NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

I work for the government, so all of our information is classified. We do a lot of on-prem with NetApp backup storage. I'm also interested in the recovery features. I'm going to take that back to the team and see what we can do with that. 

The upgrades, storage, and recovery features are some of the big aspects we discussed two weeks ago. We have an overflow in other locations that I can't talk about. We had a bunch of questions about what we would do in the event of a disaster to recover data that's been there for the past 15 to 20 years.

CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes. 

CVO has reduced the amount of storage significantly. The solution has saved costs. We've done a cost analysis of on-prem and then the cloud. On-prem is where it's at for our mission. Some organizations can store their data in the cloud and not access it for years. We need data constantly and require the ability to dig into data from five to 10 years ago. 

The solution helps to keep production data.

The tool's most valuable features are the SnapLock and SnapMirror features. If something goes wrong with the data, we can restore it. This isn't a mirror; we store data in different locations. If there's an issue on the primary site, we can retrieve data from the secondary site.

Multiprotocol support in NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is beneficial because it allows customers to manage SAN and NAS data within a single storage solution. This feature eliminates the need to purchase different types of storage.

I work in healthcare, so we store a lot of data on-prem and in the cloud. We are using multiple vendors and platforms. ONTAP was an excellent choice because everything is integrated. We haven't gotten into the AI features, but the security is pretty good. 

NetApp's Integration with AWS has helped us because we had a tough time transferring data when we used an ONTAP competitor as our storage partner. They don't have integration with AWS tools, so we had to figure it out on our own. 

ONTAP has built-in integration and allows us to replicate a copy to our second data center. Everything is in one channel. It's possible without the technology, but it's more time-consuming. NetApp saves us a lot of time, and the administration is simpler.

We use the full suite of ONTAP use cases across both on-premises and cloud environments, covering various applications and scenarios.

The primary reason for our continued loyalty to NetApp is their Snap technology, which is widely recognized as the main factor. It offers ease of use and a comprehensive suite of applications, including features like SnapMirror, SnapVault, and unified snapshot management, all bundled into a single product. With just three individuals, we're able to efficiently manage petabytes of data, which significantly reduces our operational costs.

We rely on NetApp Coud Volumes ONTAP for a wide range of purposes, including VMware, SQL, Oracle, and file storage. It serves as our go-to storage solution for almost every use case.

The transition to the AFF storage solution significantly improved our organization by reducing our physical footprint. We went from a FAS system with two controllers and twenty drive shelves to just four controllers and two drive shelves with the AFF. This led to substantial reductions in power consumption and space requirements in our data center.

We use it mostly for distributed files. For example, one of our customers is in construction. So they have centralized NetApp storage and set up replication with the Cloud volume ONTAP. Several branch users access the Cloud instance. And whatever work that they do on the Civeo instant gets replicated to the client's data center on the on-premise NetApp storage. And they use GFC with Seavio for a seamless experience.

So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the license consumption and also the consumption of the underlying cloud storage. 

So one of the clients had an on-premise 100 terabytes. When that same data went to CVO, he was able to reduce it to somewhere around 20/25 dB. So he was able to reduce using DTO compression, the consumption of this underlying cloud storage. And, obviously, with the licenses, now you need only 25 terabytes instead of 100 terabytes.

We use CVO for NFS data storage, NFS sharing, and SMP sharing.

CVO helped us migrate to the cloud. We were already using the same software on-prem. We just migrated it to the cloud, so it helped us with that. 

The workload migration was outstanding. It was seamless. We have on-premise CVO within BlueXP. We just drag and drop the on-premise workload to the cloud workload. It just migrated and cut over. That was it. The time required depends on the volume size. Our largest volume took us three-and-a-half weeks. It takes some time to migrate the data from on-prem to the cloud. 

We have on-prem NetApp AFF, and we're looking into using NetApp Data Sense or Blue XP Data Sense for the backup servers as well. Everything integrates perfectly. We have some on-prem workloads that run on NetApp, and CVO on a cloud. We can migrate between the two if needed.

We use it to monitor our on-prem and our SnapMirror between one and the other.

It's a single pane of glass where we can see our applications running.