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NetApp SnapCenter pros and cons

Vendor: NetApp
4.0 out of 5
123 followers
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Technical support for NetApp SnapCenter is very helpful in resolving issues.
Cloning is considered the most valuable feature of NetApp SnapCenter.
NetApp SnapCenter is widely used by banks and financial institutions.
NetApp SnapCenter facilitates strategic planning by providing clear visualization of data backup and recovery workflows.
NetApp SnapCenter allows for quick deployment of new virtual environments and offers efficient, easy-to-use data protection with fast recovery capabilities.

CONS

NetApp SnapCenter lags in terms of availability.
The initial setup is complex and should provide publicly available training documents.
Ease of management needs to be improved.
NetApp SnapCenter could enhance its integration with other backup solutions, such as Veeam.
There is a need for better integration with other backup solutions.
 

NetApp SnapCenter Pros review quotes

AI
Dec 19, 2018
The way that it interconnects with VMware is really handy, because you can go right into your vSphere client, where you spend a lot of the day anyway, right-click on one of the VMs where you have backups running for however long, and you can restore either some files or restore the entire thing.
ID
Jan 10, 2019
A feature that stands out is cloning databases. If you have a SQL database and it's huge, like one terabyte, the classical SQL way would be to do a backup-restore to create a clone of your database for test purposes. With SnapCenter now, we can clone a database but through the Snapshot technology, which means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 9, 2024
It helps with strategic planning because it is easy to make a strategy when you have visualized the inflow and outflow of the backup and recovery.
Learn what your peers think about NetApp SnapCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
CG
Nov 25, 2018
The most valuable feature is that it's centralized. In the old SnapManager days, we had software for each server. Now, with a centralized system, we're able to manage all systems remotely, and all agents remotely, and update them remotely. That's a huge benefit for us.
MM
Dec 24, 2018
The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place.
Engineer1785 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 20, 2018
The backup features are the most valuable because they allow the DBAs to replace SnapManager for Oracle (SMO), which is going away, and to do cloning as well. We can also clone to different servers and have the actual backup clone mounted on different servers. And we can split easily too.
MM
Dec 24, 2018
The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters.
it_user979209 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 19, 2018
What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues.
RP
Jan 13, 2019
We have been very satisfied with the technical support's help. Their knowledge level is great. For a noncritical question, they will get back to us within a day.
KA
Dec 24, 2018
Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on.
 

NetApp SnapCenter Cons review quotes

AI
Dec 19, 2018
There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there.
ID
Jan 10, 2019
I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 9, 2024
One thing that might be improved is the ease of management.
Learn what your peers think about NetApp SnapCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
CG
Nov 25, 2018
We have hundreds of servers and systems and hundreds of customers and they're separated in a multi-tenancy way in NetApp SVM. Right now, the problem is that it always scan all SVMs. If I backup Customer A, it scans all SVMs, or tries to scan all SVMs, if there is a backup relationship on the storage. But it doesn't have the permissions, so we run into timeouts or the backup just takes too long. They're fixing that in the upcoming release...
MM
Dec 24, 2018
When you have role-based access, for example, it's a bit of a problem that the person who creates the backup job is the owner of it. We are struggling a bit with this, that everyone has the same view and the same permissions in there.
Engineer1785 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 20, 2018
The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has.
MM
Dec 24, 2018
We tend to have a lot of Hyper-V... so now we have two management consoles and we would ideally like to leverage SnapCenter to include Hyper-V.
it_user979209 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 19, 2018
What I did witness lately are issues with some Microsoft KBs, the updates. But it happened only once, and not on a major platform, it was on a small one.
RP
Jan 13, 2019
Some of the minor functionalities from SnapManager did not transfer over to SnapCenter. These should be added in future releases.
KA
Dec 24, 2018
The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support.