ever since it was 7-Mode.

The initial setup was straightforward after we used EVOLTECH as a third-party. We actually took the process over after watching them do it a couple times. It was that easy.

Upgrades are great. One of the best things about NetApp is that their products are so easy to upgrade now. That did not use to be the case.

We used EVOLTECH for the deployment. We were happy with them. They did the job that we asked them to do.

We have seen ROI.

We were considering Pure Storage and Dell EMC. NetApp won out with a far superior price point.

ONTAP has a lot of stuff that most people don't utilize it for. For example, the entire Snap Management package is an underutilized piece of software in our industry. 

Get it and use a lot of the features, then have your mind blown. The moment you start using it is when the magic happens. If you don't use it, then you don't know how awesome it is.

We use it to manage our NetApps.

We used to have to log in to each cluster per NetApp to view statistics on it or the logs, if something was wrong. But now we can use ONTAP to view all the clusters and it shows us if something is full of space or not.

The most valuable feature of the solution is to be able to view multiple clusters on one pane of glass.

I find it to be very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all since we started using it, two to three years ago.

It's very scalable. We're in the gaming industry. We had 12 casinos and now we have 26 casinos. You can just input all of the NetApps. There weren't any problems.

The technical support hasn't been that great. A couple of times we have had to call support and it took a long time to get somebody on the phone, it took a long time for someone to call us back. That's the only downside, the support.

This is a type of solution that we didn't have before. It was new to NetApp. We jumped on it right away, as soon as we learned that we could view multiple clusters on one web page.

It was straightforward. We just had to build a VM for the ONTAP and install the software on that. It was easy after that.

We installed it ourselves.

We can scale it better, having multiple clusters at once. It also saves us time. One of us can log in to check over all of our casinos at once, compared to having to log in, one at a time, to check a casino and see how its storage is going. It's a very good return on investment.

We mostly had NetApp in our infrastructure already. We really had to go with them based on that. The alternative was buying a whole new solution, software, storage, etc. We didn't really have a shortlist of other options.

Test it out, go with a PoC on it to see if it's what you need in your environment. If you have a majority of NetApp, I would say, “Go with it.” I would recommend it.

I would give ONTAP about an eight out of ten because it does everything we need it to do. The two points I took off were for customer service and technical support.

We use it for VMware.

Clustered ONTAP makes it very easy to manage large amounts of data, measured in petabytes. One person can manage all that. In the old days, you could never do that.

We're using it as a virtualization platform, so not only are we buying NetApp SSD, we're also able to utilize our existing Dell EMC storage that still is under support.

I would like to see volume efficiency come closer to what Dell EMC can do with, for instance, their XtremIO platform.

Today, the stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is poor. The first line people that pick up the phone are, quite honestly, awful. Once you get to an escalation engineer they're extremely talented, but you have to pull teeth to get there.

My management was all about Dell EMC. With my experience with NetApp I just kept my mouth shut and asked technical questions and Dell EMC basically fell flat. They actually proposed a mid-tier solution that was, as they put it, a number of storage silos. And I said, "This is 2018. We have storage silos?"

So I was able to work with CDW and prove that the FlexArray would front-end the existing Unity's and 3PARs we have. CDW ended up coming to the table and they won the deal. They came in late but they won the deal. The NetApp people have never come to our office yet.

We did purchase Basic Install, so it was straightforward.

Dell EMC and Pure were on our shortlist. Dell EMC couldn't come with a reasonable solution. Pure is all-flash and we needed hybrid.

I would advise colleagues who are researching this type of solution to look at NetApp. We bought it for a couple reasons. One, it took advantage of our existing storage because we could front-end that storage. It also allowed us, through native replication, to set up a DR site, which we're working towards. And three, that DR site, in 2020, is going to the cloud. NetApp has a nice solution for that. And our production in 2022 may actually go to the cloud. So all that is already in place, no additional tools. You can use the same SnapMirror and SnapVault technology to get there. To me, it makes sense.

We bought our solution through CDW. They're excellent.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten. I think it's time for a hardware refresh. We ended up buying 8200s and they've been out on the market for quite a while. There is newer hardware that we were hoping to take advantage of but we needed the storage now.

I have use this storage appliance, which they have on-premise. It is for taking backup off onsite data. This is a storage and NAS device.

Its typical use case is storing files and getting data, so it does its use case well.

When it accesses regular files, it does so as an NFS workload, which retrieves data quickly.

The initial UI integration could be quite a lot better.

I would like to have deduplication and SSD features in the product.

If you have huge data, you will see stability issues. Since we didn't have that data, our stability has been fine.

We previously haven't had a huge workload, so it scaled fine. Though, with our current use case, we will need something faster. E.g., if you have a huge scale, having SSD-based backup is better. 

We did not contact technical support, as the solution was working fine.

The integration and configuration are not straightforward. We had to read some documentation and receive support. A good UI may be helpful in resolving this.

We looked at various Dell EMC products at the time and considered using VMAX. We also looked at Nimble Storage. For some reason, we did not look at Pure Storage.

We chose NetApp because had some collaboration or a sales representative who approached us, then convinced us of the use case.

Based on the use case, it can be a good product.

We have just one application where we store data, and we haven't had problems with it.

We are a NetApp distributor. We offer assistance for banking solutions, energy companies, and companies that do retail.

We distribute Netapp as well as a variety of other products, like VMware, for example. We use all our products to provide our customers with a whole solution.

Efficiency. We have found that its efficiency has reduced the amount of storage that the customers need, while keeping the same amount of data. 

They constantly develop new features that provide the customers with ways they can better use the system.

Deployment guides. If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides.

It has almost 100% stability.

The solution is very scalable. We have found that the ability to add other nodes to the online cluster during production has been really useful for customers.

NetApp has very good technical support across all of their products. They have many ways to contact support and you receive support almost instantly.

The customers like the support as well. The customer has on-site support with a four-hour response. They always have support as they need it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to deploy.

I'm a presales engineer. The way that I help customers is by architecting their infrastructure which helps them to decide which is the best solution for them. I also help plan the future of their infrastructure, the way they're going to be expanding the systems or the way they're going to renew their systems.

With the efficiencies of NetApp, the customer is going to be able to reduce the amount of storage they need. This is the way that the customer assesses the amount of money they invest in the solution.

I think because of the integration with the other products we sell, like VMware, for example, that's why they have us use NetApp as a storage solution. We sell a lot of security products that have integration with NetApp and we also have integration with Microsoft and VMware which have integration with NetApp.

It's an excellent product. They always have new solutions for their customers. They also have good integration with other partners like Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle.

Compared with their competitors, NetApp has a good advantage with their new development and new functionalities. The new platforms are competitive with other storage solutions. NetApp has better integration with all their solutions. They have only one interface for all their products as well as the same operating system. It's really easy for the customer to handle and to administer the solution.