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

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.

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.

The solution needs faster indexing.

It's a good product, but it's becoming outdated and moving to their other primary architecture.

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.

I would like to see more web support.

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".

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.

More in depth reporting about the files in local cache: Where they are, how much there are, and what files it is moving to and from the cloud, as it needs to. Most of that's kind of behind the magic curtain process that we don't have a whole lot of visibility into.

Also, we were actually able to discover a bug in the product that they're still working on. We've been working with their tech support trying to get it fixed. It's a bug with the Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol with older Windows operating systems. This is something we absolutely want fixed in the future, basically as soon as possible.

More than a 500 volume limit. At the moment, it only supports up to 500 volumes for SnapMirror and that's a problem. We've got 750, so a larger limit for volume replicas for SnapMirror.

It's quite simple to use. We haven't had many issues. This is really the last stumbling block for us. Once that limit goes away, it's almost set-and-forget. It's just how you want it.

Free version. It actually does a lot. It ingests data from almost any source and it will push it out to almost any cloud. So it does everything I want it to do right now. They've done a good job with it, honestly.

What could be helpful is different user base authentication so then maybe we could allow different customers to point to a single appliance and they only see the backups and things that they have. That feature may actually be in there but we haven't utilized that.

There are some bits it could do better. With tighter integration maybe with Veeam, or something like that, it'd be really good.

It is still shipping at the moment and it's quite a bigger plane. So, if you are going to go down the physical route, I'd charge for the VA.

I would improve upon the form factor. Some of the usability stuff is good. There's some better features around that prepopulate and cash-in again, that could be improved upon, but again, minor things.

Well, again, I don't know too much about what's coming up, so I couldn't really comment on that, either.

We use it in the plants right now. We use NetBackup just as a cataloging service, so if NetApp would probably make it in one box (integrating it), then it would work better to marry to other catalogs. That's the one thing. Everything built it, it could be more beneficial to customers.

To clarify, the catalog feature is lacking, and you need to depend on somebody else.

I would like to see voice activation as a new feature. If we could just tell the system what to do verbally, that would be perfect for us. I don't know how that can happen, but at this point I really can't see anything needs to be added it.

Though, more capacity with the basic model of the AltaVault would probably help out.