Azure NetApp Files Reviews

In my role as a solutions architect, I often work with clients who have demanding performance needs for their VDI. Recently, I had a client managing language telephone line data with a requirement for extremely high IOPS, reaching up to 45,000-48,000. In such cases, where Azure Files' premium option falls short, we recommended Azure NetApp Files due to its ability to provide the necessary performance and seamless integration with Azure services. This tailored approach ensured the client's VDI solution met their specific performance and data management criteria, especially when considering their plans to use Azure database solutions.

The most significant benefits our customers have experienced with Azure NetApp Files revolve around performance, particularly its impact on end-users within the organization. The key advantage is evident in user satisfaction and retention within these environments. Typically, performance issues lead people to shy away from virtual desktop solutions, but with Azure NetApp Files, we have observed a different trend. Users are choosing to stay on the platform due to the notable improvements in performance.

One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities, addressing a common challenge faced by many when using traditional databases. The solution significantly improves performance, particularly evident in the context of an educational facility where we deploy lab environments for students. This allows for smooth tracking of student profiles and provides an enhanced virtual database experience.

There are a few areas where Azure NetApp Files could see improvements. Firstly, the deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions. Simplifying it would make it more user-friendly and accessible for users. Additionally, the availability of Azure NetApp Files is limited to specific regions, and expanding its provision to more regions would be beneficial. Lastly, enhancing the disaster recovery options by supporting cross-region deployment and ensuring data redundancy, like Azure Files, would provide added security and peace of mind for users. 

I have been working with Azure NetApp Files for three years.

It is a quite stable product.

Azure NetApp Files is scalable and you can add more storage as needed. However, its availability is limited to specific regions in Azure, which might impact redundancy and data accessibility in different locations.

The deployment process for Azure NetApp Files was somewhat complex. It involved steps such as setting up the Azure interface in a dedicated subnet and configuring services. Coordination with different teams for infrastructure and identity was needed. With everyone on board, the deployment took about one and a half hours. While not overly lengthy, it required careful preparation, including having the necessary subscriptions and an established Azure environment. Overall, it was a manageable process with the right resources. Maintenance for Azure NetApp Files is relatively straightforward. A skilled engineer, like the installer, can handle governance and management tasks post-deployment. This involves tasks such as granting access to Azure NetApp Files and scaling up resources if needed. In my experience, we deployed it for a single institution - a school with approximately 300 users.

Azure stands out from other storage solutions due to its strong performance, especially for large-scale enterprise needs. Unlike some alternatives, Azure excels in both storage capacity and high performance, making it a reliable choice for organizations with substantial data and user requirements.

My advice for those considering working with Azure NetApp Files is to evaluate your specific needs and assess if they align with the deployment of Azure solutions. If performance is a critical factor and you are dealing with large volumes of data, Azure NetApp Files can offer an excellent experience. It is a robust choice, especially in scenarios where performance is key. I recommend exploring its capabilities for your specific use case and considering it for your storage solution needs. Overall, I would rate Azure NetApp Files a seven out of ten.

We were looking for a five-part solution that scales well, is fast, and has the ability to be quickly provisioned in the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environment. Our product requires it to be quick because It is a memory database that also has persistence, which has to be real-time.

We are an enterprise performance management (EPM) company. As an 18-year-old company, we have a lot of legacy systems. Around 2011 to 2012, we decided to move to the cloud. We have pretty ambitious plans to lift and shift all of our customers to the cloud. For the past three years, we've been aggressively pushing our cloud offering. It is a fully managed cloud EPM solution that we are providing to our customers. The whole infrastructure, platform, and product are totally managed by us. We are partnering with Microsoft and running it on Microsoft Azure. 

We are in the process of modernizing the whole offering and making it cloud native. We've been modernizing for the past year and a half. One of the problems that you need to solve is also storage. This is where we bumped into NetApp. It's not only about compute. It's also about storage and networking. The storage becomes quite an important role. 

We have seen solutions where you need to provision totally new storage, e.g., two terabytes, then reconfigure, shut down everything, reconfigure, and copy data to bigger storage and restart. This requires a lot of manual work, etc. With NetApp, you don't need that. You just do it via the API, and say, "I require an increase." Four terabytes is the smallest pool size, and I can say, "Give me additional terabytes," and it happens immediately. 

If you go to our website, you can trial our products by clicking a button. In the past, you would go to the website, click on that button, and fill in a form, then you would get some notification saying, "Thank you for registering. We will let you know as soon as this is over," or something like that. 20 minutes later you get an email saying, "Your environment is ready. Go ahead and try it out." What we managed to get with AKS, and especially with NetApp, is that this is almost a real-time experience. You fill in the form, click on the button, create, and the process takes around 20 seconds. You still get email in the back, but you end up with the trial environment provisioned on-the-fly in real-time. For this use case, this increases the marketing funnel. We get more inquiries and leads through it as the people trying it out are more engaged and do not get bored by waiting.

For example, if you go to Google and search for a product/offering, you find it. You don't want go to their site only to get the message, "I'll let you know when it's done." You want to try it immediately, as you're hooked on it. If you're already in the product, you want try it as a potential customer. You already know with a high probability that, "Yeah, this is the right product for me," or it's not. But, this saves the customer time.

In the past, we would provision for as much as we need or guarantee to a customer. E.g., if a customer said, "Look, I need two terabytes," or he pays for two terabyte of storage, we provisioned two terabyte of storage. Although, he's consuming only fraction of it, we still provisioned and kept that in use. With NetApp, you can do this on-the-fly.

Ease of provisioning: It's very easy to consume the product. We are not doing this manually. We are doing this programmatically, but it's very easy and seamless for us to consume it. It's like any other Azure component. It's very good and well-integrated into the ecosystem of Azure. There is tight integration. 

We didn't need to learn anything new. It feels like we know everything already, although under the hood, the product is something totally different. However, it seemed very easy for us.

It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something. 

The performance is quite good, so it's almost on par with the make of SSD storage. It provides a quick, scalable storage solution.

We were looking for a supported solution. We didn't want to experiment. We didn't want to look for open source, though we did look into open source initially before we bumped into NetApp. We figured out that adding yet another unknown into our system was not going to bring us benefit. It would be another problem that we would need to tackle. So, we said, "Okay, let's look for a supported solution," and NetApp was one of them. Then, we turned to NetApp.

I have a hunch that storage could be now the most expensive portion of our monthly bill. So I can imagine that, not this year, but next year we will be talking about looking deeper into ways how we can optimize the cost. However, I'm pretty sure with NetApp we nailed the cost thing by literally provisioning only what we need.

We started around February to March 2019. It went general availability (GA) only in the summer when it went live. We needed to raise tickets to get it provisioned, as it wasn't globally available. We were one of the early adopters of the technology, but we have never had any issues with it.

It is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. Therefore, I say, "Give me storage," and NetApp provides me storage in Microsoft Azure.

We looked for a solution with good performance, and so far, this has kept being constant. We do increase loads over the time, but we haven't had any hiccups or slowdowns. The performance has scaled with the solution and its usage.

NetApp works technically with something called pools. The smallest pool that you can allocate is four terabytes. Then, you can slice off a chunk of data, which is 100 gigabytes, and that is the smallest chunk of data. In our load, we've been slicing and taking those chunks, then once we reach out near the end we just extend the size past the four terabyte thing. I think we have done this numerous times in the past. It's been almost a year since we used it in production. We kept constantly increasing it, so we never needed to decrease anything. We keep adding more customers to it.

We are quite savvy on our own. There has been not much to learn. It was very seamless and easy for us to switch to NetApp. Therefore, we didn't even need support from NetApp. The only support we ever asked for was regarding provisioning and that was due to the fact that we didn't have access to it because it was still not generally available. It was still in preview and we were not able to use it everywhere in Azure, only in selected regions and subscriptions. This is why we engaged support. Other than that, we had a couple of calls regarding alignment, but it was nothing technical. We didn't need support because the system was working and still works without issues. It has been very seamless to consume.

We were doing a migration of one of our workloads from legacy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to manage the Kubernetes offering. In the process, we evaluated different storage solutions. One that popped up in Azure's store preview was from NetApp. Since we have a pretty good connection to the AKS team in Seattle, they said, "Maybe you're looking for something like this. Have a look at the NetApp Files." We tried it, and it was a perfect match. 

It's fully supported and fully integrated into the Azure ecosystem. There is an SLA which provides support if something goes wrong

Positive

We previously used standard Azure storage. We switched to ANF as it provides to quick and flexible solution for our AKS workload.

The initial setup was very straightforward because it was integrated into the ecosystem of Azure. It follows the same principles of a native Azure Storage, meeting or exceeding what the underlying Azure services provide. It doesn't change anything in the flow.

We build the product on top of NetApp and other services in Azure, then we sell that product to a customer. The customer is unaware of the underlying technology.

Overall, utilization went down to a real usage level with NetApp. That was part of the optimization. Cost probably were high on average, but because the services are more expensive than what we had in the past, everything was leveled.

I think we are breakeven if we look at the solutions from a storage perspective. We are on the same page where we started in terms of costs. 

NetApp is part of the puzzle, so it is part of the transformation. It's part of the change that we introduced in the offering. For the service that has been running on NetApp for the past year (since mid-April), we managed to lower that overall service cost by a factor of nine. E.g., it costs $100 per month, now it's $10 to 15 per month. 10 to 15. 

NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties which customers like us are willing to pay. Could it be cheaper? Yes, but if you combine fully supported, fully managed, easily provisioned, scalable, and quick all in one product, it's a good selling point. You can ask a lot of money for all these. If you have a use case like we do, it's a perfect match. It's like the Porsche of storage solutions in the cloud. It is totally worth the cost.

We have a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) contract with Microsoft.

We are a reseller. Our offering is a all-inclusive one, so it's paid per user per month with a subscription. We have packaging starting from 10 users, then going up to unlimited. We have customers of many different sizes spanning from a small offices of 10 users up to enterprise customers with thousands of users. So, I couldn't tell. It is incorporated, so we don't charge our customers extra for using NetApp.

There is a native support in Microsoft Azure Files. They have block storage along with different kinds of storage. Those are either slow to mount,slow to start using, or slow to use. Prior to Azure NetApp Files, all the solutions that we tried didn't deliver all three things we wanted at the same time. Either:

• It would start, quickly provision, but be slow to use and not scale.
• It would scaling well, provision quickly, but be slow to use.

It was always combination of things like that. Azure NetApp Files has a unique ability to behave like a traditional file share. This means it is always present, but it's extremely quick, so throughput is quite good. 

Because we are talking about managing customer data, if we have a data loss, while there are some open source solutions out in the wild, who would support those? 

We tried an open source contender which is a fairly new offering in the open source world. It's called Rook.io, and it's a controller for Kubernetes and the underlying technology is SaaS. It's a relatively mature open source Linux technology for storage. Rook does the implementation, yet hides the a bit of the complexity of it. At the end of the day, there is no support for it and it does not solve all the problems that NetApp does. We had a couple of hiccups with it early on in the development. While the product has moved and progressed, we haven't revisited it since there was no support for it. Therefore, it was not an option for us. 

The dynamic sizing feature saves us a lot of manual work. We know open source solutions like Lustre file system where you need to go into system and reconfigure it. You can do it via API, but it's really manual work that you say, "Okay, I need more," then you wait until it resizes. With NetApp, it's immediate. I don't know how those guys do it. It is really magic.

I would recommend having a look at NetApp.

We tried it and were ecstatic about it, so we found our solution. When we tried Azure NetApp Files, it was like, "Wow." So, we went for it.

It has literally given me peace of mind. I invested a lot of brain energy last year prior to finding NetApp and identifying the right solution for us. Since then, I've forgot about this topic. I literally don't care about it anymore, as it has been working well and was the perfect fit. I didn't even look around.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).

We are using it for some of the workloads related to SAP. We are also using it to store data related to videos coming from some of the cameras in the customer facilities.

We have been using its latest version.

Its security and ease of use are most valuable.

The main hurdle in promoting this solution is the price. Its price definitely requires an improvement. It is more expensive than other options, so customers go for a cheaper option.

We have been using this solution for about seven years.

It is definitely stable.

It is definitely scalable.

We have our own support team. We haven't had the need to take support from Microsoft for Azure NetApp Files. The information that we found on Microsoft portals has been enough for us to use the tool and give support to our customers.

Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end.

We recommend this solution to our customers because of its ease of use, availability, and security, but they don't usually go for it because of its price.

I would rate it at least a nine out of 10.

We are using Azure NetApps Files for our houses.com solution.

Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial.

We were looking for a clustered solution that has over-complicated things because we had it in AWS, which is Amazon. There was a solution for clustered NetApp. That meant there would be two NetApps that were not clustered because there was no solution for a cluster. We would like there to be an HA cluster solution.

I have been using version 9.9 of this solution for approximately one month.

The solution is stable and reliable.

We have not gone any further than what we are doing with the solution to see whether expansion comes in the future. We know NetApps reasonably well and scalability normally is not an issue. We are in the cloud, and I am not sure how this will translate scalability-wise.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We are currently on a pay-as-you-go model with the storage that we use.

My advice to others is to make sure this solution is right for what they are going to use it for.

I rate Azure NetApp Files a nine out of ten.

We use Azure NetApp Files mainly to collect events and for configuration.

Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution.

The solution could be easy to use and the security could be better.

I have been using Azure NetApp Files for approximately three months.

Azure NetApp Files has been stable.

In our use, Azure NetApp Files has been scalable.

I have previously used Splunk and I prefer it over Azure NetApp Files. Splunk is more secure and it is important.

The deployment of Azure NetApp Files could be easier.

We have five technicians and two engineers that do the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

The price of Azure NetApp Files could be better.

This is not the best solution for our use case but there are aggressive politics to market this solution.

I rate Azure NetApp Files a seven out of ten.

We have implemented Azure NetApp Files in our lab, and we have tested the NFS and CIFS protocols. We are looking for the multi-protocol approach, where the clients can leverage both protocols to access files, whether they are using Windows or Linux. Once we have this, and the data protection is in place, will we begin using this solution internally.

One of the benefits that I saw was that the administrators are hands-off, and don't have to worry about disk replacements. All we care about is creating volumes and giving our clients access to those volumes. This functionality is critical because we are a very lean team, and it gives us back a lot of cycles.

In terms of seeing a performance increase, I would not say that this is our use case. We are concerned with functionality at this time. Traditionally, the way we see it, if we want more performance then we keep it local because we see the price point going up when cloud applications need higher performance. As of now, we don't have any applications that require that kind of performance in the cloud.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution provided flexibility in both capacity and performance. In terms of operations, this solution has given us a lot of cycles back. We don't have have to deal with the scheduling and the data center folks when it comes to things like third-party disk replacement. It is hands-off.

I would say that ease of use is one of the highest items because it doesn't matter if I'm there in the company or not, tomorrow somebody else might come in and for that person, the learning curve is very linear. They will be able to pick it up in, probably, a couple of days and it's not a lot to learn. It's very intuitive when we are using Azure NetApp Files.

We have only done preliminary testing with dynamic resizing, but I would say that it has not saved us time.

At this point, using NetApp Files has not given us the opportunity for new use cases.

Features are being added to this product at a very slow pace, and they should be speeding that up and being a little more aggressive.

The critical features of this solution are SnapMirror for replication, data protection, and SnapLock.

Replication is important to us because we are a financial company, and we would like to have a second copy of the data available to use no matter what. Whether we are running on-premises or in the could, we would like to have it available in a different region.

The data protection is important because regardless of the disaster recovery, we were running into a situation where the data is corrupted in both locations. 

SnapLock is used for WORM files, where they are locked for a certain amount of time and nobody will be able to delete them. It is SEC compliant, which is important because we cannot put data onto these systems until the FINRA or SEC compliance is there.

This solution is intuitive, easy to learn, and easy to use.

We would like to be able to replicate data to different regions as soon as possible.

The data protection piece is missing.

We would like to have backup functionality built-in so that we don't run into the issue where the replication process makes a copy of the corrupted data.

Technical support needs to be improved.

We trust the stability of this solution. We have been using ONTAP for probably a decade and we trust the code. This is basically the UI that is changing, and we believe that everything else under the covers is still there, operationally.

NetApp Files is definitely scalable. However, to what extent and what price point is something that is yet to be seen for us.

We do not have to pay NetApp for support, but at the end of the day, we still have to have support, regardless of the product. So, either way, we pay NetApp or Microsoft so it doesn't matter. We still need support for the product.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the technical support a two. There are very few people who understand this technology inside NetApp. If you need to have an answer on a specific question then you need to go to the right people, which means that you have to know who the right people are. Otherwise, the question will be lingering around for months.

Microsoft brought this solution forward to us. Once I heard about it, I saw the value in getting our time back. That is very important for us because we are a lean group and we do a lot of things with very few people. That is one of the main drivers for implementing.

Azure's Service and support did not influence us in going with this solution.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. Anybody who understands Microsoft Azure will find it pretty straightforward to create volumes or enable the licensing. It's very easy.

I deployed this solution, myself.

Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features.

We do have Cloud Volume Service on AWS, which is pretty much the same, I would say. There's no difference between this solution and that one. However, Azure NetApp Files is better for us because we manage Microsoft Azure as well.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is that it's a good opportunity for companies to save time on operations.

Definitely, I would recommend Azure NetApp Files over AWS because I have seen more of them, and I prefer NetApp. We have built a lot of functionality ourselves in the form of traditional, homegrown scripts. Even though the snapshot capability was not there, we had the ability to do it using scripts. It was easier, I would say. AWS has been there for a very long time so it has that benefit. It's more mature than Microsoft Azure NetApp Files, but personally, as Microsoft users, we recommend this solution.

This is a good product, but they have a couple of key elements in the works that need to be delivered within the next one or two quarters.

At this time, I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use this solution for SQL backups and restores.

Right now, we've stopped using this solution because we finished our migration. We are looking to work with Microsoft and NetApp to see what other innovations we can do with this solution, on other practical problems in our infrastructure that it can solve.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution have provided flexibility in both capacity and performance. We were able to scale up and add more capacity with zero downtime, allowing us to continue in our migration without having to refactor anything.

NetApp's dynamic resizing has saved us hours.

Prior to implementing this solution, we could not perform really rapid database backups and restores. This new use case allows us to easily do data migrations instead of them becoming a time-consuming, very long-planning affair.

When comparing ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost, I would say that this solution is fair. It is about four times the cost of premium storage on Azure, so in order for us to use it, we'd have to be willing to increase our storage costs by four times. It would be nicer if there was a little bit less of a differential.

The most valuable features are the quick spin-ups and spin-downs, ultra-fast SQL backup and restore.

The speed of Azure NetApp Files is incredible. Instead of taking three to four hours to do a back and restore operation of a large database, we were able to conduct it in about 15 minutes.

I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region.

The stability is rock solid. We had no issues with it during the migrations.

We were able to scale really quickly.

The technical support for this solution is excellent.

We were using backups to Azure blobs and it was taking far too long to do it. A Microsoft Cloud solution architect suggested Azure NetApp Files, and when we saw the time reduced from hours to minutes, we were sold on the technology.

The Azure service support did not influence our decision because we had an established relationship with Microsoft, so their recommendation is what influenced us.

The initial setup seemed very straightforward, kind of point and click.

The NetApp engineers worked with our Microsoft engineers, which worked with our team to both imagine and deploy this solution without our architecture within hours. The three of them worked great together.

While I cannot share dollar figures, I can share customer feedback. We received almost zero complaints because of our reduced downtime, which to us is a huge ROI.

Using Azure NetApp Files got us out of a really difficult situation quickly, effectively, and at a reasonable cost.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to definitely try it out. Benchmark it against their existing solution to see if it can improve their throughput.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case for Azure NetApp Files is unstructured data.

We have this solution deployed both on Microsoft Azure and on-premises.

Azure NetApp Files gives our clients better options.

My clients have seen a performance increase in a range of between five and thirty percent.

The scale-up and scale-down capabilities of the solution have provided flexibility in both capacity and performance, as well as billing. It has streamlined our operations, making them more flexible and allowing for easier growth.

The dynamic resizing has given us better position, accuracy, and deployment, so in this perspective, it has saved time.

As a partner, we have multiple use cases on a daily basis. There is a lot of flexibility and lots of use cases that fit well with this solution.

With regard to the ease of use and reduction in management versus the cost, this solution is excellent. The time to market is quick.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility.

The speed of this solution is adequate.

The fully integrated Active Directory was exactly what I was looking for.

This solution would be improved with more innovation.

I have been selling NetApp for about fifteen years.

Stability has been good to this point.

Scalability has been good, so far.

The technical support for this solution has been good.

We are a Microsoft Premier Partner in Cloud, which made for a nice bridge because we were already partners with NetApp.

The initial setup of Azure NetApp Files varies. It can be anywhere from the basics to extreme complexity.

We are the solution integrator who implement this for our clients.

The licensing fees for this solution vary, ranging from a single shelf to a full suite.

We did not evaluate other options. NetApp is always on our short-list.

I recommend Azure NetApp Files.

This solution just fits our needs, and I would rate it a ten out of ten.