NetApp ASA Reviews

NetApp ASA has three or four main use cases including mission-critical applications, SAN environments, block storage, and always-on infrastructure. I utilize NetApp ASA in a virtualization environment. Virtualization helps me manage the virtual machines I have created. I have loaded the OS of virtualization, VMware, onto NetApp ASA, and with the help of this solution, I am creating virtual machines for my intranetwork.

In my environment, NetApp ASA is primarily used for two purposes. The first is as a SAN storage solution, and the second is as a virtualization platform, which I have already described.

The stand-out feature for me is the SAN storage because of its ability to deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency, 100% availability, active-active paths, and no performance tuning headache. When maximum users connect at the same time, there is no latency experienced.

The main impact of NetApp ASA on my organization is that my data is available 24/7. Whenever I have a requirement over the VPN or inside the LAN, I can access my data anytime and anywhere as per my need.

NetApp ASA is somewhat expensive, and I believe they should work on the pricing aspect. I understand that pricing can be negotiated by reaching out to the pricing department.

I have been familiar with NetApp ASA for around one year.

My advice to someone considering NetApp ASA is to choose the solution which provides more scalability and flexibility. I rate this product 9 out of 10.

The storage is being used for different workloads, including VMware, databases, and web servers.

We are a NetApp partner as well as a user. We are using the NetApp ASA storage for our internal applications and for hosting purposes.

We are getting excellent performance and throughput. We are not facing any of the issues. It's running smoothly. NetApp ASA has the capability to provide very good throughput and very low latency. That's why we have purchased the NetApp ASA. It is good. It provides the iOPS in millions. It's a very good option for us.

It works very well for customers who require fast performance and scalability. It offers storage replication or autonomous ransomware protection at the storage level. Any attack on the storage would impact the production and lead to downtime. NetApp ASA is a block-level storage. It provides a very good performance. It can accommodate any workload. Along with that, it provides features like replication, automatic ransomware protection. If anything happens, it can help you recover your data. It helps a lot.

I love the SnapMirror and autonomous ransomware protection features. SnapMirror is used for replication purposes in a DC/DR setup. If something goes wrong with the data center or production DR, the data automatically gets replicated to the DR site, and the DR site becomes operational, allowing continued access to data.

Autonomous ransomware protection helps recover data in case of any threat or ransomware. Ransomware is increasing daily, and according to Gartner, most companies have to pay a ransom if a ransomware attack occurs in their environment. NetApp provides a ransomware guarantee program where they commit that if data cannot be recovered in case of ransomware, NetApp will provide compensation, which adds significant value.

From a partner perspective, the presales tools could use improvement. I'm handling pre-sales and post-sales. From a partner's point of view, the tools that I'm using to create the quote or do the sizing are very slow. The tools, such as hardware universe, fusion.netapp.com, and partnerhub.netapp.com, operate very slowly. These tools should be more efficient as they enter a hung state repeatedly.

From a customer's perspective, it's expensive. Its price should be reduced.

I have worked with the NetApp ASA storage for more than three years.

It is challenging to identify any issues with NetApp ASA. The customers we work with don't have any issues with it. We ourselves are using the ASA storage and haven't encountered a single problem. It has been performing excellently with no issues regarding performance or related features. In the last three years, there haven't been any complaints regarding this storage.

It's scalable. We plan to expand its usage in the future. We are using various storage solutions from NetApp, such as FAS, AFF, and unified storage models.

We were using Dell storage previously. Our team purchased NetApp ASA because of the performance.

NetApp is a market leader in the storage industry and is included in Fortune 500 companies. This is the main reason we choose to work with NetApp.

It's more expensive than other storage vendors such as Dell, Pure Storage, HPE, Lenovo, etc. It provides the value, but some of the customers don't look at the value. They first look at the cost. It should be reduced by 20% to 30%. That's the difference I'm noticing.

 I would rate NetApp ASA a nine out of ten.

The most common use cases for NetApp ASA are VMware infrastructures and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, and in general, disaster recovery and business continuity architectures where synchronous replicas are requested between the two data centers with a very low latency.

The features of NetApp ASA that I have found most valuable are that it's fundamentally not different from a FAS or AFF storage, apart from being fully dedicated to SAN architectures. ASA stands for All-flash Storage Architecture. It's very fast and simple to manage since it's basically ONTAP 9, just as on the AFF and FAS family. It just has dedicated SAN licenses, so we can only deliver SAN services instead of NAS services, which are iSCSI and FC only. It's very smart, along with the already common features in NetApp solutions, such as Snapshot and SnapMirror.

This integration helps optimize our data storage and management strategies as it helps to save disk space since the storage efficiency, such as compression and deduplication, is very efficient, especially on ASA systems, and particularly when using NVMe disks instead of common SSD disks.

The areas of NetApp ASA that could be improved include features such as the active sync feature that allows a customer to write on either data center A or data center B. I believe that the resilience to network delays or network problems could be improved since I encountered some network delays which resulted in delays in providing service.

I have been working with NetApp ASA for between three and four years.

My experience with the initial setup of NetApp ASA involved engaging the professional services team. It's a very straightforward process, very simple, since it's perfectly the same as setting up a NAS system, such as FAS or AFF.

From my experience, I would evaluate the stability and reliability of NetApp ASA as almost excellent, apart from the issues with latency and network issues. I would rate it as nine out of ten.

I have leveraged the scale-out growth architecture of NetApp ASA, and NetApp ONTAP is scalable by nature. I can start with a cluster, with an HA couple of two controllers up to 12 controllers, just adding them and joining them to the cluster, so scaling out horizontally is very simple.

The technical support of NetApp ASA is very skilled, though some recently hired engineers are not fully experienced for most issues, as they follow a prepared checklist of issues. Sometimes they don't have the flexibility for resolving and facing customer issues, which comes with experience.

Positive

Before NetApp ASA, I used Dell Compellent storage.

I participated in the initial setup and deployment of NetApp ASA.

The implementation was done through the professional services team. It was a very straightforward process, since it's perfectly the same as setting up a NAS system, such as FAS or AFF.

I have seen a return on investment with NetApp ASA, but it requires a very large infrastructure and some years before getting a real return on investment, since it's an investment that only the largest ISPs can afford.

I am not much aware of the pricing of NetApp ASA, but I estimate a NetApp ASA system could cost several hundreds of thousand euros or pounds or dollars.

I decided to switch from Dell Compellent to NetApp ASA because we were already using NetApp with the AFF with NAS services, and it was very reliable. The Dell Compellent didn't offer the same reliability, and since we were already in excellent relationships with NetApp, we decided to improve it by acquiring new systems.

I am a storage IT specialist at Aruba S.p.A. Italy. Since the start of working with NetApp ASA, I have seen benefits in that we need a very low latency connection between data centers, and the failover from one data center to another is very fast, quick and reliable. We never lose any LAN or service with this solution.

In my point of view as a storage administrator, I have deployed NetApp ASA in a multi-environment setup. As a storage administrator, I can only see everything as a LAN. We are not aware of what the LANs actually contain; however, they are very reliable, mostly efficient with VMware infrastructures since Microsoft Hyper-V proves to be very sensitive and delicate.

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

We mostly use the solution for primary storage, and then we also have a secondary set that we are using for secondary and backup storage, but they are our primary storage provider.

There is a lot of value in the solution. It is not the cheapest on the market, and it is also not the most expensive. We can find and train people on it. It is not a niche solution. It is not a solution that only works in certain sectors. It has a very broad customer base. There is also a high level of comfort with the sales and engineering staff that we interface with at NetApp. We have been through generations of the solution, and the level of talent that we have been able to acquire gives us a sense of calm.

In the beginning, there is a bit of a learning curve. It is a premium solution. You do not want anybody going around there and pushing buttons and seeing how it works. Now that we have been there for multiple generations and multiple iterations of software, it is very intuitive for us. We feel very comfortable with the solution. If we bring in new staff that is not familiar with it, we have a good understanding with the existing staff about how to manage it and how to train someone on the solution.

We have such good reliability, and we have such a good understanding of the solution and what its capabilities are. We would not have that with other solutions. We would not feel that reliability with others. Another piece is that we understand the ecosystem of NetApp so well that it would be difficult for us to jump to another vendor because there would be a learning curve.

It may not have freed up our staff for other projects, but it definitely has kept the headcount lower because we could do more with less. We have not had to grow our storage team as much. We segment our storage team from our network team and our server team. It has allowed us to keep the headcount lower than what we would have anticipated. If we bring in a new solution, we would have to increase that headcount to understand the solution better. We may have to bring in people who have experience with that in another environment or things like that.

Their dedupe functionality is probably the best in the industry. We also find their support model to be good. When we purchase something, we have a very good understanding of how long that solution will be supported by them. That helps.

There is flexibility. We are using ASA, but they do have AFF. They have the E-class. If we need to move to another solution or find other use cases, they have a full solution lineup, which is unlike some of the vendors out there in the market who have just one solution.

I would like to see more in terms of replication between storage classes. They provide different lines of storage. They have a lower class. They have a capacity class. They have their enterprise class. 

Currently, we have interoperability at the same plane with ONTAP, but we would like to see some more mix-and-match features. That would allow us to right-size our cost structure outside of the data center and maybe in places like a remote office or another colocation facility. Better interoperability between classes of storage or models of storage at NetApp would be beneficial to us because we can then continue to use NetApp across the board. We would also have some feature parity because we are bought into the ecosystem.

We have been NetApp customers for about 15 years. We have been using ASA for three to four years, but we have been using the NetApp product catalog for at least fifteen years.

We have not had any problems. They have a very conservative approach to how they update their systems, manage their systems, and design their systems. We have not had those types of problems.

The solution has been pretty rock solid. We have not had any outages attributed to it. We have had other outages. We have had network outages. We had an issue with that CrowdStrike update a couple of weeks ago, but we have not had anything that we could tag back to NetApp. NetApp has never contributed to an outage or unexpected outage at our company.

We have opened tickets and requested calls. We have contacted them from time to time. Their support is pretty good. It is US-based. It used to be based in Kansas, but I do not know where it is now. It is somewhere else in the US, but we have always had a pretty good rapport with them.

We are pretty organized as an organization. We try our best before we open a ticket, and we have access to our sales engineer and our TAM. I have no complaints about it. We have never had any type of catastrophic errors or catastrophic failures. If you look at a spectrum of how much we use their technical support, we are probably on the lower end of that.

Positive

As an engineer, I have supported Dell in the past. I have supported Dell EMC and then Dell Compound at one point in time.

NetApp is cheaper in terms of the cost per terabyte. We feel that NetApp is only focused on storage. NetApp is a storage company, whereas Dell has a full line of products for storage, servers, networks, and all other things. Because NetApp has decided to make one product and make it very well, we feel that the engineering work that has gone into it is better. More engineering has gone into it than Dell EMC, at least since Dell purchased EMC in probably 2016 or 2017. I do not remember the exact date they bought them. 

We also have a high level of experience with NetApp. If we have to get out of NetApp because we had a problem or it no longer fits our needs, there definitely would be a much larger learning curve versus going from this generation of NetApp to the next generation of NetApp.

We are on-premises, but we are looking at moving some of it into the cloud for secondary storage and geographic diversity. They do offer a product called ONTAP Select, which is a cloud-based version of NetApp that can run either in VMware or in the cloud. We are looking at that, but we are not there today.

Its initial setup was not that bad. They do provide incentive funds for installation to new NetApp customers. That program is probably still called Run to NetApp. It has been around for years.

It took us about three weeks. That was what we were given as an incentive. We were given an engineer from NetApp for three weeks.

We had professional services paid for by NetApp when we initially deployed it.

In terms of maintenance, we do some of our updates. If a part breaks or has an issue, we will do the swap out. so it is not a completely hands-off process. We also keep our products under warranty. If something does go wrong, we do pay for the service as well.

We have had some cost savings. It is not the cheapest solution in the market, but having gone through multiple iterations of it, we have been able to shrink our footprint. Even though we have been growing the amount of storage we have, we have been shrinking our footprint in the data center. Obviously, the drives have been getting bigger, but we still maintain that reliability. We have a lot of trust in NetApp. We are not going to put ourselves at a lot of risk by going to more dense systems. That saves us networking ports, electricity, and racks in the colocation center. We cannot say that it saved us x amount of dollars over another solution, but there definitely are some efficiencies that we have gotten from going with NetApp.

As we move further into our relationship with them, we continue to grow the cost savings and efficiencies. The first reason is that we are better at it, and the second reason is that we understand the solution. There is always a learning curve going from one product to another. The biggest change for us while going to NetApp was that we were getting into a completely different class of storage. Instead of a small or medium business or a mid-sized business, we were moving into the enterprise space. The cost savings were not immediate, but it has paid dividends the longer we have been with them.

There is probably more automation that we could do. I do not think there would be a good return on investment for us with anything else with the level of experience that we have with this solution now. As we continue to grow and try to do things like geographic diversity or replication at different levels, or we get farther into our hybrid cloud journey, it definitely is valuable for us to have a partner like NetApp that works in all those instances.

It is pretty good. It is definitely cheaper than Dell EMC. It is cheaper than Pure. It is cheaper than VAST. It is definitely cheaper than HPE. The only one that is on par with NetApp's pricing for enterprise customers is IBM.

IBM is good, but unfortunately, there are not as many trained people out there. It is harder to support. Most of the IBM storage people are on the IBM mainframe. As a Windows-based and Linux-based shop, not a mainframe shop, it made more sense for us to go with NetApp.

I had some input into the evaluation, but I was not the final decision-maker.

Reliability is a key factor for how we look at a storage partner, and we found that NetApp had a very methodical process. NetApp was not the new kid on the block. It was not some fancy experimental system. It was a tried and true technology, and it allowed us to maintain our business. We also found that they were a good partner, and that is important to us. We have good support. We have good relations with our sales folks. We have good relations with our sales engineers, and that has done quite a bit for us compared to other companies that have come in and pitched their products, but they just did not seem as well-rounded as a company as NetApp had.

We started looking for a solution because we had grown to the point where we had to look at a much more enterprise-level storage product. We looked at all the big players such as Dell EMC and NetApp. There would not have been Pure at the time. We looked at some large vendors such as HPE and whatever products they had at the time. We were looking for vendors that would cater to small businesses or midsize businesses. NetApp fitted the bill for us, and that was the reason we went with them. It was not an outage, a failure, or something like that that drove us to them. It was our growth that led us to partner with someone who had a much more enterprise-class product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement.