NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

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.

We use the solution on premises for files and in AWS for the target.

We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our organization's data footprint in the cloud. The data-tiering helps a lot. I would say improving data tiering to S3 reduces our footprint by about 90-95%, which is huge. That is instead of just sitting on EBS, which is expensive storage.

The solution's Snapshot copies and thin clones is a really fast and easy method for recovery.

I think the challenge now is more in terms of keeping an air gap. The notion that it is in the cloud, easy to break, etc. The challenge now is mostly about the air gap and how we can protect that in the cloud.

So far, it has been very stable. We haven't had any downtime or other stability issues.

This product is very easy to scale.

Most of the time they're very timely. Sometimes you just need to wait, which is okay because those times are not critical issues. When we do have to wait, the response time is usually a day or two, but that's fine with that level of criticality.

I've used NetApp for many years. It's something that I know is very stable and reliable. Recommending it to the current company was an easy pass. When I joined the company we were using a different vendor. It was an EMC solution for file, but we moved to NetApp. NetApp has more storage efficiency, the Snapshot feature, and better performance when you have multiple snapshots.

It's very straightforward to set up. It was very easy and fast.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It was very easy and there was almost nothing to do. It's just a click of a button.

We used NetApp Build Engineer to deploy. We had a good experience with them.

Definitely check out this file solution. We are using that and the cloud solution. It's something you need to see in your environment if you are not using it yet.

NetApp is nine out of ten. If we address the air gap concern, it would be a ten.

The primary use case is for files, VMware storage, and the DR volume on the cloud. They also use this solution to move data between on-premises and the cloud volume ONTAP.

It's difficult to say if it has helped to reduce the company's data in the cloud right now without running it for a while. It's the same for the cloud costs.

We are going through testing right now, and can't tell if it will affect their operations until we validate it.

The most valuable features are the ease of management, the deduplication, storage optimization, SnapMirror, it has flexible in testing for different scenarios, rapid deployment of the test environments, and rapid recovery.

The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens.

The ability to go back in time. It's easy to restore the data that we need and it has good stability with CIFS. When a client is using CIFS to access their files, it is pretty stable without knowing Microsoft issues.

The simplicity and ease of usage for VMware provisioning are also helpful.

Some of the area's that need improvement are:

• Cloud sync
• Cloud Volume ONTAP
• Deployment for the cloud manager

These areas need to be streamlined. They are basic configuration error states to acquire late provisioning.

I would like to see the ability to present CIFS files that have been SnapMirrorroed to the Cloud Volume ONTAP and the ability to serve them similarly to OneDrive or Web interfaces.

We are talking about DR cases, customers who are trying to streamline their environments. In the case of DR, users can easily access that data. Today, without running it as file services fully and presenting it through some third party solution, there is no easy way for an end-user to access the appropriate data. This means that we have to build the whole infrastructure for the end-user to be able to open their work files.

The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure.

As an example, you cannot reuse that administrator name, because that object is created in Azure, and it will not let you create it again. So, when the first deployment fails and we deploy for a second time, we have to use a new administration name. Additionally, it requires connectivity from NetApp to register the products and the customer is notified that Network access is not allowed, which creates a problem.

This issue occurs during the time of deployment, but it isn't clear why your environment is not deploying successfully. For this reason, more documentation is needed in explaining and clarification steps of how it needs to be done.

We are just validating the cloud for a couple of our clients, so we haven't had it affect our client storage operations.

Scalability remains to be seen. At this time the NetApp limits on the levels of premium, standard, and the basic one are unreasonably incorrect.

It is hard to go from ten terabytes to three hundred and sixty-eight terabytes and leave everyone in between there hanging. Nobody is interested in going with the limit of ten terabytes to test this solution.

I am talking specifically about Azure, Cloud Volume ONTAP and the differentiator between three levels of provisioning storage.

I have used technical support and it's mediocre.

They gave their best effort, however, at the point they couldn't figure out the problem, they simply said that we would have to deal with Professional Services. I was not impressed, but I understand that it is a new product.

It can be straightforward if everything is perfect, but if there are any glitches on the customer's side then potentially it could require long-term troubleshooting without knowing where to look for the problem.

We have deployed on-premises, but currently, we are testing it on cloud volumes.

For the initial deployment, I used the NetApp file manager to get it up and running.

When it comes to choosing the right solution for our clients, they trust our judgment in recommending something that they know is going to work for them. 

Most of our clients are looking for availability in disaster recovery data and centralizing it into one cloud location. In some cases, a customer doesn't want to go with multiple clients, they want to have it all in one place. They are also looking for simplification in management of the entire solution, provisioning, managing copywriting from a similar interface and a company that can be responsible for the support.

Our customers evaluate other vendors as well. They have looked at AWS, several from Veeam, and partners from ASR for different replication software.

Customers decide to go with NetApp because of our recommendations.

I have experience with other application services including Commvault, Veeam, and ASR.

If Snapshot copies and FlexClones are licensed they work great. The challenge is that the client will not always get the FlexClone license, then it is more difficult to provide it in the future.

Some of our older clients do not have a license for FlexClone, so the recovery of snapshot data can be problematic.

In some cases, they use inline encryption using SnapMirror, but not often.

Inline encryption addresses concerns of data security, as well as using Snapshot. If it is encrypted and it's not near encrypted traffic, then it has less chance of being accessed by someone.

I don't work with application development, so I can't address whether or not snapshot copies and Flexcone affect their application, but for testing environments where we have to update with batches made for maintenance, yes, it allows you to provision, to test, and it validates the stability of the testing and updates releases.

The clients included me in the decision making.

Each has its pros and cons, but with NetApp, this is a NetApp to NetApp product. With Windows backup solutions, it can be from any storage platform to any cloud also. In different ways, they have different workflows with different approaches, but you know each of them is meeting with its business objective, giving you a good balance.

My advice would be to try it first, figure out all of the kinks that might come up, have the proper resources from NetApp lined up to provide you support, and don't give up because it works in the end.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Our primary use case is for multiprotocol access.

It helps us with our snapshots with our backups. We do a lot of SnapVault backups to our secondary data center and that is very efficient for us. It reduced our recovery time.

ONTAP has reduced our company's footprint on the cloud and has reduced our cloud costs.

Multiprotocol is the most valuable feature because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data from Linux and from Windows clients. That was our value proposition for CVO, Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The operational recovery of snapshot copies and thin clones is very fast and efficient. We do a lot of database refreshes, and the dual clones and copies have reduced a lot of operational time.

It is highly stable.

Scalability is good.

Their technical support is amazing. 

We are old NetApp customers and we chose this solution because we wanted to adopt newer technologies. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy. We have faster deployments. We used Cloud Manager to get up and running. Its configuration wizard and ability to automate the process was amazing. It's easy to use, simple, and it does everything.

We used a partner for the deployment called EBT. Our experience with them was smooth. They know what they're doing. 

We have seen ROI.

We are a big NFS shop, so ONTAP is a great fit for us. If you are an NFS shop then I would recommend getting ONTAP.

I would rate ONTAP a nine out of ten. Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management. 

Our primary use case for ONTAP is for DR. 

ONTAP has improved my organization because we no longer need to purchase all that hardware and have that all come up as a big expense. It worked out better for our budgeting purposes.

We use it to move data between hyperscales on our on-premises environment. We're able to do that with SnapMirror and it's pretty simple to set up and move data around. 

The most valuable feature is DR backups. 

ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms.

We use SnapMirror inline encryption for security in the cloud. A lot of people, especially legal, want their data to be protected. That's what we use it for.

Snapshot copies and thin clones have made our recovery time a lot faster. Doing a restore from a snapshot is a lot better than trying to do a restore from a backup.

In terms of time management and managing our infrastructure, we are a lot better because of the consistency of storage management across clouds.

I wouldn't say it has reduced our data footprint in the cloud because whatever we were using was basically a lift and shift as of right now. We are hoping as we go we'll be able to take advantage of all the storage efficiencies like compression and all that. Hopefully, that'll save us quite a lot of space and time.

In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now.

We haven't had issues with stability so far. 

Scalability comes down to what service or what NetApp Cloud solution you're using. There are different solutions for what you're trying to achieve. Based on your requirements, you just need to pick the right solution that works for you.

I haven't had any issues, so technical support is pretty good.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we were told we were closing the data centers so we had to migrate to the cloud. The management told us we are closing data centers and migrating everything into the cloud. That's what kicked us off.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It could be a little challenging if you don't know how the network security groups and how the roles in Azure work. That's where we had the challenges with deploying because we had cloud managers in different regions, one in Azure West and one in Azure East and we were trying to do replications between the two clouds. The Cloud Central Cloud Manager wasn't able to make a connection and that was because of some of the roles that we had to provide. Even the documentation on that was kind of scattered across. It wasn't just one page and it had all the information. So that was kind of challenging and it took me a lot of time to figure that out. I think it should be in one single pane of a page. Not as scattered around different pages.

Once I reached out to the support they helped me out, but I was trying to figure it out on my own reading documentation and it didn't do anything.

The first one I deployed in Azure was very simple. The second one that we deployed and I was trying to make the connection between, that was complex because of how the roles worked.

We used consultants for the implementation. We had a pretty good experience with them.

We have seen ROI. All of our SLASs via some of our SQL databases,  have SLAs of around five minutes. SnapMirror works great for that. We don't have that and if we have a disaster, then we could be in big trouble if we have SLA breaches and stuff like that.

It has not reduced our cloud cost. We're still pretty new and we're still trying to figure things out like how the cost modeling works and which is the best performance and best cost for our workloads. Based on that, it's a lot of tuning. Once you get there, you just need to monitor your workloads and see how it is and just go from there.

For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA.

For the DR we are using NetApp but for the production, a lot of the cloud architects in our company want to go native to Azure or native to AWS. Since we are a NetApp Cloud shop for a while and even our RND on-prem is mostly just all on NetApps. We want to keep that going, going into the cloud because it's a lot simpler to manage our infrastructure, our storage and take advantage of all the efficiencies that NetApp provides. Whereas if you don't use that, all of those savings, and if you have a lot of data as we do, petabytes of data, and Microsoft and AWS, take advantage of all those efficiencies and we don't because we don't have that capability. With the NetApp integration, we can take advantage of all those efficiencies and other performance.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because of the simplicity of the DR is amazing. You just set it up. If there are any issues bringing it back, bringing it online in a DR site just takes a few minutes and then you're back up online again.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering ONTAP is to give it a try. That's how I learned. I didn't know anything about the cloud. Then our company just started telling us that we were moving everything to the cloud and we had to learn about it. That's how we learned and moved everything to the cloud.

We're trying to see whether it's a good fit to move our secondary storage to the cloud, which would then be in competition with ONTAP Cloud Volumes. However, ONTAP gives us a bit more flexibility. If it's cost-effective, good enough performance, and has all the tools we need, we will continue with it. So far it looks great.

ONTAP made us less reliant on in-house hardware. It has already changed the way we're looking at our investments, purchasing plans, and budgeting for the next three to five years. We are shifting more into the cloud OpEx rather than keeping our expenses on the hardware side. That is already a good outlook.

We're just using AWS for now, but the consistency of storage management between our own program and the cloud seems to be great.

The solution has definitely helped reduce our company's data footprint in the cloud. I don't have the numbers in my head. By using compression in the cloud and deduplication, it's something that definitely reduces all the data, probably by more than 20%. That is in comparison to using native cloud source storage solutions.

In terms of our company's cloud costs, we're still seeing about the same amount of money spent. However, it's shifting towards the OpEx part and that gives us the flexibility to scale up and down versus the investment that you have to do upfront in the beginning. It's the shift that we're interested in rather than the total amount at the moment. In the future, we might expect that the cost of the cloud solution will drop. Therefore in the future, we may also see the total costs go down.

For us, the value comes from the solution's flexibility, speed, and hopefully cost savings in the long term.

I would like this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider.

The stability is perfect. We have had no problems. On-premises was also good, so I'm not worried about this.

The solution is definitely scalable on the cloud. On the cloud, you can scale almost infinitely. You don't have to worry about reaching any limits, so that's definitely very good. Also in performance levels, you can have underlying storage in the cloud allowing you to change the IOPS, or performance at latency on the fly. That is something you cannot do very easily on-premises.

Their technical support is great. We're using a partner in the Netherlands for support and we have a great relationship with them.

I first encountered NetApp at Insight 2018 Barcelona. I was there and talked to NetApp.

I found the initial setup straightforward. Cloud Manager is point and click, which makes deployment pretty easy.

We involved NetApp a little bit but it was to look at the product. It's so simple to use that we were able to do it mostly ourselves without a lot of help.

Take a look at it, try it yourself. It's one month for free, with no licensing costs from NetApp. Try it out. It doesn't cost anything but some of your time. It's pretty simple to run and see how it works.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because the multi-cloud has to be in three layers.

My primary use case of ONTAP is for all of my data.

We have DR and we once had a problem with electricity and the data moved to the other side of the DR and the user and I didn't know about it. ONTAP has avoided this from occurring in the future.

The most valuable features are that it's easy to manage and it's reliable. 

I haven't had to restore the Snapshot copies and thin clones. Every time I check, it's working.

I don't use the inline encryption.

In the next release, I would like to see more options on the dashboard. 

Local support needs improvement. 

It's very stable.

Scalability is easy.

Their technical support is very good. 

We previously used HPE 3PAR and we switched because of the complexity we had with HPE. It was easier with NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward. We started with a small pilot and we then moved to production with no downtime at all.

We used an integrator for the setup. They were good. 

We chose NetApp because after we did the pilot, we saw the difference between both of the companies.

I would rate it a nine out of a ten. I give it this rating because of my experience with it and the ease of implementation. To make it a ten it wouldn't cost money.

My advice to someone considering this solution would be to go for it.