NetApp ONTAP Reviews

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 with the All Flash FAS solution.

There are a lot of the reasons that we chose this solution. We are going the direction of automation in the cloud. It has flexibility and supportability around NetApp solutions and products.

For the All Flash FAS, it has lessened our performance issues. Our support for that is a lot easier for our patients to access.

The most valuable feature is the NVMe AFF.

The config could be a little easier. It's not entirely difficult, but it could be a somewhat easier. I have seen other vendors make it easier. 

We have other flash arrays which seem solid, but we trust NetApp to deliver us the best product.

One of the big benefits was the scalability. We wanted to grow as is. 

We have a lot of problems with this right now, so this product seems to help.

We have always had great technical support from NetApp on all their solutions. That's why I trust them against all our other vendors.

The initial setup is straightforward. Most of the information can be found outside of the config guide, either way the information is available.

We used a reseller for deployment, PEAK Resources. We have been using them for 15 years. They're awesome.

We chose NetApp for a lot of support reasons.

Other vendors did not seem to not be on the forefront with their solutions. Their roadmaps for the future were unclear, where NetApp's roadmap is solid. It seemed very specific for our needs.

We also looked at IBM, Pure Storage, Nutanix, and Pivot3. None of them met the mark. They were all short for a lot of reasons, but mainly it was the roadmaps. They were unclear and general, so we decided to go with NetApp.

Don't buy IBM.

NetApp solutions get rid of a lot of time spent on the operational side. This solution makes things easier for us on the operations side. 

NetApp seems to be very cognizant of what we need and where the future of technology is going with health care, in general.

We use it for storing unstructured data.

It is able to store a lot of data, and we can manage it with fewer people.

• Snapshot
• Availability
• Performance

Generally, their products are good when they come out of the gate. However, what would be good is when we uncover new issues, if those could be addressed quickly. 

We would like to see SnapMirror encryption in the next release and have better access to feature development.

It is generally very stable.

Technical support has gone down in my perspective. When getting to the root cause of issues, they need to respond faster. Also, they need to respond quicker to bug fixes.

There have been some changes internally at NetApp. Currently, we are moving to a different level of support which will hopefully fix our issues with it.

We use NetApp products. If we switch products, it is because the product does not perform or is not keeping up with its competitors in terms of cost.

We did the deployment ourselves. Deployments are easy, but NetApp could make it easier.

Return on investment has been good.

There are specific workloads where some vendors provide better value, but in general, NetApp has done a far better on price than other vendors.

We have used Hitachi and Dell EMC, but we use NetApp the most.

It is a good, market-leading product.

We use it for on-premise storage.

For our organization, in terms of resiliency, it has gotten better over the years. It has also become more reliable.

• Availability
• Resiliency
• Recoverablity

I would like to see more evolution towards the cloud.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is very good. It enables us to use different product lines within the same operating system.

Technical support is good to very good.

We actually haven't switched. We've been using it for about 15 years. We've been with it for a long time.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We do all our deployments in-house.

We're always looking at different vendors, and we want to see fit-for-purpose. We want to make sure that we're using the right technology for the right job.

It has a good, safe implementation.

I gave this product an eight, because there is always room for improvement and to make things better.

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 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.

Definitely ONTAP. The command line. It's super easy to use.

The ONTAP is so easy to use. I can do my tasks pretty easily on there. If someone needs something quickly I can give them what they need pretty quickly.

The one thing I would really like to see - I don't know if they offer this or not. I know EMC has got really good: their SRDF replication is really good for keeping consistency with your backups, or the other side.

NetApp is crash consistent. I don't know the quality of the EMC one but that one seems to work really well. EMC is primarily block storage anyway so that is what it is build for.

It's pretty stable. There have been some random crashes we have had though, from a couple weird things.

There always seems to be some random bug in the code. If there is a random bug in the code, it seems like we have so many of these storage arrays that one of them is going to experience a crash from it. We have had a couple like that, zombie deletes, causing the controller to panic. We have had a couple weird things like that.

Never really implemented one but it seemed to be pretty easy to scale out. If you have the money to buy one, to scale it out is nothing crazy.

We have an in-house resource and usually, if there is something going wrong, he is the one that will handle it and give it direction. If we ever call it in we always get the front-line people and typically we don't need the front-line people. When we need support we need someone specialized, like a certain protocol or a certain aspect. Usually, that's kind of annoying, when we call in it's getting front-line people and it is an extra 30 minutes just to get to where we need to go, really.

No, ever since I have been here at Centene, we have been using NetApp.

I know NetApp and EMC are at the top, but other than that we don't really have any. I haven't seen much for any other vendor, like Nimble or like a couple of others, we don't really deal with those.

We use it for datastores, and do a little bit of SAN on it too. We use it for both, block and file storage.

My impression of NetApp as avendor of high performance SAN storage is that it's not as good as EMC. I don't have any complaints, really. I primarily use NetApp. I only use the EMCs a little bit.

I am more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experience with AFF. The failover seems to work pretty well, they seem to be pretty reliable. If you have a lot of clusters, a cluster that's broke out, it works pretty well. If it fails or crashes, you still have to fix it but it still works.

Performance is pretty good. It's a little hard to compare because I'm not really on the OS side. I don't really delegate storage provision so I hardly ever get to see the other side of the systems.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria include is: can the vendor supply a solution that we need? If we need block storage, can they do block storage very well? If we need good replication, can they provide that? It just depends on what we need it for and if they can provide that solution the best. Our company doesn't have any really money constraint problems. It's more just about the solution than about the cost.

If someone was looking to buy one I would say: I love the ONTAP operating system. The support is pretty good. I would say the block side of NetApp is probably the weak point. It still does it well, but if you are doing file shares and datastores, you could use it for that. That is primarily what we use it for.

The primary use case is to move from Fibre Channel to SolidFire.

We see it drastically improving our organization. We are trying to move away from Fibre Channel. SolidFire with iSCSI will change a lot going forward in the organization.

The vendor diagnostics, which allows for movement from one vendor to another vendor using the application technology that is available. It should be able to talk to any vendor, not just NetApp to NetApp. We should be able to replicate the data, so the next feature should not be vendor specific.

The solution is stable, and upcoming releases will make it more stable.

Right now, there are some limitations. However, what I am hearing is that future technologies will be more scalable than what we have now.

They have pretty good technical support. They have a different support model for the hypervisor customers, so I have been quite happy with the support until now.

The previous solutions that we have are both IP and Fibre Channel-based. We are moving away from Fibre Channel, so we wanted to look for a new solution which was IP-based.

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at multiple vendors.