NetApp SnapCenter Reviews

It's used for backup and restoring of virtual machines from VMware. I have some experience with SnapCenter but only on the installation. I don't work directly with the end customers.

The simplicity of backup and restore directly with VMware is an advantage and the time to backup and restore is reduced.

The easy installation of the plug-ins to the host is the most valuable feature.

The compatibility with other manufacturers, like Oracle and Hyper-V, could be improved. I would like to see it be more compatible with other software.

So far, it's very stable, although I don't know what it's like for the end customer. From my side, it seems to be very stable.

I had a customer with two sites, and the scalability was great. I had to install SnapCenter on both sites and it was very straightforward. The two sites communicate with each other.

I have used NetApp's technical support for this solution and it went very well. They asked me for some logs, identified the problem - we easily got to the point, where the issue was - and the problem was resolved. 

Some of our customers were using Veeam and Commvault before using SnapCenter. They did not replace the other tools, they are doing some backups with them as well. The solutions are complementing each other.

The initial setup is straightforward. Other than one issue, a networking problem on the customer's side, I have had no issues. Installation is very fast, very straightforward. Deployment, with all the features installed and configured, takes about one day.

I am using the Standard license, the free version. There is an Advanced license but I don't know its price.

Try it and buy it. Try the product to see the features, the easy installation, and how easy it is to implement and to work with.

We have five or six end customers, users, who are system admins. For deployment and maintenance, it requires two people.

I would rate SnapCenter at seven out of ten. The tool could be faster.

We use HANA Database for SMB. This is where we are using SnapCenter to manage all our Snapshots, backups, etc.

It's all together managing both storage and backup, which makes it easier for troubleshooting issues and the automation part of it. SnapCenter is the one that's making it possible to make everything work. 

The ease of access and management from both storage and backup being all in one area, where it integrates with SnapVault and other features with NetApp. However, this is not the case for databases where we used to take consistent Snapshots. 

For OnCommand Insight, they could do cloud-based stuff as well. It would be nice if they could integrate everything inside, so it would be easier for management: One tool used for everything.

I want to see a few more features add that will help our team in managing solution better.

I have not had any issues so far. It has been pretty stable.

It can scale well.

We had to engage the engineering teams on this one point, and the support that we received from NetApp was awesome.

For ERP SAP, we were using a Dell EMC solution previously, but a few things changed from the application teams perspective on what they needs were. So, this drove us to think about other solutions and not just fix on one solution that had been working fine for them. We wanted something that had both cost effectiveness, but also brought both backup and storage together in one platform. This made the difference in going with NetApp SnapCenter.

The initial setup was complex. We were one of the first customers to implement this product, which made it difficult. Even connecting SAP to NetApp was not straightforward.

We used NetApp consultants, who were great.

We only looked at Dell EMC and NetApp. The ease of access, then cost, were the factors in choosing NetApp.

Gather the requirements and see what your application team needs.

We use SnapCenter for our VMware, SQL, and Oracle environments providing application-consistent and centralized backup and recovery from disasters, and cloning. It maximizes NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror, SnapVault and cloning technology.

It's a centralized, easy-to-use solution empowering RBAC management, monitoring, notifications, extensive logging, and backup schedules for standalone as well as groups of the same types of environments. The cloning capabilities accelerate development.

We previously had the NetApp SnapManager Suite which made the transition to SnapCenter smoother. SnapCenter is better integrated into our new NetApp storage as well as ONTAP Cloud, providing tighter, relevant problem reporting. This has helped in troubleshooting any problems that arise.

Here are just some of the valuable features:

1. Quick cloning of DB environments when development or testing is critical. I love the new clone split feature and the clone update without re-cloning. 
2. Centralized management of backup plug-ins without having to manage them at the host. You can perform host/agent download and push of updates. 
3. Tight integration with NetApp storage, both on-premise and cloud. 
4. Detailed backup reporting and suggested troubleshooting. 
5. PowerShell commands can be run without having to access via the GUI.

1. The Dashboard view needs to be more compressed with better ease of access and drill-down features. 
2. DB plug-in cloning should have similar SnapManager features which allow reuse of specific cloning parameter features.
3. Reinstate Linux filesystem backups of storage volumes (which existed in the prior version).
4. Add integration into OCUM and Active IQ.
   

The solution is very stable.

In a short period of time, we have seen the product scale quickly in feature enhancements and adjustments to the product, thanks to their quick development.

Because of our prior experience with SnapManager, we had a smooth transition to SnapCenter.  When we had a need to reach out to technical support we would work directly with level-2 or global support engineers who are knowledgeable about the product.

SnapManager Suite for VMware, SQL, and Oracle.

The initial setup was straightforward, using online reference documents.

We did an in-house implementation, with additional assistance from our NetApp Enterprise Solution Architect.

We evaluated Veeam, Rubrik, Symantec, and Commvault.

• Evaluate in-depth features you require
• Validate interoperability (very critical)
• Thoroughly inventory every existing component of the business that will use it or be impacted
• Evaluate the installation, configuration, and ease of use with an eval or vendor
• Do a price comparison, once all components needed are identified

Primary use case is covering fast backup and restore for customers, mostly for SQL databases, some Oracle database systems in servers, and some file share backups with Snapshots with the possibility of restore.

SnapCenter is usually an additional software, which is not the main backup software. Most companies have already found a backup solution and are using SnapCenter to be able to do a fast restoration of their data. Therefore, they are using two solutions at once, side-by-side. Companies will have their primary backup solution and SnapCenter as a redundancy because the primary solution isn't favored to recover data so quickly.

The biggest advantage of the product is you can provide a quick restore. We have some companies with policies which require us to be able to restore their data back up and running in maximum 15 minutes. We can achieve these customer policies for RPO and RTO using SnapCenter.

Most customers are able to restore their full backup of the database in two to three minutes (15 minutes is the maximum). This way, they have another 10 minutes in their time window to restore SQL transaction logs, etc. 

The main advantage is its fast backup and restore.

The Microsoft environment is its biggest disadvantage due to the central management of all the actions. Because the SnapCenter server is where we deploy everything, it also affects the Microsoft environment, which can cause many difficulties when resolving issues like Windows update problems. 

We had less issues with SnapManager, the previous product before SnapCenter came out, where there were standalone installations. We are having issues with SnapCenter because of its central management. While it is fine if it's working, sometimes it's quite heavy to figuring out what's wrong, and mostly the problems are because of some Windows updates. We would like NetApp to develop some better diagnostics to report when an installation is performing uncharacteristically. This would allow us to resolve issues and do troubleshooting instead of opening a support case for these issues.

Some of the minor functionalities from SnapManager did not transfer over to SnapCenter. These should be added in future releases. I know that NetApp is currently working on this.

It is very stable. But if you have a bigger Microsoft environment, there are issues sometimes mostly caused by MS updates.

There are no limitations on the scalability for customers with their environment size. We currently have about ten customers using this solution with the biggest installation containing up to 40 servers.

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.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy. If you are familiar with the products and know what to do, it's quite straightforward. 

We do our customer implementations. We use our customer requirements with their RPOs and RTOs, then find out which plugins of SnapCenter that we should use for them. If it is an installation of servers, then we do some testing of the functionalities, backup, and restoring of their test environments. Afterwards, we implement their production systems and documentation.

It took about five or six of us to do the deployment (including installation and configuration) of the client's SnapCenter server and storage.

Our implementation strategy depends somewhat on the implementation strategy of the company who we are doing the implementing for. The time frame for deployment depends on the environment size, number of servers, etc. It can take from one month from the beginning of the project to the production. However, we also had one company, where we had to write a lot of documentation and do a lot testing, which lasted around nine months.

Companies tend to maintain their own SnapCenters. Some companies can maintain it with one person depending on their policies. It usually takes ten people in bigger companies to manage their parts of the storage with SQL admins, storage admins, and network admins.

The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles, making it cheaper to use SnapCenter as a second solution.

I have also used Veeam, Dell EMC NetWorker, Commvault, and HPE Data Protector. I have worked with these solutions for installations.

The problem with SnapCenter is not the backup solution. While it can help with backup and quick restore, our customers use SnapCenter (the previous version: SnapManager) as an additional tool for backup, not as the primary backup. We have no customer using SnapCenter as a primary backup.

Our primary use case is VM backup and our secondary use case is backup from all databases like SQL.

Before, we had to go to the storage CLI or to the SQL Server to check if backups ran correctly. Now, we have everything in one central management view, we don't have different views. That's the main benefit. I don't think that it really changed our organization. It's more for us, as administrators. We save a lot of time. It takes us about 50% less time for the same checks.

Also, if we have to create a new backup for a new SQL server, for example, the policy is all ready and we can add it there with just a few clicks. Before, it was a lot more difficult.

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.

It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter. You don't need to go to SnapCenter to restore a single VM, for example. You just click on VM and you can restore it completely.

We are struggling a bit with the permissions and roles. We are not sure if there is an issue at our end, if we didn't get set things up correctly, as per plan. 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.

I don't think it's really an issue with SnapCenter. I think it's more that we aren't using it correctly.

In terms of additional features, if it was possible to create backups on non-NetApp storage, that would be helpful. For example, if you have a standalone host, you cannot back it up with SnapCenter. You have to make sure that everything is on NetApp. It would be nice if you could also back up systems that are not on NetApp storage. For example, if you have a standalone ESX host, and it is running a few VMs, it would be nice if you could back up those VMs, even if those files don't rely on NetApp storage. It would be a nice feature if it was possible to back up those VMs. At the moment, we are using another backup solution, Commvault Simpana, for those situations.

Normally, it's very stable. We don't have a lot of issues with it. We once had a case where everything looked good, all the services were running, but we were not able to access the management console. We still don't know, up to today, why there was this problem. The page was blank. Then, a few days later it just started to work again. That was a bit strange. But usually, it's very stable.

There are big possibilities to scale it up, of course, with all those roles. The idea behind roles is that you can give control for backing up and restoring to the person who makes the database, to the database owners. They can restore their databases. We don't have to do it ourselves. So it's very scalable.

We haven't used tech support for SnapCenter. There is a lot of documentation and best-practices guides on NetApp. We use those, and then, if we have questions, we ask our partner because they already have experience with setups like this, which always makes it a bit quicker. We also have a support contract with them, with a few hours in there. Usually it's quicker for us to ask our partner, rather than call NetApp tech support.

We switched this year to SnapCenter. We got a new all-flash MetroCluster. For that reason, we switched to SnapCenter and we left the technology of SnapManager for Oracle Databases and for the SQL backups, as well as the Virtual Storage Console we used earlier for VMware backups.

Another reason we switched is that before we had three tools. Now, we have all those in one, with the possibility to also back up other types of databases like SAP HANA or MySQL, etc. That was another the main point in choosing SnapCenter.

Finally, I expect NetApp will cancel support for SnapManager in the future and will only go with SnapCenter.

The initial setup is pretty easy. Also, with the plug-in registration in vCenter, it's very easy. Depending on the database you want to back up, it could be a bit more difficult. For example, we tried to create a backup of SAP HANA systems with SnapCenter, but there was an issue with the single-tenant and multi-tenant installations of SAP HANA. At the moment, it's not possible to back up multi-tenant databases from HANA with SnapCenter. I think that's an issue on the SAP side, because there is no backup solution on the market, with Snapshots, etc., for this scenario.

The time for deployment depends on how many different backup policies you have. If you have a complex situation, it will probably take longer. In our business it's pretty easy. We have just one policy for all the types of databases so we were really quick. It took about two days to get it running and working.

There were two of us involved in our company. One is more for backups and I'm more on the primary storage. It's difficult to draw a border between us, because there are the Snapshots and we have to make sure that they are labeled correctly and that the backup is working correctly. The two of us work to maintain it.

We did not use a third-party, for the most part, but we have a good storage partner, BNC, Switzerland. We had a few questions and they were able to help us out with the SnapMirror labels and the like, which didn't work at the beginning. But I think it's possible to do it on your own.

I'm not sure we've seen a direct ROI, but if you spend less time on the tasks of checking backups, that is also a return on investment. Of course, it's also cheaper if you can use the license that is already included, rather than if you have to buy another backup solution. And SnapCenter is fully integrated.

The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array.

We didn't look into other solutions because we have the licenses with NetApp. If you buy the storage cluster, you get a premium-license bundle, so SnapCenter is completely licensed with the storage. With other backup solutions, you have to buy licenses for the data volume or the count of instances. That was another main point. We decided to try it, since it was included, and we were happy with it.

Go for it and have a look at it. You don't really need much time for the implementation, but you have to make sure that you have a bit of know-how on how the Snapshot technology from NetApp works with the SnapMirror labels, etc. That is very important.

At the moment, there are three persons using it in our company: My backup colleague, the database specialist also has access, and I. In a future step, we are planning to move our Exchange backups to SnapCenter. We are using about 60 percent of the functionality, and we are planning to go up to between 80 and 100 percent.

I would rate SnapCenter at a good seven out of ten. As I mentioned, one time it didn't work because the page was blank. That was a bit strange. We don't really know what happened there. And the other issue is the roles; it's not very user-friendly. So we have to check this out in the documentation first. Those are the two main points for why I only give it a seven.

Backing up SQL and Exchange is our primary use case.

We are putting a new SharePoint infrastructure into production - we're upgrading SharePoint - and our users need a test environment for that and they need it refreshed every day. These are big databases. My colleague is able to create a clone of the production database on a daily basis, through scripts, or through SnapCenter's command line interface which comes in handy. He puts in a new database every day for our users.

I'm not sure this would be possible otherwise. I don't know how many databases SharePoint consists of but there are a lot and they're big. If you need a clone of your databases every day, I don't know if it would be possible to do so overnight, using a traditional backup and restore. I don't know if it would be ready the next morning for users to use. But with SnapCenter, now, it is ready.

The difference is that it's more manageable. Backup timeframes are shorter, restore timeframes are shorter, and we have one portal through which we can control everything.

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. That means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly. It's instantly presentable to our users and in test mode. Clones or duplicates of the original can be used for testing or acceptance. 

Also, the backup process finishes very quickly. In the old way of running a SQL backup, you would wait for SQL to read the whole database - and here I'm talking about a full backup. It would have to read through one terabyte of data. That's not necessary anymore. Now you snap the storage in which the SQL database exists, and the backup consists of pointers on disk, as far I understand.

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. I have made something like 20 calls to NetApp regarding this product. I've used a lot of products in my life and this one has needed the most interaction with the company that made it, to get it working properly in production. There were a lot of bugs and things that didn't work.

For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files. Exchange creates log files of the mailbox databases. After a full backup of Exchange, those log files were being cleared. It was not working. So we created a backup with SnapCenter of our Exchange environment but the logs were not truncating. Finally, we got in contact with someone from NetApp in Holland and he directed us to a university somewhere here in Holland and they explained to us what they did to fix it.

It has improved over time.

And the GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot.

In addition, we had a major production problem due to SnapCenter, because we also use SnapCenter to back up our whole VMware environment. When we did an upgrade of the SnapCenter Server and its plugins - because SnapCenter puts plugins on the host and, in this instance, it puts a plugin on our VMware server - SnapCenter was then supposed to snap our virtual machines and then the whole volume on which the virtual machines reside, and then delete the snaps. This last step, deleting of the snapshots, did not happen. It wasn't deleting snapshots anymore. Our fault was that we didn't record this. We didn't have any measurement of the number of snapshots which were on our VMware infrastructure. After two weeks there were 14 snapshots of each VM in our whole park, and this created a huge performance issue. After we discovered this, we had to delete them and then everything ran fine again.

So after the upgrade of the plugin, there was a bug. We could only work around this bug through manual scripting. Now, we are running a beta plugin from SnapCenter to overcome this problem. So, there have been a lot of bugs.

It's a beautiful product. You can put multiple systems in it but I think they're still really in the stage of developing it. They used SnapDrive before, and now its SnapCenter of course, to create a more general approach, which is great. But they should have tested more and more.

Other than the bugs I mentioned it has been stable.

I can't say anything about scalability because we only have 12 physical hosts in SnapCenter and 20 VMware instances with about 400 virtual machines. We're not a huge ballpark. We're a hospital and we have 6,000 employees. I think that if you are a really big company you would need multiple SnapCenter Servers, but I'm not sure.

For my environment it's perfect: one server, a lot of gigabytes in total memory, http use. It works. And we plan on increasing our usage. Every server which comes into production will now be connected to SnapCenter.

In our organization, almost everything is working with SnapCenter. There are just a couple of SQL Servers that need to be rebuilt, new clusters. My colleagues should finish that somewhere in the first quarter of 2019.

The technical engineers who work at NetApp, here in Amsterdam, are really helpful and willing to help. They're really nice guys and we have no problem with them at all. 

We are using Data Protector backup software and SnapCenter. Before SnapCenter we used SnapDrive from NetApp. Before that, we were using EMC Legato NetWorker. We switched to SnapCenter because our colleagues here were already using NetApp. We're a hospital, we don't need high-end banking server rooms with Fibre Channel. This is an NFS solution so we decided to implement this storage. It was an all-in-one package: backup, file services, and VMware. That was really what convinced us to buy SnapCenter.

For normal sysadmins who are working with the product for the first time and who haven't taken a course on it, the setup is complex. And that's especially true for someone who didn't have any NetApp or snapshot technology knowledge prior to this. It's such a universal product - you can work with iSCSI, you can work with VMware, you can put file systems on it - you can do a lot with it. But our main provider of this software did not have any usable knowledge or experience with it either. They used whitepapers which were not that clear. It really could be better.

To install it and for everything to be working it took one to two full days, about 16 hours. That's a lot of time. At times we were saying, "No, this is not working, try it again. Let's try this, let's do this, what does the whitepaper say? How do I interpret this? Oh, let's call NetApp." It was not really that transparent.

We didn't really need any implementation strategy because we started with just one server. We had our regular backup and that continued to do what it does. Then, in addition to the regular infrastructure, we were building this. We did not really have an implementation plan. We said, "Okay we have a test SQL Server, we're going to put it in SnapCenter and see what it does."

We did not use any integrators or consultants. It was just my team. The server was installed and, afterward, we were implementing our servers into this product. I just took it on and did it myself.

Our SQL DBA took some things on also, but that was after I had explored the product and got rid of a lot of bugs with NetApp. It's an extensive software package. You have policies, you have schedule times. There was one person doing the SnapCenter integration, and that was me. Perhaps it would have been better for us to have someone from NetApp in the house. But there's a price hanging over that, of course.

What we should have done initially was put more responsibility for it in the hands of our main supplier and say, "This is not working, we need to do it differently," instead of me fixing all the problems.

Those quicker backup times, and quicker presenting of new environments: From an admin's perspective, this is a great product. But I cannot translate that into financial gain.

Hire someone who has already installed the product ten times, an experienced SnapCenter installer who can implement this product very easily and who knows all the ins and outs and bugs and which patch he should run. Get guidance.

In terms of maintenance, I convinced my colleagues, our Exchange people and our SQL people, to use it often and look into it. We all get alerts if SnapCenter fails or if a backup does not complete, but I'm the main person who is looking at it. There are three people in our organization using it: our Exchange admin, our SQL admin, and our VMware storage admin (me).

SnapCenter is an eight out of ten. In general, it's a great product, and it does what it's supposed to do, but it's buggy. They should spend some more time on the web GUI for users who don't use the CLI that often. I thought, initially, it was slow because of the resources we gave to SnapCenter Server, but that wasn't it. It has slow reaction times and does not radiate security.

Our ERP structure is on the SnapCenter. We also keep on it SQL Servers, VMware products, etc.

It has greatly improved our DR activity. 

Assisting backups.

We would like to see more granular repording and reporting in bigger sets available in SnapCenter. 

Our ROBOs has told me that stability is good. However, we have been hit by bugs.

I have not looked yet at scalability because we are using single instances right now.

We have experience some difficulties with our current support. We are engaging in engineering level support because some of our problems are more technical.

We were having some data corruption problems in our biggest environments, so we started looking into it NetApp solutions, that's why we went for SnapCenter (after doing a PoC).

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used NetApp Professional Services. Our experience with them was good. We have a long standing relationship with them.

We looked Dell EMC and NetApp. One of the features in our requirements was going from a SAN environment to a NAS. These types of features are why we went with NetApp.

It's for storage. We sell a call center and voicemail solution and we store the recordings there. We also store the configuration file there. We use it for redundancy. We are using an HA proxy for redundancy so if one fails we can use another node.

We have new software releases every month, or every week, and we can implement them directly on our system without worrying about the backup because we have SnapCenter. We can just roll back if there are any issues with the new software.

It helps with workflow because we used to need to create a Snapshot every time we wanted to upgrade things in vCenter but we don't need to do that because we have SnapCenter. It cuts down the time compared to what we previously needed to do.

It's very helpful because SnapCenter is already integrated with VMware Snapshot, so it's very easy to use.

I have an issue with SnapCenter because sometimes a VM cannot be backed up. All the other VMs have already been backed up, but this one particular VM is not being backed up because it has errors. It's causing a problem in the whole thing because after the next round of backups, not all the backups are removed. It's because we have an error on a particular VM where it could not create a Snapshot. That is really annoying because we need to check for that issue every week.

The way SnapCenter works is that it makes a backup of all the VMs and then it removes all the old backups. If one VM cannot be backed up for some reason, it has already created a new backup for all the VMs but it cannot remove the old backups. It ends up creating so many backups in VMware and it will cause a performance problem if the condition is not fixed.

It's really a huge issue. When one VM causes this problem it's too much. It could just skip that one VM and do the remove for the rest of the VMs. That's how it needs to work.

It is stable. We don't have any issues with SnapCenter.

SnapCenter has no issues with scalability. We have plans to increase usage in the future. When we add new customers, that will increase our usage of SnapCenter.

Technical support is good. They are responsive and really helpful. If I want, I can contact them directly.

The deployment took about a week. I had some issues and I needed to contact NetApp support.

The setup was complex. When you deploy SnapCenter it requires integration with vCenter which is a firmware thing and it doesn't always work the first time. I had an issue that I thought was coming from SnapCenter but it was coming from VMware. NetApp needs to create documentation on the firmware setup.

Our implementation strategy was just to follow the recommendations and, if there were any issues, to ask the NetApp support agents. They were very helpful in finding the issue.

The integration required just one person, me. We have five people supporting it, from our engineering team.

If we were to lose that data it would mean we would lose customers.

Just try it.

I would rate SnapCenter at eight out of ten because it needs some improvement, as I outlined above.