What needs improvement with NetApp FAS Series?

It's hard to find in-person training that fits our schedule in our area. They offer a lot of online training, but we need somewhere to go because we can't really get away from the office.

There is some learning curve that goes into it. It's been a bit of a journey for us to to learn how to leverage everything. That's not a knock against the product; it's just sort of a learning curve so that it does take a little bit of time to introduce it to an environment. It's not like you can just know how to use it right away. A big problem with physical appliances is that updating them can be a bit burdensome. It can take a lot of labor time. I would like to see the ONTAP platform become a little more hands-off with upgrades.

NetApp could improve costs while making the solution more straightforward to use and deploy.

When we were going through all the MFA hardening and the anti-ransomware setup, I gave some feedback to our executive. The MFA process for getting that set up on the AFF systems was cumbersome compared to some of our other systems. With one of our systems, there was a little QR code. We could point our phone at it and get our MFA going. We did a lot more heavy lifting to get that going on the NetApp side. This is clearly a technology that exists and just needs to be prioritized by the development staff. Given how sensitive we are to ransomware, they should do everything to make it almost a no-brainer for every admin to get those kinds of protections turned on. This is something that should be prioritized. We have got it working now, but we could have done it a lot sooner if it was easier for us to do that.

The plan is to go with all SSDs and use MDM, rather than sticking with traditional disk drives. The goal is to have all SSDs for better maintenance speed, which is essential for applications that need to work.

We have some experience with older equipment end-of-life. For example, when warranty support stops or updates stop – it can be frustrating. Not all clients can buy a new filer every year or two, and NetApp ending support a bit quickly can be a concern. Moreover, we've looked at new models and performed some price comparisons. There doesn't seem to be a large difference in price between different models within the FAS series. It would be good if there was a larger price variance between models.

NetApp is costly when compared to Dell.

More integration would be beneficial. Moreover, cost is always a factor. Some people choose EMC or Dell because they perceive NetApp as being more expensive. But we do have other products, like support for other models, that are more cost-effective. So, the pricing could be improved.

The biggest issue we face is parts delivery. There's no local warehouse in Myanmar, so if a customer encounters a technical problem like hardware failure issue, they have to wait a long time for replacement parts.

I was a little skeptical about the model. I wonder why the replication is included in the ONTAP One bundle when some customers may not require additional features. It should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle, even if there's a slight price increase.

As a company, NetApp may consider working with ARL systems.

Once, I've been in a program, but they stopped supporting protocols like HTTP, STP, and that kind of stuff. All of the DIP supports at the beginning were kind of support when it was just Python and just five storage. And it happened a few times that the customer required the STP and HTTP protocol for storage. And I was surprised I couldn't do it anymore with NetApp. So, it would be beneficial for them to support both kinds of protocols. The only little black points that I would put on top of NetApp FAS Series. There is room for improvement in deployment and configuration processes. The thing with ONTAP is that we have a lot of layers, from the raw disks to the volumes we present to servers and configure. There are quite a lot of things to configure. Probably NetApp should ease the way to install that. In NetApp products, such as ONTAP and FAS, a solid understanding of storage is still necessary to handle configurations in larger systems. It's not the same with Pure Storage or Huawei. Even someone less familiar with storage could manage it, making it more accessible.

They should add all features from Flash Pool, Flash Cache, and other new features into the product.

The product should improve its user experience. The console should enable easy mapping to the storage volume and the server.

There are some technical limitations, but it would be great to have in-line deduplication and in-line compression for the FAS series as well. These would be improvements on current features.

Everythink is ok.

We no longer have OEM support in South Africa which is not helpful, it can be difficult. They should add an office back to the country because it was better.

I think this kind of infrastructure is mostly obsolete. To keep up with developments in this space, you need to move all these features to an All-Flash solution. Nowadays, we are working with a massive database involving big data and lots of information (even intelligence), and for these environments, it's not appropriate to run this kind of business. We feel that we need to move to an All-Flash environment in order to offer better performance for the client.

The NetApp FAS Series is not as high-performing for our business critical applications, because it's not an all-flash solution. It's also not as fast, so its speed needs improvement, but this could only be done if it's an all-flash solution.

I would like to see NetApp add incident support.

The only improvement to this solution that I can propose is for NetApp to make the price more attractive. If the price is more attractive, then it will have a bigger market share. I can't think of any other area for improvement because the price is the only one that really comes to mind.

The solution can improve on the replication features.

You always need a huge amount of hardware to fulfill a given setup. Its deployment can be complex, especially if you go MetroCluster.

We're supposed to have used NetApp FAS Series for replication, but then one of the nodes failed, and then it's taken us some time to bring it up. The management console and disc partitioning could improve.

NetApp FAS Series could improve by being more secure.

For long term partnership in Myanmar, The local warehouse should be built in Myanmar that's something I'd like to see. We have some issues with supply so there is sometimes a delay in getting the hardware.

The user interface could be improved.

There should be a separate admin web management for each SVM. We are currently managing all SVMs from a single admin interface. it is a problem. Real-time performance monitoring requires good software. It would be great to be able to see the audit logs.

Its operating system is very cumbersome. However, after you set it up, it runs pretty smoothly. Its file system is not very dynamic. It is very static.

Interfacing with the cloud environment could be better. I want to be able to move some cloud volume and integrate it seamlessly with my home on-premise storage. Sometimes I have issues with port permissions. NetApp probably needs to improve more on the integration side from on-premise to the cloud. Capacity management could also be better. The difference between AFF and FAS has always been an issue, but now we have the advanced disk partitioning technology on the whole FAS systems that can give us more usable capacity. That has been the bigger issue that I had with NetApp in terms of improvement, and they seem to be working on it now.

For the most part, we don't have any problems. There is no NetApp infrastructure set up here in Greece. We don't have a representative with a technical department and someone who will help you in order to understand the product better.

Its licensing cost can be improved.

We'd like to move to a solution that does more beyond just data, like starting to get more to servers and network specialization and data visualization and things like that. Server network and management specialization or consolidation. And also, trying to see a bit more single plane of glass in terms of managing, so that it gives you more insight in terms of what's happening. Ideally the solution should have one console, the ability to use a single plane of glass across the enterprise. Because we have one VRR, one size duplication so just to have one console where you can manage everything else in harmony would be a good additional feature.

The one aspect of the solution that's negative for us is also more unique to us due to the fact that we did a MetroCluster. The tiebreaker piece that does the monitoring of the two different locations, and determines if one is not talking to the network normally (or if it's truly down) is a little difficult. It feels like it was not designed from the beginning to fit well into the other pieces. It feels like it was thrown in at the last minute and it is not smooth. I've actually spoken to NetApp about that. I understand from a little bit of my research that they do have another product out. They've renamed it. I don't know how much they've changed it. I don't know if they have made that a better fitting piece or if it's just got a different name. I still have not moved to their most recent version. I believe they have incorporated several updates that I haven't had experience with yet. I'd hate to say, "Oh, we should put it that in there," and it's already there.

If our customer needs a high-performance storage solution then we don't recommend this product. Some of our customers complain about not liking the UI, whereas others say that they love it. Also, some say that the FAS is too slow and some say that it performs fine. It's all relative and depends on the customer as well as the use case.

Netapp closed their local offices in our country leading to no technical and sales support representation.

Dedicated storage efficiency accelerators could improve the overall performance of the system.

I would like to see an improvement in the licensing on Data Mirroring (SnapMirror) features. Currently, the newest release is not HCI friendly.

* Integration with most of the third-party BR tools * A clear roadmap for next releases should be available.

I would like to see less latency and higher IOPS.

I want to see the system automatically tier; we call it auto-tiering. When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives.

* Ease of management needs to be improved. * The power consumption for the FAS is a lot more compared to the new SSD arrays. Going forward, I don't want to be using the FAS again. I want to be using AFFs more.

None at the moment for the box itself. We are very happy with the current capabilities of this hardware. Hopefully, the AutoSupport can be improved to be more proactive in certain cases.

We would like to have further integration with some backup products. They have some of them already, but there could be more. We have already seen the new roadmap and a lot of our requested features are already on it.