NetApp AltaVault Reviews

I have six months of experience with the product, and as a consultant, the use cases for NetApp AltaVault mainly stand out for me.

I have six months of experience with the product, and as a consultant, the use cases for NetApp AltaVault mainly stand out for me.

Regarding the deduplication feature in the product, I am interested in whether clients are using it.

There are different integrations available with NetApp AltaVault, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and I want to understand how they impact data security policies in my case.

Public cloud is often used, and while many advantages for the product have been covered, I am interested in areas for improvement and what could be better.

I have been dealing with NetApp AltaVault for a couple of months, and I am interested in how long others have been dealing with it in years or months.

The initial installation is difficult for my clients who have it on both on-premises and on cloud.

The solution is stable, and there are no critical issues with stability, but I am curious about the solution's scalability and how easy it is to scale up or down.

The solution is stable, and there are no critical issues with stability, but I am curious about the solution's scalability and how easy it is to scale up or down.

I would rate support as a nine out of ten, where one is really bad and ten is really good. As a consultant, I want to rate NetApp AltaVault overall from one to ten, where ten is the best product.

Positive

I wanted to share my opinion on some other products, specifically whether I still work with Palo Alto products or if I switched to other technologies such as AutoFocus or Prisma Access, or any other solutions.

The initial installation is difficult for my clients who have it on both on-premises and on cloud.

As a consultant, I am dealing primarily with some big vendors such as HP, Dell, and other technologies in the scope that I was working with most recently.

Considering the disaster recovery scenarios, I want to assess NetApp AltaVault's ability to minimize the recovery time objective (RTO) and what positive impact I have seen from the product so far.

It is complex to deploy and to manage, and regarding pricing, I want to assess if the solution is affordable or slightly expensive.

It is a DLP product that I am discussing.

I want to advise NetApp AltaVault for specific customers rather than all types from small to enterprise, which is why I want to ask about NetApp technical support.

I am dealing with NetApp AltaVault, and I want to know if it encompasses just storage or servers as well.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate NetApp AltaVault a 9.

I use the solution for backup and recovery.

Our systems have become more stable and scalable after using NetApp AltaVault.

The dashboard is useful for managing data backups. The deduplication technology helps me take offline backups efficiently. The workload on the end team has been reduced. It is a stable and reliable solution that does not require regular monitoring. The tool's structural design fulfils the compliance requirements.

The product must provide multi-gate connectivity. It will enable us to take backups faster.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. We have 60 to 70 users in our organization. I use the product daily.

We used Dell before. We switched to NetApp AltaVault because Dell was a Windows-based solution, and it was vulnerable to viruses and other attacks.

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. The deployment took a few hours.

We did the deployment with the help of an integrator.

The price is a bit high. It should be more competitive. However, we are using this solution because it is favorable for us.

I will recommend the product to others. It is reliable, stable, and fulfils our compliance requirements. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company uses NetApp AltaVault for the functionalities it provides, like file share and home directory share.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is easy to use and integrate with whichever operating systems you use, providing you with a complete view, especially when you plan to migrate to some other operating system.

The capacity for file sharing in the tool right now in the solution is 10 TB. Whenever the solution reaches a full level or is probably about to be full in terms of its capacity related to file sharing, I want it to auto-increase its capacity without my need to intervene. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the solution.

I have been using NetApp AltaVault for six years. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a very stable solution.

Scalability-wise, I can say it is a good product because it provides you with different ways of using it.

Two or three people in my company use the solution.

The solution's technical support is good since my company has always had good experience with them over the call. Whenever my company faces some problems with the solution, NetApp's technical team tries to resolve those problems and tries to provide us with timely support.

The initial setup phase of the tool was difficult. My company had engineers who were involved in the installation and configuration phases of the solution, who specifically found the configuration part to be a difficult task.

NetApp AltaVault is an expensive solution. There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution, which comes to around 3,000 USD.

My organization chose NetApp over other products in the market since we were already a customer who just had to renew it. Predominantly, I believe my organization chose NetApp since it is able to serve the people according to what they pay for and remains stable.

I can recommend the solution to those who plan to use it. My problem with NetApp stems from the fact that since cloud services are offered, along with the offerings from Microsoft, which includes SharePoint and OneDrive, there is no longer a need to have just NetApp.

Considering that nowadays, there are better cloud services offered, while NetApp AltaVault remains an expensive product that is deployed on an on-premises model, I rate the solution a three or four out of ten.

We use the product mainly for data archival. For instance, a port we deal with uses it for its video archival. They have a lot of needs around that. They've got to record everything that happens at the port where containers are being loaded from trucks, ships, and back and forth. They have to monitor all that for safety purposes and keep a good amount of retention, unfortunately, due to some accidents that have happened there.

For large data sets, file data sets, file and object data sets for archival is the primary use case that I've seen it used for where we don't necessarily want to keep this on a full-fledged filer. We need to get it down and tear it down, potentially leveraging some cloud buckets as well.

The most valuable features that it has are probably its ability to index things and move them to lower-cost storage.

Its initial setup is easy.

Technical support is good.

The solution scan scale.

The pricing is decent.

NetApp's own competing products complicate things. If I were going to take a more modernized approach, I would probably be looking at FXS ONTAP and I'd be looking at Azure NetApp files and just doing more of a cloud-native solution than doing hardware appliances. Where it'll probably stick is where people like those at the Port, where it's just so big that they have to have lots of buckets of active tier and mid-tier retention and then super long-term retention. Then there's compliance reasons where folks can't necessarily leverage cloud to do that. While it's a strong product, seemingly, some of NetApp's own products are a bit predatory on it.

NetApp's not continuing to invest and develop it. I'm just not seeing that.

I've used the solution for less than a year. The company is moving away from it and therefore I haven't used it that much.

While I have had some stability issues, the solution has mostly been very good. I'd rate the stability eight out of ten.

Scalability's pretty awesome. I'd rate it nine out of ten overall. With the size of our organization, we likely have around 9,000 users.

Technical support has been very good.

Positive

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate it eight out of ten in terms of ease of implementation.

How long it takes to deploy really depends on the customer. As far as baseline deployment, not really moving data, that normally would take just a couple days, or maybe more if it's huge. However, the policies and more on the design side need to be done before you go to actually deploy it. That can take a decent amount of planning. It's more about strategy. It is probably more like a week total time in planning and architecture.

You have to get stakeholder buy-in in terms of how long things are retained and what that looks like. As far as the actual people doing the hands-on keyboardin for implementation, it's something one or two people could do.

In one use case, and we have several, to run for a particular customer, the price is about $375,000 a year. They've been doing it for four years.

For new users, it's really all about strategy and policy. The platform itself does what it says it does. How much benefit you get from that is dictated by your policies and how you're archiving data.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

We are resellers of the solution.

We use the solution more for archiving. It's like having the data outside of the place and that's with the indexing and everything.

We like that you can have it from a single point from a storage provider, rather than having different products from different providers. The same support will be from the same place.

The interface is great. The GUI is great. It's so easy to work with.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Scaling isn't a problem.

The solution is stable.

The solution needs faster indexing.

We've implemented this solution for a while. I've been working with NetApp since 2014. This is a long time.

The stability has been good. It serves its purpose well. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

Any department that is having files shared and data that can be deleted and changed a lot would need this solution. Here is in the Middle East, it's a little bit different as the adoption of the cloud is not so strong. Mostly the type of businesses that would use this product are all SMBs. I'd recommend a higher level for enterprises. 

There is nothing wrong with the scalability of the product. It's simply a matter of licensing and configuration, nothing more, nothing less. If it needs something from the back end, it's a configuration that can be done or adjusted easily as it's something on the cloud. You can just change the attributes that you need for the service. It's simple. Nothing is hard there. As it's not a mission-critical thing that it needs to be up 24/7, you can do these upgrades easily.

I've interacted with technical support. I interacted with them a lot in small cases and in big cases. The good thing about NetApp, when it comes to a serious issue, if we're talking about real downtime, you will find everyone online with you.

The initial setup is so straightforward it doesn't require very many prerequisites.

The deployment time depends on the size of the data. In general, we can say that testing, taking the data back and forth, can take about two days.

You just need one person for deployment and maintenance. You do not need a big team. If your business model is having one support and deployment team and they are doing the same job, then you can have one person. If it's different departments, you can have one for the support and you can have one for the implementation and that's it.

As integrators, we handle the professional services for NetApp. We do not take professional services from the vendor right now. In fact, we are a service arm for NetApp. We are bound to the documentation and everything from the vendor. However, we are the team that does the implementation.

What will happen is that customers will eventually get to an ROI. It'll save time and effort for the team that is working. This is a very important thing and it will give them opportunities to do some other work. 

It's not expensive. Its cost is fair. 

You can have set up a subscription. You can do the payment like that. The payment model is completely different from region to region and partner to partner. Sometimes we can take it as facilitation from our side as an investment with the customer and we can make it monthly as well. It depends, however, mainly, it's set up as a SaaS service with monthly payments.

The one price includes everything. Usually, when you receive the quotation, everything is there. It's divided up and the various aspects are written there. These are essential things in the initial quote.

We're partners. We are system integrators. I'm exposed to storage regarding NetApp - all services of NetApp and HDS and AltaVault. We are also selling that. From the backup perspective, arguably our specialty is actually in Commvault and Veritas. We handle backup, archiving, and data management solutions as well. 

NetApp these days is completely different than the old days. NetApp started as a software company. The core is the software, which is the ONTAP software. Now ONTAP software can be deployed on the cloud. If you're looking for on-prem storage, you can have that. If you're looking for the storage capabilities yet you want the same capabilities on the cloud, you can have it by having the ONTAP for the cloud. The only difference is that NetApp doesn't have a complete solution for the cloud as a cloud provider. It's not like Amazon and it's like not Azure. This is a service that is running on those services.

They do not have the same capabilities as the on-prem storage - such as the rate of de-duplication. They don't have de-duplication actually as a normal feature with the normal rate. They don't have serverless replication between desks. It's not like that. It's a clock active storage there on the cloud. However, when you use the NetApp ONTAP on the cloud, it allows you to treat the cloud storage and cloud tier like normal storage on-prem with everything, regardless of the number of snapshots, compression, or deduplication.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

It's an object store. It was used for archiving. They're kind of doing away with it in favor of just using object native ONTAP. It doesn't really seem like something that's still being developed. It's kind of being replaced within another solution set within NetApp.

The most valuable feature is the portability of large archived data. You're able to put things on large on-prem, low-cost storage and then augment that with even lower cost storage in the cloud.

It's a good product, but it's becoming outdated and moving to their other primary architecture.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup can be a little more complex. It's a lot of policy. It's complex for good reason.

You could compare it to a Dell EMC or ECS, and I think it's probably a little less costly than that. Within the marketplace, it's a medium cost.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10. My advice is to stick with ONTAP and ownCloud because NetApp AltaVault is going to die.

We primarily use the solution as an email backup and for some SharePoint instances on the cloud.

The solution can be used for all Office 365 applications.

In comparison to other backups, specifically Commvault, it's easier to work with.

In the past, there was a product called Snap Protect. If there was any sort of integration between this and the online arrays from that, it would be perfect. It would allow for a lot of integration between the on-prem and cloud. It would also help customers with migrations. It would make for a more complete platform.

It would be nice if the solution was more complete. Many customers are looking for a single solution or silo that they can manage everything from. It would be nice, instead of having different products, if everything a client needed was in one solution.

We've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any requests from the client in terms of support. That means, they haven't run into any bugs or glitches or have had any crashes. If they had, we would have heard about it.

The solution is based on the number of users and nothing more. You can just add subscriptions if you need to expand the solution out.

The solution's technical support is quite good. Out of ten, we would easily rate it a nine. 

In the past, I have worked with Hitachi.

The functionality was good. It offered unified storage with normal arrays. However, the pricing wasn't as good.

The initials setup isn't complex. It's quite straight forward. 

In terms of deployment, It depends on the number of users a company has. Once it is started, it doesn't take more than 30 minutes.

The pricing of the solution is reasonable.

I don't use the solution myself, I recommend it to customers. We're a Star Partner of Netapp.

The solution is a cloud-based subscription. It doesn't need a deployment. It's subscription base, therefore, it's sort of its own service.

The solution is great for reducing headaches in the IT department. It's easy to use and narrows issues surrounding taking Office 365 to the cloud. Users can simply install it and get safe, easy access to cloud backups. They can retrieve data easily if it's deleted. They have a great data protection policy in place. All of these reasons are why I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case or this solution is data backup.

The solution is very easy to use and it offers great support. It is also a very flexible solution that saves us a lot of time.

I would like to see more web support.

The program is very stable.

The technical support is good.

Our company grew, so that is why we chose this solution.

We used a consultant for the installation and deployment and the service was excellent. The initial setup was straightforward. You just follow the instructions.

It is a rather expensive program.

We also looked at VMware but this solution offered better support.

It is a good solution. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We were able to get away from tape for backups. Being able to backup directly to the disk and have it dump directly to the cloud means we're not 24 hours offsite, or 24 hour behind the times, where literally seconds is as fast as it can dedupe to the cloud.

The deduplication engine. Right now, we're at about 10.5 to 11 times deduplication of our backup data. That's really handy because we're only using about 200 terabytes onsite, but we're getting two petabytes worth of deduped expanded data.

I really want to partner it with the SnapCenter. We haven't implemented that yet. We're upgrading all of our stuff to the ONTAP 9, which you had to have. You can set up different shares, but I would like to be able set up retention windows inside those shares, which right now they're not. You have to use your backup software to be able to keep it forever or say, "Hey in 30 days delete".

It's been great. It's been up since April 2nd, about six months. I've rebooted it once, never had an issue, no bad disks. It just works. It's very, very simple, but it works.

Excellent. I have two different nodes that are 116 terabytes of usable data on each. I'm using about 95% of them, and I was hoping to get about three months onsite that I could keep for backups or for recoveries, and I have literally six months on and still going strong. Still haven't hit the cap.

We were using LTO-6 and we were having to swap tapes out constantly. We were murdering our tape library so we had to buy another tape library, and then there was the overhead of storage, moving it offsite, keeping it for a year, keeping records, and the like.

Here, I just dump to a location, it dedupes to the cloud, and after one year it automatically deletes itself and I don't have to do any extra work. It's all automated.

Straightforward. Super simple.

We're connected to public cloud, to Azure, and right now we're using NetBackup but we're looking to move into Veeam.

We a NetApp shop, so we have multiple NetApp appliances. It was a no-brainer. We did look around but AltaVault seemed to do everything that we wanted it to do, so we took a chance and it's paid very, very well.

It's super simple. We tried to overly complicate it and expected it to be overly complicated and it wasn't. From start to finish, within three days I had moved all my backup policies over to it, and it took longer to replicate to the cloud for that initial data. But after that, like I said, in seconds, where our recovery window is a 24-hour period. We're literally 30 seconds out from backup, to dumping, to dedupe, to the cloud.

Definitely try a demo. I think the on-prem solution where you buy the storage, you keep it locally for quick re-stores. Our restore window has been cut by 10 times. From having to pull back from tape -  I'd definitely recommend it. I don't have to worry about where it's at, I don't have to worry about anything. It literally knows to either pull it from local or pull it from the cloud, and it does everything itself. I just use my backup software, which I know how to use.

• On-prem
• Fast recovery
• Moving away from tape and archiving to the cloud

We're still into the development, bringing it into production, but we had issues with performance so we're not fully in production yet. The jobs we have baseline into the AltaVault, it seems to be able to recover faster than the previous solution.

We would like

• reliable monitoring
• to be able to offload into glacier naturally, through policy
• to unlock the file system restriction between the on-prem cache and the logical space.

We've had a lot of issues, crashed the service console a lot, service crashes. One of the motherboards died because it hit a bug. They shipped all the AltaVaults with the same OS that had the same bug condition. We've upgraded now, we hit all their bugs with AD authentication, all the issues, so we're trying to solve those right now.

We haven't gotten to the point that we need to scale it yet.

We're still working with a PS engineer. Tech support, when we raised some of the issues we had, has been 50-50. Sometimes there seem to be conflicting answers, then it gets escalated. Then we get the actual solution to the problem.

We use AltaVault for cloud-based back up. We have connected it to a public cloud service.

I gave it a seven out of 10 because right now we're just performing at an average, it's not blowing away.

If I were to advise a colleague at another company who is researching this or a similar solution, I would say make sure you get a good PS engineer involved. It needs maturity. I'd wait another year to see where the OS is.