NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

We mostly use it for disaster recovery.

We are using Cloud Volumes only for our NAS storage, not FAS, which includes Windows, Linux, Solaris, and VMware.

We are remotely able to manage data.

We have performance monitoring, but there is not much load. Sometimes, we use it to trace performance when there are performance-related issues. We will then log a case based on what needs to be checked, like a network issue.

The flexible volumes are its most valuable features because we can increase and decrease the volumes. 

There is unified storage, which provides flexibility. It is set up perfectly for performance and provisioning. We are able to monitor everything using a separate application. It provides error and critical warnings that allow us to take immediate action through ONTAP. We are able to manage everything, log a case, and follow up with the support team, who can fix it. That is how it is unified.

We can take a Snapshot. We created a snapshot policy for the cloud, non-cloud, and test so there are three policies. We take Snapshots daily and weekly. This hardly takes any of our attention.

It is very comfortable to learn and work with when managing everything, e.g., with upgrades and maintenance. We can do everything perfectly. 

They don't provide training documentation where we can learn about the back-end architecture and how it works. I have needed this type of documentation for Cloud Manager, its AWS integration, and managing the on-premise back-end. We would also like to learn about future enhancements from documentation.

I joined Baxter International six months ago. That is how long that I have been using the solution.

It is stable compared to other storage solutions. 

It provides a stable storage for flexibility. Everything is perfect and works quickly.

We upgraded last month. I am not a fan of the upgrade to 9.7.

Everything is fine with the scalability.

We have more than 10,000 people using the solution on the cloud. 

The company has more than seven filers and controllers each. 

There are four people managing Baxter International's storage in India and the UK. Two people manage this device, a senior technical associate and myself.

The tech support is wonderful. They provide support in a timely fashion. They have provided support to us on knowledge base related issues, fixing them without any problems.

Types of issues we have logged:

• Time sink.
• Getting a warning alert about not being able to connect to Cloud Manager when we log into it. The support has provided links, but this particular issue is not fixed yet.

We are currently in the process of deploying the new NetApp box and are unable to deploy it. We are getting some errors. We are working the the network team to fix this.

I still need to learn about SnapMirror with the new migration.

The operations team did the setup.

I am not aware if it saves money on storage. This is managed by senior people.

I have used IBM and Hitachi.

The product is secure.

Cloud Manager also works quickly.

I would rate Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a nine (out of 10).

We use NetApp for our on-premise file shares, and we use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as an offsite backup copy.

Being able to deploy in AWS is a big advantage for us. The company I work for was recently spun off as a smaller company. We sold most of our company to a large company and all of our assets went to that company. Then we started building our first data center and we did not have a second data center for our outside copy. This was a great solution in these circumstances.

In general, NetApp provides unified storage, but we mostly use it only for NAS. It gives us great control over our data. We can define which region or zone we put our data in, in AWS. That way, we can strategically place our offsite copies. Instead of putting everything in one place, we now have more freedom to put data wherever we want.

We are also saving at least $100,000 a year on storage costs.

The most valuable features are 

• tiering to S3 
• being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule.

These are valuable because of the effect on cost. All of the data that is stored in AWS is, obviously, very expensive if stored in EBS volumes or spinning disks, but it's pretty cheap in S3, so that makes good financial sense. 

For the shutdown and startup, it's the same thing. Since it's a backup copy, we don't need that filer running all the time, so we just shut it down. We only turn it on before the replication starts, and then shut it off after the replication is complete.

One area for improvement is monitoring. Since we are using turn-on and turn-off, based on a schedule, it becomes a little bit difficult to monitor the instance and the replications, etc. If NetApp could implement a feature to monitor it more effectively, that would be helpful.

Also, I would like to see more aggressive management of the aggregate space. On the Cloud Volumes ONTAP that we use for offsite backup copies, most of the data sits in S3. There are also the EBS volumes on the Cloud Volumes ONTAP itself. Sometimes what happens is that the aggregate size just stays the same. If it allocates 8 terabytes initially, it just stays at 8 terabytes for a long time, even though we're only using 20 percent of that 8 terabytes. NetApp could undersize that more aggressively.

I have been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about one-and-a-half years.

In all the time we've been running it we have had no issues. It's great.

We are not using it at that big of a scale, so right now we do not have any concerns. It's limited to 360 terabytes. In the past, before we sold 80 percent of our company to that large company, we used to have more than 360 terabytes of data. If we still had all that data we would have to build another instance of Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Or, post-sale, if we were to cross that limit we could have to build another instance of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, but we're not there yet. We are using about 25 percent of that limit right now.

Overall, their support team is great. One of the best features about Cloud Volumes ONTAP is that once you open the OnCommand Cloud Manager, there's a tiny chat button at the bottom. You can just send a message to all the experts related to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That's a great feature.

We used to use two NetApp filers in two different data centers for offsite backup copies. We decided to go with Cloud Volumes ONTAP because after we sold 80 percent of the company, we were left with only one data center. We did not have a second data center to put the second NetApp in, so we went with this solution. It was the perfect solution for our use case.

The initial setup of the solution, in our case, was a little bit complex because we use Terraform to manage our cloud infrastructure. To configure Cloud Volumes ONTAP in combination with Terraform proved a little bit challenging. That's one of the areas for improvement of the solution: NetApp could provide customers with templates of how to manage this infrastructure as a code. The difficulties we encountered were mostly in terms of what components need to be configured in Terraform, as well as how they could be configured.

Overall, our deployment took about a month. We didn't really have a deployment plan for this solution because this was the first time we were deploying it. We had to make it up as we went along, especially because NetApp did not have any documentation on how to implement this using Terraform. We had to come up with that plan.

We did not hire anyone, but the NetApp support team was great. It is just me working on this, in our company.

This is more of a pay-as-you-go model rather than an investment, but we definitely see benefits. If we had to build another NetApp in our on-premise location, whether we used the storage or not, we would just be spending money. The asset would just depreciate, whereas, in the cloud, we only use what we need and we just pay for what we use.

Licensing seems pretty straightforward and then we just pay for the EC2 costs.

Pricing brings up another point in terms of room for improvement. If they could provide some insights into how we could optimize the cost of Cloud Volumes ONTAP in our cloud, that would be great.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. It's the same as what they showed us in the initial deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we use on-premise NetApp. NetApp works best with NetApp.

We did look at other solutions just to see how they were working, but back then, when we were implementing it, they were nowhere even close to as mature as NetApp. We looked at the Dell EMC Isilon but it was not even close to what NetApp was capable of in the cloud. They were not even close to building something in AWS at that point. It was an easy decision.

Be careful while choosing the instance size, and manage the aggregate size as carefully. Otherwise, you'll just end up paying a lot of money. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this is exactly those two things. I noticed that I need to size the instance carefully, and I need to make sure that the EBS volume sizes that I use are not too underutilized.

Our use case is to have multitenant deployment of shared storage, specifically network-attached storage (NAS). This file share is used by applications that are very heavy with a very high throughput. Also, an application needs to be able to sustain the read/write throughput and persistent volume. Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps us to get the required performance from our applications.

We just got done with our PoC. We are now engaging with NetApp CVO to get this solution rolled out (deployment) and do hosting for our customers on top of that.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save.

• CIFS volume.
• The overall performance that we are getting from CVO.
• The features around things like Snapshots. 
• The performance and capacity monitoring of the storage.

These features help us to have a backup of our volumes using the native technology of NetApp ONTAP. That way, we don't have to invest in other solutions for our backup requirement. Also, it helps us to replicate the data to another geographic location so that helps us to save on the costs of backup products.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP gives us flexible storage.

There are a few bugs in the system that they need to improve on the UI part. Specifically, its integration of NetApp Cloud Manager with CVO, which is something they are already working on. They will probably provide a SaaS offering for Cloud Manager. 

We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full. 

Six months.

I cannot comment on stability right now because we have not been using it in production as of now.

We still have CVO running on a single VM instance. As an improvement area, if CVO can come up with a scale out that will help so we will not be limited by the number of VMs in GCP. Behind one instance, we are adding a number of GCP disks. In some cases, we would like to have the option to scale out by adding more nodes in a cluster environment, like Dell EMC Isilon.

Get NetApp involved from day one if you are thinking of deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP. They have a very good support team who is very helpful. They will help you with every aspect of getting the deployment done.

We previously used OpenZFS Cloud Storage. We switched because we were not getting the performance from them. The performance tuning is a headache. There were a lot of issues, such as, the stability and updates of the OpenZFS. We had it because it was a free, open source solution. 

We switched to NetApp because I trust their performance tool and file system.

We did the PoC. Now, we are going to set up a production environment. 

The initial setup was a bit challenging for someone who has no idea about NetApp. Since I have some background with it, I found the setup straightforward. For a few folks, it was challenging. It is best to get NetApp support involved for novices, as they can give the best option for setting to select during deployment.

The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge.

My team of engineers works on deploying this solution. There are five people on my team.

We have not realized any money or savings yet because we are still in our deployment process.

They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product.

We did consider several options. 

In GCP, we also considered NetApp's Cloud Volumes services as well, but it did not have good performance. 

Another solution that we tried was Qumulo, which was a good solution, but not that good. From a scaling out perspective, it can scale out a file system, whereas NetApp is not like that. NetApp still works with a single VM. That is the difference.  

We also evaluated the native GCP file offering. However, it did not give us the performance for the application that we wanted.

We do use the cloud performance monitoring, but not with a NetApp product. We use Stackdriver. NetApp provides a separate thing for the monitoring of NetApp CVO, which is NetApp Cloud Manager.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We are predominantly using it as a backup target for our products. We are also doing some CIFS shares to remote sites that don't have their own file server infrastructures.

It gives us flexibility. In a disaster situation, or even in an office relocation, there can be a gap. NetApp CVO allows us to continue to provide service customers with access to their data, even if a physical site is going to be down for a long period of time. It's only really viable if you know a site is going to be down for a long period of time. We've had office relocations and there have been gaps between when the old office closed and the new office opened, during that period of moving stuff over and setting things up. There were a couple of weeks where we were serving the data out of the cloud, rather than out of the physical site. NetApp CVO may have improved our uptime by 1 or 2 percent, because we don't have that much downtime to start with.

It has all the advantages of the real NetApp product. You can provide storage in most of the formats you'd want. 

It helps us to keep control of storage costs because it's an OpEx-based model rather than a CapEx-based model. It depends on how you license it. You can have it up and down, almost on an hourly basis. Obviously, we don't do that, we've got it up long-term. But it does have that flexibility to bring up an instance of a client filer for just a short period of time.

It has saved us from having to buy and host another filer somewhere. That would be the only option to achieve the same goal. If we were to buy another filer to provision the capacity we've got in the cloud, the CapEx would probably be at least $200,000, whereas the running costs are not that much. It depends on how you deal with AWS, but we don't pay that kind of money. It probably saves us 75 percent of the cost of buying a filer for real.

One of the most valuable features is its similarity to the physical app, which makes it familiar. It's almost identical to a real NetApp, which means you can run all of the associated NetApp processes and services with it. Otherwise, we would definitely have to deploy some hardware on a site somewhere, which could be a challenge in terms of CapEx. Also, in our case, in Europe, in terms of physical real estate, we are trying to reduce the size of our data centers.

There is room for improvement with the capacity. There's a very hard limit to how many disks you can have and how much space you can have. That is something they should work to fix, because it's limiting. Right now, the limit is about 360 terabytes or 36 disks.

I've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about two years.

The stability has been really good. I don't think we've ever had any major outages. AWS, obviously, doesn't guarantee 100 percent uptime, so I can see that it's not been up since I last restarted it. Rather, it's been up since some AWS event resulted in it migrating to another one of their pieces of hardware. But we've never had it actually crash.

The scalability is good to a point, but there is a hard limit on the capacity. We could, obviously, create another associated instance of it, but it wouldn't be a single name space, and we couldn't do some of the things you can do if you have a lot of multiple, real NetApps. So there are some hard limits to how big a solution you can create.

Day-to-day, it's probably only being used by about a dozen people in our organization, because it is mainly a backup target. There is a small collection of people whose shares live on it, but the majority of the business' files are on the real NetApps on their sites.

It's probably at a size where we're not likely to implement any more. You never know. It's very hard to tell what will go on with our company. But at the moment, it's probably not going to get any larger. We may actually shrink the capacity because we are temporarily storing some stuff for a part of the business that should only be on there for a few months at most, with this COVID.

As an organization, we went ahead wholehearted that anything and everything should be in the cloud — cloud first — and that got tempered a little bit because they started to see the costs. We also hit limitations with some of the software vendors because they're quite small companies and very niche. They don't want to support anything that's in the cloud, so there are limits to what you can put in the cloud.

Their technical support is very good. In the early stages, we would get almost instant online support, because we would go into the Cloud Manager and there would be a chat and we could have a chat session with the engineers who were implementing it on the NetApp side.

As things have progressed, we now need to follow a more formal support model, but we usually get a pretty good response, for general, routine questions, within five or six hours. If it were a major incident, you would get much faster support. We've never had a major incident with it.

It replaced some physical NetApps that were going to be refreshed. One of the reasons we switched was to limit capital expenditure. Another reason was that it was very much a "Let's go and put as much as we possibly can into the cloud" approach. It fell in with that initiative quite well.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The challenges we had were only around the security we put on top of AWS. For me, as an engineer, to be able to do things requires another team to do stuff on the network side or to do stuff on my rights within AWS so that I could deploy it and manage it afterwards. But it is relatively straightforward if you're not fighting other complications.

It took us a couple of days to get it up and working the first time. My colleague did one in the US and it took him about half a day. We did one for another part of the business and that took about three or four hours to get up and running.

Initially, we were just doing an evaluation to see what it was like and if we could actually use it. It went from a trial implementation to going live within a month or two, once we realized it was going to do what we wanted to do.

We had four people involved in the implementation. I was involved, as a storage engineer, and we also had one of our client specialists, a network person, and an info-sec person to validate that the network stuff was within their rules. In terms of maintenance, it's just  me, but it doesn't really require a lot of attention because it's cloud-based and it's a NetApp. Generally, once you set them up properly, unless you're changing something, they look after themselves.

It was done by just us. Because it was one of the very early implementations of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, we were working with NetApp and their staff were playing the role that a third-party integrator might have played.

We're probably burning about $10,000 a month on it but it's saving us the CapEx and the power and cooling of a real filer. We're likely seeing at least a 50 percent saving.

Choose your disk type properly. Go with the slowest, cheapest disk you can. If you need bigger, faster ones then go for them. 

They've got a variety of license schemes. The one we've gone for is where we pay NetApp once a year. They call it the Bring Your Own license scheme. There is a by-the-hour or by-the-month basis from AWS and you can get it that way as well and be billed through AWS. But you may not get the same level of discounts that you would if you were dealing with NetApp directly. If you are committed to having a client filer for an extended period, then go with the NetApp licensing model rather than the AWS-provisioned one.

Ultimately, the more data you save, the more it costs you, because you're paying AWS for the capacity. NetApp is licensed per filer, but there are additional running costs that are paid to AWS. You pay AWS' hosting fee for an EC2 instance, and each one of the disks within the NetApp is EBS storage and you pay AWS for those.

There is potential to save money by moving things off to object storage. The only cost savings we see on it is against having to buy physical hardware.

We looked at third-party hosting with either our own, dedicated hardware or shared NetApp hardware. I wasn't that involved in that evaluation process, but I figure that the costs for the work-around were too high or the solution was too complex for us to go with.

CVO enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used management options provided by the native cloud service. With the native solutions, you don't get any of the advantages of the NetApp in terms of being able to deduplicate and having clear management of the snapshot-ing. Also, at the time, there wasn't an easy way to back up to a cloud NetApp. There was nothing. Now they have a slightly different solution where they'll mount it for you but, at that time, you created your own cloud instance and your own cloud file and you managed that. Now, you can access a solution that is managed by AWS or by NetApp.

It is almost identical to having a real NetApp, and it's just that it's remote and it's in the cloud. Almost anything you can do with NetApp locally you can do with a cloud filer.

Go with the cheapest disks to start with, and if you need the performance you can easily transition to using faster disks.

There are limitations, but in general it's robust and easily managed.

The solution is for file sharing and networks. If we have a cluster in a network, for example, two servers needed to use a common file, NetApp is a good tool. You can spin up a network from the other cluster, so if your application is a multi-node cluster and you need a common place to share the drag with, you can use NetApp for that. 

At the time we implemented it, there wasn't any other solution. We needed a cluster, and we needed a common place where both nodes can share a file. There was not a good solution at that time besides NetApp. Now, there is. There's EFS. EFS is for Linux only. NetApp works for Windows. However, now, AWS is competing with NetApp with FSx. However, NetApp also has a feature for FSx.

The cluster needs to use a common file share, so NetApp just does that.

They provide extra security, backups, and many other features with it. 

One of the most important aspects is the flexibility to expand it. It's very scalable. 

We can easily file share with AWS. 

ONTAP is great for helping you migrate on-premise workflows to cloud environments. I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. It does what it's supposed to do. It was just expensive.

My impression of ONTAP against native AWS integrations is that FSx is much cheaper. That said, NetApp has more flexibility. Therefore, it is competitive against AWS. NetApp has an advantage in its class, and FSx has an advantage in terms of its low cost. FSx just lacks features.

In terms of ONTAP integrations with AWS native services like AWS Backup, NetApp uses AWS, so in a way, it's already backed up. If you want to provision one terabyte being backed up, they would provision ahead of time, so that way you protect your data. 

The cost needs improvement. Cost should go down. If you have a company with many servers, then the cost is down. However, if you're in a situation where you only need it for one function, then the cost can be overwhelming.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

It's pretty reliable. It's an HA solution, so even if one cluster goes down, another cluster can support everything.

The solution is extremely scalable. For example, if you initially subscribe to one terabyte, and then all of a sudden, you need two terabytes, you can dynamically expand it. You can add a feature within NetApp, and it will automatically increase it for you. You never have to worry about the space getting out of control.

Technical support is not bad. NetApp does a lot, quietly in the background. I don't even have to look for support for the most part. In most cases, when I do look for support assistance I get my questions answered. 

They could improve their response time. Once, there was an AWS outage and it took a long time to get a response. 

Neutral

We started using this solution before AWS developed its own tool called FSx. It's very similar to FSx. However, NetApp provides even more features than FSx does.

NetApp is a multi-cluster. Like FSx, the cluster is controlled by AWS itself, so you don't see that background feature. Unlike NetApp, all the deployment is in our control, so we can use that. Then there was a node feature that you can get with NetApp support in addition to the cloud support. Those are the key features. It's a little more expensive than FSx. However, there are good reasons for it.

We've been using NetApp for a while, so we'll just stick to it.

The initial setup was extremely easy. It was extremely simple to set up; it's a couple of clicks of a button, and it will then have an HA cluster for you. That's one of the good features of NetApp, the ease of setup.

I deployed the solution basically by myself.

We needed an HA solution, which we got from NetApp, so that's the only return we've received. Otherwise, we would have to go with another risky option. We do now have the option of moving over to FSx as well.

Cost-wise, ONTAP is a bit high.

We looked into FSx, which came out after implementing NetApp. We tried to use the AWS NetIQ solution with the EFS. That said, their EFS is only for Linux. There was a way to do EFS for Windows also by using Samba Share, yet that gets a little bit complicated and unreliable, so we chose NetApp at that time to keep things simple.

We have not reduced the amount of our storage with ONTAP. That was not our intention. We are not using NetApp to reduce our storage costs. We needed a reliable HA solution; that was our main goal.

We have not reduced any costs by using ONTAP. With our services, we are only using them for one thing. If we start using the product for many other functions, it's definitely a good solution. So we are trying to find other use cases for NetApp. The more we use it, the more we reduce costs.

NetApp does offer a ransomware solution, which AWS NetIQ does not offer yet. That said, we haven't faced an issue with ransomware yet. Still, that is one of the key features of NetApp that AWS does not provide yet.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the price were cheaper. 

Generally what we show our customers are possibilities for using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for multi-cloud environments, to do disaster recovery and to back up sites.

Our company provides backup and DR professional services. We allocate people to support our customers' needs in these areas. We implement the solution that the customer requires.

By creating snapshots and a multi-cloud dictionary, the solution doesn't have to replicate all the data. The dictionary can point to some of the data on another site and create a correspondence between sites. It's going to lower the storage cost. For example, it saves my clients between 50 and 60 percent.

One of the features our customers like is that it can be used from one cloud provider to another. They can use it from Azure to AWS or vice versa. That way, they don't need to use the same provider for backups. If something goes wrong on the primary site, having the same data in another cloud service provider is important.

We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side. Those requirements are just for our big customers. We have one, here in Brazil, that is very big that uses a lot of mainframe storage. But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers.

We have been a NetApp partner for three years. We have been distributing this solution for about a year and a half.

I cannot precisely say what the SLA availability is for the platforms, but in general, the stability of the cloud service provider, whether you put it in AWS, Azure, or even in GCP is very good. There are very few moments during the year that those platforms have instability. Normally their availability is at "four-nine's."

We have people assigned to us from NetApp to support us in both pre-sales and post-sales. On the post-sales side, our customer may open a case with us and we will open a case with NetApp.

NetApp's support is responsive.

Positive

We started using Spotinst and then NetApp acquired the company. From that point on, we have done a lot of business together with NetApp.

The setup is familiar because many software as a service providers have created the same types of stacks and permissions and roles. We are able to use the same skills to do these kinds of installations.

Overall, the pricing of NetApp is aggressive and the pricing becomes more aggressive as the amount of data increases. The cost for a given volume of data that you are storing becomes lower. The greater the volume of data, the cheaper the license.

With increased volume, it is expected that the cost of each megabyte will be less. It's not a "wow," or a compelling feature. It's much more compelling when you say that, by using the solution, the data replication will be improved. Those are more technical arguments and better than saying if you increase your volume you're going to decrease your price per megabyte. Other features are also more compelling than that.

The licensing is very straightforward, with the cost based on the volume.

In the past, we have tried to resell other solutions, like Wasabi, and we evaluated the Commvault solution. NetApp has many solutions for us, not just the storage and itself. It doesn't just create a repository for saving things with a lower cost. NetApp has cloud products as well as an open-source project. That variety of offerings is the main aspect that is important for us.

We use Cloud Volumes ONTAP to back up ONTAP Select instances from our plants and distribution centers to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Azure. We store a backup solution for all or most sites.

In terms of how this solution has improved my organization, we use a third-party backup solution, like Spectrum Protect from IBM to backup finances. That's not the best way to do it. Our choice was to move from that technology straight to using the same technology for backup, which is essentially NetApp. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is NetApp. It's the same technology which is where the efficiency really is. It's much more efficient than using a third-party solution.

It provides unified storage no matter what kind of data we have. Right now, it's just backing up Volumes but NetApp is a unified solution. In our case, it's really for file storage, NFS or CIFS.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to keep more backup. We can keep more backup because of the cost of storage in Azure versus what we have in our data center. This is also completely off-site from our data centers. We have two data centers close to each other, but this actually keeps us as an offsite copy too because it's far enough away. It does keep control of our storage costs from a previous backup technology because it's kept in Azure and it's cloud-based storage. It's not our on-premise storage, it's kind of a hybrid cloud solution.

We're saving around 20% on storage. 

It is the same technology that we run on our sites. All of the backup functions and recovery are similar. It's the exact same process. From a learning experience, it's the same. If you learn ONTAP itself, then you can do Cloud Volumes ONTAP without an issue.

The main feature of it is what we call "native backup technology." We're not using somebody else's technology backup, we're using NetApp. 

The other important part to us is the Cloud Manager. It gives us a single pane of glass to look at the environment. Everything is remote right now but we will be backing up some on-premise very shortly.

Lastly, the API and web services are fairly good. That is an important feature too. We write some code to do different things. We have code that runs to make sure that everything is being backed up as we say it is and we try to also detect places where we may have missed a backup.

I'm very happy with the solution, the only thing that needs improvement is the web services API. It could be a little bit more straightforward. That's my only issue with it. It can get pretty complex. 

I have been using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for a year. 

So far, we haven't had any downtime. 

It scales well. We can add to the license. We have a 100 terabyte license right now, but we can add to it very quickly.

There is very low maintenance because once you deploy it, you run your scripts and you can see what failed and not many things fail. So, it's pretty quick.

We did contact their support initially during the initial install. It was our cloud technical support. We had a resource from them. They were excellent. 

We switched to CVO because of the efficiency and architectural consistency because it uses the same technology. NetApp to NetApp is not trying to go to somebody else.

We were backing up Spectrum Protect and we were using SimpliVity backup at one time on the license, but essentially those weren't solutions and we moved totally away from that.

The initial setup was straightforward. You log onto their marketplace and deploy the Cloud Manager. Then it will deploy the actual CVO itself. It's pretty much a point and click. You have to set up some things ahead of time, like your Azure connections if you don't have them. Those can be more complex, but the actual solution itself was fairly straightforward.

There are prerequisites that have to be done like networking to Azure to your cloud and making sure that you have firewall rules in place. Those are more site-specific, like customer-specific issues. It's not really related to CVO directly.

It took about three months to deploy all the sites which are just for North America. This is also deployed within our company and in Asia. We have about 24 sites and we have a 100% adoption rate. 

We did the deployment ourselves. 

We never really got down to the TCO. We just know that it was at least 20% better. The only reason we would pick it and change everything is that it was cheaper and consistent with our architecture. 

We don't think it's that expensive when compared to what we were paying for the previous vendor. This is less expensive. Pricing is good. 

My main advice is to get your cloud technical support online. Make sure you have all the prerequisites properly done and you understand how to deploy the Cloud Manager. That's really the main thing.

Anytime we want to deploy new sites, we have to get the network people involved for firewalls because in our case, we're coming from Azure, which is where the CVO is, back into our company's network. The security protection is the most important lesson that you've got to get right. The security of your connections is important. 

I would rate NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP a ten out of ten. 

I work as a cloud architect in the multicloud team. We have customers that run NetApp services like CVS or CVO on Google or AWS or Microsoft Azure. We help them, support them, and we do migrations from their prime workflows to the cloud.

The primary use case is the migration of workloads from on-prem to cloud. We use the SnapMirror functionality to move to GCP, for example. The second use case is that we also have some file services which we need on the cloud platforms. Our customers use file services like NFS and  CIFS or SMB to address their requirements.

We save money using CVO because there is a data-tiering concept. There are algorithms that make sure that data which is frequently accessed is kept on the faster disks, and data which is less frequently accessed is stored in a cold tier. Deduplication and compression also provide storage efficiency and savings..

The feature which I like the most is that it has the capabilities that the traditional storage system offers. It provides all the functionality. The deduplication and compression work exactly like ONTAP's traditional storage. So people who have experience with that find it very easy to manage. And, exactly like the traditional NetApp system, it provides you SnapMirror and the Qtree functionality, which means you have the multi-protocol mechanism. That is something that many of the cloud-native file services do not have. 

The capacity is also flexible. You can start from a small disk and you can go with a bigger disk size.

CVO is quite well when it comes to use the file services on a cloud-native platform. 

It does have some compliance features. If a person is looking for compliance with GDPR, he can use the compliance feature provided by Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Most companies have some kind of compliance software for example, Data Custodian.A second option would be to go with the compliance feature provided by Cloud Volumes ONTAP. You can implement policies that would restrict the usage of data. NetApp doesn't control the data, the data stays with the company.

Currently, Cloud Volumes ONTAP is not a high-availability solution. When you deploy the solution it comes in single-node. It supports a single-node deployment in Google Cloud Platform, but with other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon it does offers dual controllers deployment models. However, the RAID protection level isn't quite well designed since it is laid out at the RAID 0 level. So even though you have a dual-controller deployment in place, you do not have high-availability and fault-tolerance in place during a component failure.

NetApp has said it will come out with HA as well, but even if they come out with HA, the way CVO data protection is quite different than a traditional NetApp storage system. Hence, in my opinion It needs to be improvised with RAID protection level on CVO to have better redundancy in place.

In addition to it, when it comes to critical demanding workload or read-write-intensive application, it doesn't provide the expected performance that some of apps/DBs require for example SAP HANA Database. The SAP HANA database has a write-latency of less than 2 milliseconds and the CVO solution does not quite fit there. However, It could be quite well worked with other databases, where the requirements are not so stringent or high demanding for write-latency. I don't know if NetApp has done some PoCs or evaluation with the SAP HANA databases so they are certified to use with.

A last thing, it is an unmanaged solution, it means  someone who has no storage background or technical experience for them it's quite challenging to manage the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. They may need a NetApp managed-service model so the NetApp support team can help them to maintain or manage or troubleshoot their environment. When you deploy the solution to a customer environment, you shouldn't expect they will have some storage experience.  They might be software or application developers but this product would require them to upgrade their knowledge on the storage track. In my opinion NetApp should consider selling the solution with some add-on services model for example   CVO Manage Model support service models to support and manage customer CVO infrastructure.

I have been working with Cloud Volumes ONTAP since 2018. We are using two kinds of solutions from NetApp. One is the Cloud Volumes Services  managed cloud storage services and second one is Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The stability is only lacking when you have a problem with the underlying subsystem and the hardware has failed. I have not encountered that problem so far. 

When doing tests for some of our LOBs, I realized that if your aggregate goes offline then you would have to do a manual failover. That means if you are using CVO for instances, like VMs or, on the on-prem world if you are doing hybrid-cloud connectivity, then you would have to unmount your disks and mount them back. That would be a disruption. 

But when it comes to overall product stability, if you don't have any underlying issues, it works fine. But if you have a subsystem level issue, then you will have a problem.

There are capacity limits. It has a maximum of 368 terabytes.

I have never used technical support from NetApp. I know people there whom I was working with two years back, and they are my points of contact if I need something. I haven't used technical support because if I have issues I directly contact the people I know. They are usually quite responsive. I have not had any problem with the support so far.

I have done the deployment end-to-end for our customers. The CVO setup is quite simple and straightforward.

You need to have a cloud account, a service account, which CVO can be used with for a cloud provider like Google. You cannot download CVO directly from the marketplace, you need to be on the NetApp website. If you have a service account already created, it will authenticate. You just feed it the information. It's a GUI interface. You just click "next" and it will ask you for the information, like "Which network do you want to deploy?" and "What is the name of your machine?" etc. I don't think anybody needs experience to do the set up.

The challenge comes with configuration, such as if you want to do a multi-protocol or an AD integration. Those things are a little bit deep. A person who has already worked on those kinds of things can easily do them. And other than that, the deployment is quite easy.

The deployment time depends on what you feed to the appliance but it should take about 20 to 45 minutes, everything included, except things such as Active Directory integrations or multi-protocols.

There are many people in our company using CVO but, from an architecture standpoint, I am the one who is helping the LOBs. Some LOBs have some experience because they have been using NetApp. But when it comes to the deployment on the cloud, they are not aware of how the service account works.

If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp.

Because we have been a NetApp customer for a long time I think we do get some discounts when we buy this solution from NetApp on a large scale, although I am not involved with the pricing side.

I work with file solutions from other vendors. We have vendors like Elastifile which I used to work with but it was acquired by Google. I also checked a Google-native solution. And Azure has file shares as well as something called NFS Blob, but it also uses the NetApp in the backend. It's a NetApp CVS. It's not like CVO, it's quite different, but it does provide the same functionality, such as file services like CIFS or NFS. But that solution lacks other things. It doesn't work like CVO because CVO provides a lot of features.

CVO provides all the functionality any customer would need on cloud. It's a single solution that covers everything.

It's not a managed solution, so a person who uses this solution should have some prior knowledge using NetApp storage. It is your responsibility to manage the solution.

CVO does provide unified storage, We use CVO's cloud resource performance monitoring. It provides you overall performance stats, such as your disk level, your egress traffic going from the disk, the read/write, random data and sequential data. But for databases, you need specific tools like DB Classify. While CVO does give you information, it doesn't give information at a more granular level. It only provides information from the disk side, such as the IOPS and the throughput you're getting. But there are other things that play a vital role, such as your instance size or type. If your instance-type  or size configuration is not properly configured or if it is fighting for resources, you won't get a good performance. In conclusion, it provides a holistic view, but when you want to drill down you need different tools to look at the subsystem level, like the DB or application level.

CVO provides quite good  file services that no other cloud provider offers so far, from what I have seen. It has all the mechanisms, such as NFS and SMB and it has multi-protocol. It does provide exactly what a normal storage system provides. The thing it misses is performance/fault tolerance.