NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

It is managing services in our production environment that are in Azure. It provides file shares, both NFS and CIFS, that are used by other applications that are also in Azure.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is part of the production environment of our company so the entire company, over 5,000 employees globally, is touching it somehow. It's a part of an application that has data that resides on it and they may consume that application.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is great because of the storage efficiencies that it provides. When you look at the cost of running Azure native storage versus the cost of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you end up saving money with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That's a big win because cost is a huge factor when putting workloads in the cloud. We had a cost estimate survey done, a comparison between the two, and I believe that Cloud Volumes ONTAP saves us close to 30 percent compared to the Azure native costs.

Azure pricing is done in a type of a tier. Once you exceed a certain amount of storage, your cost goes down. So the more data you store, the more you're going to end up saving.

The storage efficiencies from the NetApp platform allow you to do inline deduplication and compaction of data. All of this adds up to using less of the disk in Azure, which adds up to savings.

We have two nodes of the NetApp in Azure, which means we have some fault tolerance. That is helpful because Azure just updates stuff when they want to and you're not always able to stop them or schedule it at a later time. Having two CVO nodes is helpful to keep the business up when Azure is doing their maintenance.

The solution provides unified storage no matter what kind of data you have. We were already using the NetApp platform on our on-premise environments, so it's something we're already familiar with in terms of how to manage permissions on different types of volumes, whether it's an NFS export or a CIFS share. We're able to utilize iSCSI data stores if we need to attach a volume directly to a VM. It allows us to continue to do what we're already familiar with in the NetApp environment. Now we can do them in Azure as well.

It enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used the management options provided by the native cloud service. With CVO, all of your data shares and volumes are on the one NetApp platform. Whether you are adjusting share permissions on an NFS export or a CIFS share, you can do it all from within the NetApp management interface. That's much easier than the Azure native, where you may have to go to two or three different screens to do the same stuff.

The storage efficiencies are something that you don't get on native.

Also, because of the NetApp product, we're able to use the SnapMirror function and SnapMirror data from our on-prem environment into Azure. That is super-helpful. SnapMirror allows you to take data that exists on one NetApp, on a physical NetApp storage platform, and copy it over to another NetApp storage platform. It's a solid, proven technology, so we don't worry about whether data is getting lost or corrupted during the SnapMirror. We are also able to throttle back the speed of the SnapMirror to help our network team that is paying for a data circuit. We're still able to copy data into Azure, but we can manage the transfer cost because we can throttle back the SnapMirror. It's just very solid and reliable. It works.

And all of us IT nerds are already familiar with the NetApp platform so there was not a major learning curve to start using it in Azure.

NetApp also has something called Active IQ Unified Manager, and it gives us performance monitoring of the CVO from an external source. There are several people on my team that utilize the CVO and we each have a personal preference for how we look at data. The Active IQ Unified Manager is a product you can get from NetApp because, once you license your CVO, you are entitled to other tools. CVO does have resource performance monitoring built in, but we primarily utilize the Active IQ Unified Manager.

Beyond that, it provides all the great stuff that the NetApp platform can do, but it's just in the cloud.

I think this is more of a limitation of how it operates in Azure, but the solution is affected by this limitation. There's something about how the different availability zones, the different regions, operate in Azure. It's very difficult to set up complete fault tolerance using multiple CVO nodes and have one node in one region and one node in another region. This is not something that I have dug into myself. I am hearing about this from other IT nerds.

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

We had issues with Azure when they did maintenance on the nodes. They just do their maintenance and it's up to us, the customer, to make sure that our applications are up and data is flowing. When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly.

We have had tickets open with NetApp to have them look into it and try and resolve it. They've made improvements in some ways, but it's still not 100 percent automated for everything to return back. That's an ongoing thing we have to keep an eye on.

It is definitely scalable. You can add more disk to grow your capacity and you have the ability to add more nodes. There's a limit to how many nodes you can add, but you can definitely scale up.

Tech support is good. A lot of it depends on the technician that you get, but if you're not happy with one technician, you can request that it be escalated or you can request that it just be handled by another technician. They're very eager to help and resolve issues.

We had some issues with permissions and with getting the networking correct. But we had a lot of support from NetApp as well as from Azure. As a result, I would not say the setup was straightforward, but we got the help and the support we needed and you can't ask for more than that.

I've always found NetApp support to be accurate and good with their communications. Rolling out this product in Azure, and working with the IT nerds in our company and with Azure nerds, occasionally it does add another layer of who has to be communicated with and who has to do stuff. But my experience with NetApp is that they are responsive and very determined to get situations resolved.

It took us about a week to get everything ironed out and get both nodes functional.

We had done a PoC with a smaller instance of the CVO and the PoC was pretty straightforward. Once we rolled out the production CVO that has two nodes, that's when it was more complicated. We had a plan for getting it deployed and to decide at what point we would say, "Okay, now it's ready for prime time. Now it's ready to be put into production."

For admin of the solution we have less than 10 people, and they're all storage administrator analysts like me.

Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it.

Make sure that you can stay operational when Azure is doing their maintenance. Make sure you fully understand how the failover and the give-back process works, so that you can deal with your maintenance.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is where we host our NAS storage on which we keep our files, et cetera. We have three clusters of CVO, each serving close to 300 terabytes of data. We have our SQL backup workloads and the application data residing in it. We are using the tiering policy, which pushes the inactive data down to cold storage to help save on costs.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is all cloud-based and we have our workloads on Azure.

At one point we were paying close to $80,000 a month for cloud resources, and now it's down to $25,000 to $30,000 after using the tiering.

Also, using Unified Manager we are able to resolve issues before they have an impact. For example, there were conditions where bulk operations were happening against a particular volume, and our business was also writing the data. We caught it using Unified Manager. The IOPS were low and there was a high latency, close to 1,500 milliseconds. We had a look at exactly what operations were happening and, before the user even reported it, we reached out to the team that was doing the bulk operations to stop whatever process they were running. That's just one example. We have had a lot of occasions where the tool has been really handy when it comes to proactive monitoring. 

And it's not only for proactive monitoring. The same tool is also used for a lot of root cause analysis.

The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature. With the pay-as-you-go plan, we can choose between standard and premium storage, but we use only premium for high performance. High IOPS and low latencies are the main features of the premium storage. With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high.

NetApp also has something called SnapMirror replications and that's how we replicate our data from production to the DR site, for our BCP. It has pretty solid solutioning for the replications so the SnapMirrors are pretty handy when it comes to BCPs.

In terms of cloud resource monitoring, we use Unified Manager and it's pretty cool. It has both Excel-based metrics as well as graphical representations, which give us a clear idea of which particular file systems have performance problems. We can go over the statistical information and it comes in very handy. At the same time, it has an alerting mechanism where any sort of conditions can be configured and alerts are then sent to your mailbox or your mobile SMS.

It definitely needs improvement with respect to clustering and with respect to more collaborative integrations with Azure. Right now, we have very limited functionalities with Azure, except for storage. If CVO could be integrated with Azure that would help. When there is any sort of maintenance happening in the cloud, it disrupts the service in Cloud Volumes ONTAP. 

If those could be rectified, that would be really good news because it would reduce the administrative overhead my team and I are facing.

I have been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for close to two years now.

It is stable, at least with respect to Azure, which is what we use.

NetApp is scalable. When we initially started with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it had a hard limit of 378 terabytes as its maximum capacity per cluster. Beyond that you couldn't expand. So we had to spin up another cluster. When that was almost full we had to get a third cluster. But I believe that in the recent build of CVO they have introduced the ability to stack one license on top of another cluster, so you can have infinite data per cluster. So there were challenges, particularly with vertical scalability before, but that has now been fixed in the recent release.

In terms of increasing our usage in the future, we definitely will if required. It gives us the flexibility to perform automations and it has its own encryption tools. Right now, we are using it for one particular region in Europe, but we do have plans to get it out to other regions as well, but that's not going to happen immediately.

We have used their technical support on a lot of occasions and they have been pretty helpful. I'm completely satisfied with the resolutions they have come up with. We have created more than a hundred tickets in the last two years. Those were all submitted initially, when we had an older version of CVO, but now we hardly create tickets with support because our team has the ability to administer it.

We had ONTAP before CVO. We also used Dell Isilon and SoftNAS before we migrated to CVO. We switched because we found that SoftNAS was not stable enough to handle the workloads. We often had problems with the applications.

The initial setup of Cloud Volumes ONTAP is pretty straightforward. We didn't have any sort of difficulties getting it spun up. It was also pretty quick. We had everything needed in Azure. It hardly took us three to four hours to have the entire environment set up and ready.

We did some architectural planning for setting this up and we got all the approvals and licenses well in advance, before we actually configured it.

When it comes to maintenance, it depends on what kind of coverage an organization wants. We are a team of four who administer NetApp clusters alongside the cloud resources. We have roughly 2,000 users.

We worked only with NetApp. We had one architect and one contractor from Professional Services.

Now that we have started using tiering, we could still actually save more costs, but we haven't gone to that specific area. We know it is definitely going to affect the performance if we keep all the data in the cloud tier. That's why we haven't. But Cloud Volumes ONTAP has the flexibility to dump all the data to the cloud tier to save every penny possible.

We have an annual license renewal for all the clusters. The license comes with annual training and with some Professional Services time. We have used all of those. I'm not sure if that's standard or it's an agreement between our organization and NetApp, but that's what we get as a part of our licensing.

The money you can save with CVO depends on what type of configuration an organization needs. They can also push all the data down to the cold tier. The pricing model for the Azure Cool Blob offering is pretty low compared to the premium or the standard. The cost of cold storage would probably be 10 cents per GB.

Very few of the cloud service solution providers have that tiering option. Tiering results in a lot of savings.

NetApp, on the whole, is a whole different tool for me. Two years back, when I started, when I had my hands on it for the first time, I found it pretty interesting. I would note its simplicity. It's simple and, at the same, time very powerful and able to handle any sort of storage workloads.

NetApp is really cool. If your organization is looking for cost savings, NetApp is the way to go.

Overall, I would rate CVO a nine out of 10. We had a lot of problems with NetApp, but those were in the very early stages. And NetApp always promises to upgrade their products and they actually listen to the customer's problems. We have raised a couple of defects with NetApp, and they have always been supportive, getting these resolved as soon as possible. 

The NetApp organization, on the whole, is pretty good. They're coming up with go-to-market products like Azure NetApp Files, etc., which is actually the beta version of Azure Sites.

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. 

The primary use case is to use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for unstructured data storage, both for Windows and Linux-based machines. We use both from an NAS functionality perspective, along with SMB and NFS file shares/exports, for storing unstructured data.

The solution enabled us to deliver on our cloud-first strategy. It also provided us some savings and consolidation capabilities from a volume perspective where we can run with less management. We can run higher volumes of unstructured data and store higher volumes of unstructured data as compared to other solutions.

• The data tiering capability
• Deduplication
• Compression

The data efficiencies are valuable, If we want to combine compression and deduplication.

It is valuable to us that it runs natively in Azure. 

Using this solution, we are also in control of our backups. In regards to disaster recovery, we don't have to rely on Azure or Microsoft to fail anything over. We are in control of backups and replication (or disaster recovery). 

With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically.

The solution provides us unified storage as long as it's unstructured data that can be accessed through a file share. We are in control of the portability of the data. We are not locked into Azure with this product. For example, if we wanted to go to AWS, there is that capability. If we wanted to pull this data or solution back to on-premises, there's that capability. Therefore, there is some flexibility in the control of the data versus being locked into a non-proprietary solution, e.g., just within Azure.

If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful. 

The ease of data migration between devices could be improved somewhat. There is already some flexibility which is better than just migrating the data. However, that could potentially be further improved.

Including the evaluation period, it has been over two years.

The stability of this solution has been great. A couple of interruptions that we had were not really related to the product. They were more related to Azure, where we had a couple of issues with actual Azure hosts which run the virtual storage device and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

There is a team of four people who are in the role of managing and administrating the devices. There are thousands of people who access it.

There is room for growth. We are just in the process of migrating an on-premise system. That will probably service 10,000 users. We started out using it mainly for unstructured data which would be less frequently used or Azure-native. Now, we are at the process of expansion. After using the product for a year and a half, we are comfortable migrating on-premises into our system.

NetApp technical support is good. They are receptive and want to make sure that you succeed in using their product. Overall, their Professional Services, setup, and support for the past couple of years, in comparison to other large companies that I have used in the past (like Microsoft, IBM, or Dell EMC support), has been as good or better than their peers. 

We have used the NetApp solution on-premise with one of our outsourcing providers. We have used NetApp before in Canada. In the US, we used the Dell EMC NAS solution. So, we have had some experience with NetApp as our company has used NetApp in the past for years, but those solutions were not entirely cloud-based. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is unique in that it runs the same familiar operating system that you would run on the on-premise NetApp system with some differences and specifics to Azure. There are a lot of synergies, but basically it's the same operating system. A lot of the things work the same as they would using the on-premise NAS. Currently, we use the solution in Asia and North America.

The initial setup is well-documented, so it's fairly straightforward. There are all these aspects where you need to have some understanding of what you want to achieve in the end. You also need to have in mind a final design of what the requirements are. Based on that, the initial setup is well-documented and not overly difficult.

Our initial deployment was a year and a half ago when things were fairly new for NetApp. Our environment was fairly complex because we needed an antivirus integration along with different things, so the initial setup took about two to three weeks. Then, setup of subsequent Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices, as we expanded the solution, would take one to three days. We followed the same steps that we established in the original deployment, and in some cases with a few improvements, incorporating lessons learned.

We knew what capacity we required. We knew that we wanted to configure backups and deploy disaster recovery. We also knew that we wanted antivirus scanning and integration as well as malware protection on the system. Therefore, we identified the requirements, then worked initially with NetApp Professional Services to deploy the solution.

In the past, we were working with outsourcers on-premise. Even compared to just standard Azure or other solutions available, this solution has allowed for probably 50 percent, or in some cases, higher storage savings.

From a scale or scalability perspective, the more data you store, then the more you can save. For example, the more data you can tear down from SSDs (from premium storage down to Azure Blob), then the more you're going to save. Scale certainly matters because as the more data you store, then the higher savings you can achieve. 

There are storage efficiencies built into the product. The tiering helps with keeping the storage costs under control, i.e., the tiering from primary storage to Blob storage or object storage helps. Also, the storage efficiencies, deduplication, and compression help to keep storage costs under control. Depending on what solution you are coming off of, a 50 percent savings in storage costs is achievable.

Some flexibility around the licensing model would help. The product is licensed based on capacity. Basically, the largest capacity license that you can buy is 368 terabytes. At this point, NetApp is addressing some people's concerns around this. 

I can stack licenses, e.g., two, three, or more 368 terabyte licenses can be stacked. However, I would like to see some more flexibility because you can't remove disks that you added from Azure. You would need to delete a whole disk group. When you have highly utilized Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems, you can get into a situation where you can't remove disks. This is something that I run into, so you need some flexibility with the licensing. 

NetApp could perhaps allow temporary bursts of capacity on the 368 terabytes. For example, if I'm rearranging my disk groups or disk aggregates, then I could add to the existing capacity and move my data around within the system to optimize capacity, costs, and performance. After that, I could migrate off the set of disks that the appliance is using currently, move data around, and delete the original source, but still stay under the 368 terabyte capacity. However, to do that data movement, a couple of sets of disks have to be assigned. At the same time, you might temporarily exceed that 368 terabyte limit. Therefore, that is something that could potentially be improved. 

I understand why there is a cutoff. Because if you're licensed for 368 terabytes, you should be using 368 terabytes. However, keeping in line with the elastic nature of cloud and flexibility of the cloud, some bursting of that 368 terabyte license capacity should be allowed. I think that would a good idea.

We looked at Azure Files and just regular file servers in Azure. We also looked at a couple of other not well-known vendors who are in the cloud, like SoftNAS. Basically, when we were exploring options in the cloud over two years ago. Now, when we started kind of the journey of trying to see what was available in the cloud over two years ago, nobody had the capabilities of NetApp. To date, I don't find that there is real competition for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP at the scale that they're doing it at. 

While I have been aware of Cloud Volumes ONTAP for probably over three years, it wasn't at the scale or refinement that we needed then. That's partly why we didn't go with that solution earlier. However, it met our requirements by the time we got on it.

The solution provides more granularity and feature-rich options than if we used management options provided by the native cloud service, like Azure.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

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).

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. 

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.

The main use case of ONTAP is for users to utilize SharePoint. From there, they need to access data where there are specific applications as well as an individual shared folder.

It is being used for application purposes as well as for individual user purposes.

We are using the latest version.

This isn't an isolated solution. We must have NetApp to support our faster access on a file protocol. We found the same solution on Azure is just as helpful when compared to the on-premise solution.

The solution provides us unified storage, no matter what kind of data we have. If we take a normal storage account in the public cloud, then it may not be active in terms of identity level. However, using NetApp, we can leverage the identity management control integrating with our AD. From there, we can gain the computer user's access and maintain the user side entity for who is accessing what.

On-premises, we are using the same NetApp. We find the solution in Azure to be more reliable and tailorable in NetApp with the same NetApp features because it gives us the most updated NetApp solution.

If you have a larger amount of data than normal in the cloud, it is easy to provision and maintain. Waiting for the delivery of the controller, the configuration of enclosures, etc., all this stuff is eliminated compared to using on-premise.

Eight months.

From my months' experience, I haven't seen a single point of failure within the ONTAP, except for Azure maintenance.

Scalability is a very good feature. If our data reaches 90 percent (or some threshold level), it automatically increases the storage within ONTAP without our intervention.

The solution helps us control storage costs. It is scalable. If we need more storage, then we can opt for a monthly or yearly option.

The technical support is good.

Once you register with NetApp Cloud Central, people will get in touch with you who can assist you with deploying your solution.

This is the first time that we are using this type of a solution in the cloud.

The initial setup is straightforward, but I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution.

Deployment time depends on the client. On average, deploying the entire solution can take about a day (eight hours), if there are no issues.

For a standard storage implementation project, we need to have some shared storage for the client's application as well as the user groups and shared files that they have been using. To leverage this, we've been using this solution.

You need to go through the NetApp website and go through the documents regarding deploying ONTAP. If you experience any difficulties, there is a technical team to help you.

Some of the sales managers and other team members helped me setup the environment. They explained to me how the pay as you go and BYOL models work. If you need to the BYOL model to work, they will use some temporary licenses for a 30-day evaluation. They are there for you from beginning to end if you need assistance.

Because we went with the BYOL instead of pay as you go, we haven't seen ROI.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save. If you use traditional cloud providers, then you cannot manage unified lists. For that, you would need to follow a set of rules and some other stuff. You also need to have more people managing the entire environment. Whereas, NetApp provides a single point solution. 

They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy. 

Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have. We would like NetApp to come up with a solution for this. For example, a customer may think, "Let's use this solution." Later, he realizes that, "This is our solution and I have this budget for the year. If we can pay upfront for one year, then we can reduced the amount we pay." This is currently not possible if we select the pay as you go model.

Your OCCM should always be the same as your ONTAP, e.g., suppose you have deployed one ONTAP, then due to some reason, you deleted it and also OCCM. Then, the next time that you want to deploy another OCCM and ONTAP, that same license won't work because the license is based on the OCCM serial ID.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We only evaluated ONTAP.

NetApp is an industry leader as well as we have experienced with NetApp on-premise. That is the reason we chose NetApp as a reliable partner.

We don't use the solution’s cloud resource performance monitoring.

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

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.

Our primary use case is data replication to the cloud.

Using Snapshot copies and thin clones for operational recovery is convenient. This technology makes things very easy.

The unified file and block-storage access across clouds and on-premises infrastructure have made things easier for us. It means that we do not face significant roadblocks.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it.

We would like to have support for high availability in multi-regions.

There is no support for Microsoft Azure.

I have been using this solution for three years.

The stability is very impressive and we have had no issues with it.

Scalability is not an issue because it is really expandable. If you don't know the structure of the business you can scale up, scale down, and do everything graphically.

We have not used NetApp technical support directly. We have been speaking with partners who are in our region.

We used the NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running, and we found it very simple. It was very easy, and you don't have to be an engineer to get it working.

Partners from our region assisted us with the deployment. CW did a good job starting from scratch and getting everything up and running. When I would give a requirement, they would come up with all of the options that were available.

I have tried Pure Storage and EMC RecoverPoint, but ONTAP is easier to use.

I love this solution. They have a lot of features and they explore the market really well, whereas other vendors fail to do those things. ONTAP keeps evolving with the needs of the market and follows the trends.

I would rate this solution a ten out of 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 use this primarily to consolidate our services and block services.

We are using Linux and eventually, we are going to use SnapMirror. So far, we have seen benefits from using this solution. When we started this process there were some very specific goals about log and files being stored in a single static device. This is achieved with a RAM solution. We are also able to integrate with the cloud, which is another goal we achieved. The solution has also saved us on costs, of course. We calculated that we are saving $1,000,000 across three years.

The consistency of storage management across clouds has effected our storage operations. Essentially, one of the benefits of open NetApp is that ONTAP is pretty much the operating system for any mirrored device, so it doesn't matter if it is in the cloud or on-premises, or whether you use other NetApp products, you pretty much have a safe interface with ONTAP. We like that.

One of our goals is to unify file our block file services into a single storage device. At the same time, we want to replicate on-site services to the cloud. That's also a benefit for us because that way we can move it to the cloud if we need to.

Replication to the cloud is the most valuable feature. Deduplication and compression are also very important to us. We are in the process of adopting the cloud. We are going to AWS and we are trying to do a safety technician call out with integration to the cloud. NetApp allows us to move some of the volumes to the cloud, at the same time that we continue providing the cloud services that we have on-premises.

We are in the process of doing various plans for all equipment in order to do acceptable recovery of products in the new environment.

Maybe I need more speed, but so far, I don't have any feedback for improvements.

I would like to see something from NetApp about backups. I know that NetApp offers some backup for Office 365, but I would like to see something from NetApp for more backup solutions.

The stability is great. We have been doing different scenarios about errors from controllers, to disks, and so far it is very stable. We have not had any issues. We upgraded our own version and did not have any issues there, either.

This is another issue that we like from ONTAP. There are products for different scales. It is very easy to use.

When we deployed everything, we opened a case with support for two minor issues we had with some servers. They're great. They were willing to help, easy to communicate with, and respond very quickly. They already found the issue and resolved it.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That is how we deployed it. Their configuration wizards and ability to automate the process were very easy. The wizard is very easy to follow. There are videos, so you don't really need a lot of skill. If you understand integrations and have a basic knowledge of the cloud, you can quickly connect your equipment. It's good.

We did evaluate other solutions.  We evaluated the main players in this area, like EMC.

There are some features that we really liked from NetApp. One of them is the ability to consolidate files and blocks. Other vendors have some mirror solutions, but they are not in the maturity level that NetApp is. We also really like that NetApp has a product for the cloud that is really working and is proven and valuable. Other vendors do not have that, or if they have it, you need to deploy something in the middle. That is something that we like. We don't need to deploy anything. We can just run the backup directly from the OS and spin out the solution.

Try not to focus only on the current issues, but also look into the innovation process of NetApp. It is very impressive how they have been able to develop and continue trying to develop products for the cloud. Try to gain a deeper understanding of established needs and requirements for files and blocks.

I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

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. 

The primary use case for our customer is disaster recovery. They had an array that was reaching end-of-life, and they were trying to decide whether to go with a refreshed new array on-premises or go with CVO in a cloud. The chose the latter.

Our customer is a large organization that has just merged with several other organizations, so they have a lot going on. It was important for them that the time to market was very short, so they needed to deploy fast and get it set up with minimal impact to the business and their IT staff.

Our customer does not use the inline encryption using SnapMirror.

This business is only using file access and no block access. NetApp provides much of their file access across their infrastructure, so this being a DR solution allowed them to have the tertiary copy.

They use Snapshots and I believe they use clones, as well, but I do not have any specific data.

Currently, they are only using AWS, but they certainly are looking at alternatives to save money.

The data footprint in the cloud has expanded since the implementation.

Using NetApp CVO has definitely reduced our customer's overall spend. However, I think that their cloud costs have probably gone up a little bit.

They do not make use of the functionality to move data between hyperscalers and their on-premises environment.

Our customer finds SnapMirror to be valuable.

NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance.

This solution has been deployed at our customer's site for about three months.

The stability has been really good. It has only been deployed for about three months, but they have had no issue so far.

Scalability is very good. If they need to expand then that is one of the features of this solution, easy expansion. We haven't seen any issues there. They haven't expanded it yet, but certainly, the functionality exists.

Our customer was previously a NetApp shop, and they were already familiar with SnapMirror, so upgrading to the current solution was a no-brainer. They saved money and have the same functionality.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy, with no learning curve involved.

The NetApp Cloud Manager works well, and the customers are happy with it.

Our customer has not specifically seen ROI. However, they did a calculation that showed they saved money by not buying another on-premises solution. So, there is some return on investment there, I would say, or a TCO saving at least.

The customer was happy with NetApp and did not look at any alternatives.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to definitely take a look at NetApp for all of the cloud-specific products that are out there now. I think that NetApp is definitely a leader when it comes to the cloud approach, especially compared to other storage vendors like Pure. Pure is definitely playing catch-up to NetApp.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is disaster recovery. We protect our data by replicating using SnapMirror and storing it in a public cloud.

We use this solution's Snapshot copies as part of our data management and data protection strategy. We store these on serial volumes in a public cloud.

The inline encryption using SnapMirror has helped us to address concerns over data security in the cloud. Our enterprise data is private and is protected, but it is still available for our business.

The most valuable features of this solution are SnapShot, FlexClone, and deduplication.

Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud).

The stability is very good for us because it is required for our operations. We have had no problems with it.

ONTAP makes it easy to scale our infrastructure. It is important for us because our business has increased rapidly.

I used cloud central to set up our Cloud Volumes.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to manage all of our NetApp storage.

We have been having good luck with this solution's snapshot copies and thin clones, in terms of operational recovery. We are looking forward to encryption for the snapshots.

Our version does not support inline encryption using SnapMirror, so we're not at that point yet.

With respect to this solution's unified file and block storage access, we only use block-storage and it fits the needs of our customers. We serve internal customer bases, which feed the customers on the outside. For us, it is the right fit.

We don't have anything in the Hyperscaler environment right now. Everything is internal to us.

This solution has helped us because it is easy to use. The ability to find things in the GUI and being able to restore things has been really simple for us.

The Snapshot copies have helped increase our application development speed, especially in testing because we can blow things up and restore it really quickly. Speed to market is where it really helps.

In terms of the consistency of storage management across clouds, this is something that is critical to us because we have several locations. Each of those locations has the infrastructure in place, including some that are overseas. It has become more and more critical for us to manage those things centrally.

In our case, using this solution has not helped to reduce our data footprint in the cloud. If anything, it's growing.

I would like to see better integration with Active IQ. I know they're making strides for that, and some of the tools are being mimicked in Active IQ now so that I can look at the same information. If the footprint looks right and the GUI looks the same to us, it'll be more effective for us down the road in the long-term.

Encryption is very important for us going forward because we sometimes store data out of the country, and sometimes overseas. We are looking forward to more in terms of encryption, including the inline encryption for SnapMirror and things of that nature.

We have had no problems with the code levels, or anything else. We get the occasional bugs as everybody does, but the code, overall, has been really good for us.

We haven't hit the upper boundaries of the solution, so I don't think that scalability is going to be a problem for us in the near future.

The technical support has been pretty good. Whenever we open a ticket or a case, they've been really responsive.

The initial setup and subsequent upgrades have not been difficult for us.

The documentation and the reference architecture on the NetApp portals are very well defined.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We did not use the NetApp Cloud Manager during our initial setup.

The speed to market with the encryption has really been a nagging thing for a lot of folks in our industry, so I'm glad to see that they're finally getting around to encrypting things, including the traffic in between SnapMirrors.

NetApp has been around for a long time. They're an established company and there's a lot of big companies using NetApp, so I think that the new stands for itself. When you're comparing it to other companies in the industry, NetApp is one of the leaders.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Desktop-as-a-service is a PoC that I'm doing for our customers to allow them to use NetApp for their personal, departmental, and profile shares. This connects their desktop-as-a-service that we're building for them.

This is for training. The customer has classrooms that they have set up. They have about 150,000 users coming through. They want to have a way to do a secure, efficient solution that can be repeated after they finish this class, before the next class comes in, and use a NetApp CVO as well as some desktop services off of the AWS. 

It is hosted by AWS. Then, it hosted by CVO who sets out some filers, as well Cloud Volumes Manager as well. We were looking at it with Azure as well, because it doesn't matter. We want to do a multicloud with it.

We haven't put it into production yet. However, in the proof of concept, we show the use of it and the how you can take it in Snapshot daily coverage, because we're doing it for a training area. This allows them to return back to where they were. The bigger thing is if they need to reset up for a class, then we can have a goal copied or flip back where they need to be.

It gives a solution for storage one place to go across everything. So, the customer is very familiar with NetApp on-prem. It allows them to gain access to the file piece. It helps them with the training aspect of it, so they don't have to relearn something new. They already know this product. They just have to learn some widgets or what it's like in the cloud to operate and deploy it in different ways.

The customer knows the product. They don't have to train their administrators on how to do things. They are very familiar with that piece of it. Then, the deduplication, compression, and compaction are all things that you would get from moving to a CVO and the cloud itself. That is something that they really enjoy because now they're getting a lot of cost savings off of it. We anticipate cloud cost savings, but it is not in production yet. It should be about a 30 percent savings. If it is a 30 percent or better savings, then it is a big win for the customer and for us.

• Dedupe
• Compression
• Compaction
• Taking 30 gig of data and reducing it down to five to 10 gig on the AWS blocks.

I would some wizards or best practices following how to secure CVO, inherit to the Cloud Manager. I thought that was a good place to be able to put stuff like that in there. 

I would like some more performance matrices to know what it is doing. It has some matrices inherent to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. But inside Cloud Manager, it would also be nice to see. You can have a little Snapshot, then drill down if you go a little deeper. 

This is where I would like to see changes, primarily around security and performance matrices.

It is a good system. It is very stable as far as what I've been using with it. I find that support from it is really good as well. It is something that I would offer to all of my customers.

It is easy to scale. It is inherent to the actual product. It will move to another cloud solution or it can be managed from another cloud solution. So, it's taken down barriers which are sometimes put out by vendors in different ways.

We use NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Its configuration wizards and ability to automate the process are easy, simple, and straightforward. If you have any knowledge of storage, even to a very small amount, the wizards will click through and help to guide you through the right things. They make sure you put the right things in. They give some good examples to make sure you follow those examples, which makes it a bit more manageable in the long run.

They use some native things that are inherent to the AWS. They have looked at those things. 

NetApp has been one of the first ones that they looked at, and it is the one that they are very happy with today.

Work with your resources in different ways, as far as in NetApp in the partner community. But bigger than that, just ask questions. Everybody seems willing to help move the solution forward. The biggest advice is just ask when you don't know, because there is so much to know.

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

We're not using inline encryption right now.

We use this solution both on-premises and in the cloud.

Our primary use case for our on-premises implementation is production data and DR. In our cloud implementation, we use this solution for DR.

Moving to the cloud version was something that was different for us, but it was a fairly easy transition. Once we got comfortable with it, now it's second nature. There are many new features and I find that it is more valuable.

In terms of operational recovery, the solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones are easy to do. It greatly simplifies DR testing or application testing because we can very quickly clone a volume provided to the application team. They can use it, and if they want to keep it then we'll split it off and they have their own volume. Or, if they don't want to use it then we just throw it away.

With respect to using inline encryption using SnapMirror, this is something that we are interested in but our version does not support it. Once we upgrade to a supporting version, we plan to deploy it.

The solution's unified file and block storage access give us a standard common interface and a set of tools that we use regardless of whether we're dealing with the cloud or on-premises.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones have greatly improved our application development speed. The DBAs can create clones on their own and do whatever they want with them. They can keep them, destroy them, split them, etc. It takes a load off of the storage administrators and puts it where it really should be.

The consistency of storage management across clouds has made our storage operations a lot simpler. We didn't have to learn new interfaces and new command sets. Everything that we're used to using on-premises works for us in the cloud.

With respect to our data footprint in the cloud, we are seeing all of the storage benefits being extended from what we have on-premises. We're just getting into the cloud now, and we're probably seeing between a 30 and 50 percent reduction in our data footprint using compression, compaction, and deduplication.

This solution has made everything easier to do. The most basic operations are very simple and we've been using NetApp tools, plus some of our in-house tools, to automate a lot of the processes. It saves us a lot of time and effort.

ONTAP is extremely reliable.

The inclusion of onboard key management in CBL would simplify the way we have to do our security.

Multipathing for iSCSI LUNs is difficult to deal with from the client-side and I'd love to see a single entry point that can be moved around within the cluster to simplify the client configuration.

I have been using this solution for eighteen years.

In terms of stability, this is a rock-solid solution.

The scalability is great. You don't have to add controllers to add storage space and you can scale out if you need to add more horsepower to your cluster.

NetApp's technical support is outstanding.

We have not moved off of another solution. Rather, we are expanding to implement a new solution for a problem that hasn't been addressed yet. Specifically, we are looking to use CBO for replication that up to this point, had not been done yet.

The initial setup of this solution is very simple. I don't remember there being any problems that we looked at and had to research an answer for. It just worked.

We use Tego Data to assist us with this solution. They've been working with us for years on NetApp, and they're just great. They work with us hand in glove on any projects that we reach out to them for, and they know our environment just about as well as we do.

Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two.

We've looked at other storage solutions and we just keep coming back to NetApp because they provide us with everything we need. They have great support and the hardware has drastically improved in horsepower and capacity, so we're happy to stay with them.

I have no problems with this solution at all.

My advice for anybody who is researching this type of solution is to take a serious look at NetApp. They have products that are very flexible, extremely reliable, they're cost-competitive with other storage solutions, and their support is outstanding.

There is always room for enhancement, but what it does, it does very well.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is storage of medical records.

The solution’s unified file and block-storage access across our infrastructure is invaluable. Without it, we can't do what we do.

The consistency of storage management across clouds affects our storage operations by making everybody go to object-based storage, which is not a bad thing. I don't care what cloud provider that you use, they all are based upon what AWS comes out with, which is their S3 object-based storage. NetApp is doing that with with StorageGRID, and that's why we have one and a half petabytes of StorageGRID now, because we have developers and they all want to use object-based storage. Everybody likes puts and gets, but I still prefer traditional NFS.

The ability to Snapshot and SnapMirror between locations is the most valuable. The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery works very effectively. If you want to automate it, use SnapCenter 2.0. Otherwise, do it manually. It's not that hard to do.

I suspect ONTAP will just end up being a portion that runs on StorageGRID. Ultimately, everything will be object-based, then you'll just have a little dock of ONTAP that will do your NFS and CIFS.

The on-premise NetApp is very stable. I can't speak to the cloud side.

It just works. I don't have problems with it.

It's very scalable. I even insisted when we ordered the latest ones that we get the interconnect switches. So, if we want to expand, we already have those in place.

We have used technical support. As long as they don't call me at four o'clock in the morning to tell me that a drive failed and they are sending me another one, I like it. They have a tendency to do that. 

We previously used Commvault.

I have used NetApp before at two previous companies. 

Compellent is what they already had when we acquired this other company. It would just crash constantly. It is not worth it.

It is pretty easy. It is sort of wizard based.

I have done it numerous times.

We did the last deployment ourselves.

It is reliable, and Commvault is not reliable.

Dell EMC sucks. They are not innovative. They haven't done anything in years.

NetApp is the best solution out there.

I would rate it as a 10 out of 10. I've been using the solution for a number of years. I have watched it increasingly get better, not worse.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones has affected our application development speed by speeding it up. However, we do so much through Ansible that this is really irrelevant. Theoretically, you should never care about your virtual machines. Your data should always be on NFS or CIFS exports so if a virtual machine gets messed up, you just blow it away and redeploy it. I can redeploy it faster than you can log into it and troubleshoot it, but the data's always here.

With dedupe compression, it does reduce our organizational footprint. Unfortunately, we have to hold on to everything for 20 years.

We are getting ready to use the solution’s inline encryption using SnapMirror.

The primary use is virtualization as well as filer storage, pretty much all the features of the ONTAP suite.

We don't have any cloud footprint for contractual obligations. So, it's all pretty much on-prem, but it's in a co-location.

We use it to replicate between data centers. It is for our DR site as well. We use it to create redundancy.

We do on-prem S3 for StorageGRID. The on-prem infrastructure is cheap. It works just the same. It's S3, so it works very well as far as integration and things that use S3 in our environment.

The most valuable features are the native filer capabilities because a lot of SAN providers don't do that. When they do it, they do it with an appliance or a secondary. With this, it is just baked in right there on the system that you require. You don't have to have anything extra.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are the best thing since sliced bread. Rollback is super easy. It's just simple, and it works. It's very efficient.

The stability is good. I've been with NetApps for a long time, so I've seen them fall and come back. However, with cDOT and all this new stuff, it is great. It just works.

We're not that big, storage footprint-wise. However, it's simple. You just add nodes. So, it works.

We have not really used the technical support.

We had previous experiences with deploying ONTAP at other companies successfully.

ONTAP makes our storage solutions more flexible. Traditionally, that's hard to do. ONTAP gives you those features which you typically have to build yourself.

It's straightforward. But you do have to know what you're doing. Things do what you expect them to do. There is quite a bit of initial setup, but with things like Ansible and all this new stuff that they're doing, it makes it much easier and automated. So, it's simple.

I did the deployment myself with a little help from our vendor's professional services.

We have had less downtime.

Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost.

This company that I work for now is just acquiring quite a bit of NetApp equipment. We will be doing SnapMirror. I have done it in the past at another company.

It does exactly what it does, and it does it well. It works, and that's what really matters at the end the day: uptime, functionality, and scalability.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement. No one is ever going to be a 10.

The primary use case is to move age old data to the cloud.

It is deployed on the cloud.

The tool saves us time and money. Now, it's easy to retrieve data back, where you can go back and look at the statistics to study them. Because my company is focused on healthcare, there's no time limit on the retention of information. It's infinite. So, instead of having all our data on tapes and things, which takes many hours to try to retrieve information back. This is a good solution.

The migration is seamless. Basically, we shouldn't be spending a whole lot budget-wise. We would like to have something reasonable. What's happening right now is when we try to develop a cloud solution, we don't see the fine print. Then, at the end of the day, we are getting a long bill that says, "Okay, this is that, that is what." So, we don't want those unanticipated costs.

We use the solution’s inline encryption using SnapMirror. We did get Geoaudits and things like that. In other words, everything put together is a security. It's not like just storage talking to the cloud, it's everything else too: network, PCs, clients, etc. It's a cumulative effort to secure. That's where we are trying to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. Any vulnerabilities are addressed right away and fixed.

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are good. Snapshot copies are pretty much the write-in time data backups. Obviously, critical data is snapshotted more frequently, and even clients and end users find it easier to restore whatever they need if it's file-based, statical, etc. 

The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones have affected our application development speed positively. They have affected us in a very positive way. From Snapshots, copies, clones, and things, they were able to develop applications, doing pretty much in-house development. They were able to roll it out first in the test environment of the R&D department. The R&D department uses it a lot. It's easy for them because they can simulate production issues while they are still in production. So, they love it. We create and clone for them all the time.

The solution helped reduced our company's data footprint in the cloud. They're reducing it by two petabytes of data in the cloud. All of the tape data, they are now writing to the cloud. It's like we have almost reached the capacity that we bought even before we knew we were going to reach it. So it's good. It reduces labor, because with less tapes, you don't have to go around buying tapes and maintaining those tapes, then sending them offsite, etc. All that has been eliminated.

Right now, we're using StorageGRID. Obviously, it is a challenge. Anything that you're writing to the cloud or when you get things from the cloud, it is a challenge. When we implemented StorageGRID, like nodes and things like that, we implemented it on our bare-metal. So the issue is that they're trying to implement features, like erasure coding and things like that, and it is a huge challenge. It's still a challenge because we have a fine node bare-metal Docker implementation, so if you lose a node for some reason, then it's like it stops to read from it or write to it. This is because of limitations within the infrastructure and within ONTAP.

How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically. 

It needs better reporting. Right now, we had to put everything one to the other just to figure out what could be the issue. We get a random error saying, "This is an error," and we have to literally dig into it, look to people, lock files, look through our loads, and look through the Docker lock files, then verify, "Okay, this is the issue." We just want it to be better in alerting and error handling reports. Once you get an error, you don't want to sit trying to figure out what that error means in the first two hours. It should be fixable right away. Then, right away you are trying to work on it, trying to get it done. That's where we see the drawbacks. Overall, the product is good and serves a purpose, but as an administrator and architect, nothing is perfect.

There's always room for improvement. Overall, it's still stable.

60 percent of our tape data is sitting in the cloud now.

There's a limitation to scalability. Right now, when you want to expand the initial architecture, we have to add additional loads just so it can handle the data without hurting the performance. Then, we have to go back and request for more licensing. It adds to our licensing, thus adding to the cost. In regards to scalability, unless you have a five to six year plan ahead, we can't say, "Great, we have run out of space. Okay, let's try to increase space." It's not like increasing volume.

Unless a much more experienced person comes, I think the print and tech guy is only reading what he sees on the website. He pulls up their code or whatever, because what we see when we open a case is already there is an automatic case that's opened. We see typical questionnaires, but nothing pertaining to the case. For example, you run out of space or high nodes, the technical support is sitting there asking us something else. Nothing to do with high nodes and the volume being down or offline. It's not relevant. It is a generalized thing. You have to sit down and explain to them, "This has nothing to do with the questions you're asking. It's out of context, so you might want to look again and get back with the proper input." That's a pain.

However, the minute we say, "It's very critical," we see a good, solid SME on the line who is helping us.

I'm not experienced as many of my colleagues. They're really frustrated. We did convey this concern to our account person and have seen a lot of change.

The company has always been a NetApp shop even before I entered the company. We continue to use it because of the good products. We do market research, obviously. We do see good products, and every year there is improvement. When we want to do hardware upgrades, it's still very good. The way we are trying to develop, it's very seamless for us and not a pain. 

We have never felt, "We are done with NetApp. Let's move onto something else." I love to introduce other vendors into the mix, just so it's not a monopoly. We still love NetApp as our primary.

It is a little complex. It's completely different from the regular standard ONTAP, and how you manage and the learning code. Half the time you get confused and try to compare it with a standard cloud. You start to say, "Oh, this feature was here. How come it's not there? That was very good there. How come it's not here?"

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. The configuration wizards and its ability to automate the process was good. We liked it. It's all in one place, so you don't have to go around trying to use multiple tools just to get things worked out. You see what you have on the other side plus what do you have on your end, and you're able to access it.

Mostly, we did it ourselves. When we went to MetroCluster, we used their Professional Services. For the rest of ONTAP, we deployed it ourselves. It is pretty much self-explanatory and has good training.

Cloud is cloud. It's still expensive. Any good solution comes with a price tag. That's where we are looking to see how well we can manage our data in the cloud by trying to optimize the costs.

I do know our licensing cost to some extent, but not fully. E.g., I don't know overall how much we have gone over the budget or where did we put costs down just to maintain licensing on it. That part of it, I don't know. 

I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs.

We use Caringo. It's object storage migration for age old data. It is a cheap solution for us, so that's why we use that. When we compared prices, Caringo was much cheaper.

Once we migrated everything to Caringo, there were challenges because it's another vendor, and then you're working with two different vendors. We started having issues, so now we use StorageGRID.

We chose NetApp because we already had the infrastructure. Adding additional resources and features into the mix is much easier because it's one vendor, and they understand the product. If we needed to add something and improve on the solution, it's much easier.

I would recommend NetApp any day, at any time, because there's so much hard work in it. It's more open and transparent. Nobody is coming from NetApp, saying, "We're going to sell this gimmick." Then, you view all the good stuff but begin to realize, "This is not what they promised." For this reason, I would recommend NetApp.

They make sure the solution fits our needs. It's not, "Okay, we'll go to the customer site and tell what we feel like regarding their products." Even if it fits or not, it doesn't affect that they've gone through the door. A lot of people do that. NetApp makes an assessment, then they make sure, "Okay, it does fit in."

The product: I would give it an eight (out of 10). The company: It's a six (out of 10).

We have not yet implemented the solution to move data between hyperscalers and our on-premises environment. It's just from our NetApps to the cloud, not from the hybrid. The RVM team is planning on that. So, they can have the whole untouched thing put on the cloud rather than being hosted on our data stores.

We are using it for storing files, to get high-performance access to files. We are also using NetApp for DR. We copy the information to the same system in other regions.

The solution's high-availability features are cost-effective for us because we are able to use the cloud benefits to reduce the cost of DR. For example, if we have it in one region, we can copy the data to another region. They keep it powered off and then they power it on for a few minutes, copy the data, send the data again, and shut it down again. That reduces the costs by approximately 80 percent.

Similarly, the data protection provided by the solution's disaster recovery technology is cost-effective and simple.

We're using Cloud Manager to automate some of the management. We use it for bringing the DR environment up and down as well as for scheduling data synchronization between different regions, worldwide. It's almost impossible to do that manually. Compared to an engineer doing it manually, it's about 90 percent faster. That's specifically for this kind of operation. In reality, the automation is enabling such capabilities. It's not actually reducing the time taken. If it didn't exist, we would never do it. That's even better than saving time.

Overall, NetApp has standardized and certified file services, both on-prem and in the cloud, corporate-wide. In addition, by using the automation, it has provided us cost-effective DR and management. In the cloud it has enabled us to provide tailor-made storage solutions for each of our cloud customers. The storage efficiency has reduced our storage footprint because we are offloading all the data to the storage account. So it has reduced the cost of corporate storage. And the data-tiering has also saved us money.

What is most valuable is that the system is the same as what we use on-prem. So the guys who are responsible here for managing NetApp feel comfortable with it& and that they have enough knowledge to manage the system in the cloud. We are able to& keep the same standards that we have on-prem in the cloud.

The usability is& great. We don't have any issues with it.

We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us.

The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data. So we do that once, at night, to another region and then shut down the destination. It's good because it's using Cloud Manager and its automation, but I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud.

We have been using it for about half a year in production; longer when we include the PoC.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any issues.

We still haven't needed to scale up, but I think the scalability is good.

We are using it for a system which stores files and parts of databases, but the system is used by hundreds of customers. NetApp is not used directly by them, rather through the system. We may plan to increase NetApp according to the usage of the system but we still have no specific plans.

We are using NetApp engineers and they are great.

Before NetApp we used a home-grown server in the cloud, a Linux server with a big disk. It was less simple to manage.

We're also using Avere, a storage solution that was purchased by Microsoft a month or two ago. It's mainly responsible for real-time data synchronization between on-prem and the cloud environment. It's different than NetApp which doesn't provide the kind of synchronization solution that Avere does. It's two-way, real-time data synchronization between the Oracle storage solutions which we have on-prem and the Avere solution that we have in Azure. NetApp does not help with such requirements.

The initial setup was very simple. It was quite easy to set up the environment in just one day. We started with a small implementation and then added more and more parts of the solution. We started with just one desktop and then added additional ones and then added tiering.

It required a small number of staff members. That's all we needed because it was pretty simple. We did a few sessions online and one or two onsite, for the entire solution. For our specific case it requires almost no maintenance. It only requires management to expand the disk capacity or perform the management operations, per-request. Generally we wouldn't require an increase to our storage team to manage the solution.

We used a NetApp engineer to help us.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer. The DR environment is billed by the hour and paid to Azure directly and NetApp is paid on a yearly license.

We checked Dell EMC and HPE but we chose NetApp. The Storage team made the decision. One of the main reasons they chose NetApp was the existence of NetApp on-prem and the knowledge of it the team had. We are familiar with NetApp and the products are good, so we decided to extend the success to the cloud as well.

Implement it. Do not think about it. It's very simple and very useful.

For the most part, we're using it to move data off-prem. We have the ability to do mirrors from on-prem to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and we also have both single-node instances and HA instances. We are running it in both AWS and Azure.

We're using all of the management tools that go along with it. We're using both OnCommand Cloud Manager and OnCommand Unified Manager, which means we can launch System Manager as well.

Unified Manager is what monitors the environment. OnCommand Cloud Manager allows you to deploy and it does have some monitoring capabilities, but it's not like Unified Manager. And from OnCommand Cloud Manager you can launch System Manager, which gives you the lower-level details of the environment.

Cloud Manager will allow you to create volumes, do CIFS shares, NFS mounts, and create aggregates. But the rest of the networking components and other work for the SVMs and doing other configurations are normally done at that lower level. System Manager is where you would do that, whereas Unified Manager allows you to monitor the entire environment.

Say I have 30 instances running out there. Unified Manager allows me to monitor all 30 instances for things like volume-full alerts, near volume-full alerts, I-nodes, full network components being offline, paths, back-end storage paths, aggregate fulls. All those items that you would want to monitor for a healthy environment are handled through Unified Manager.

We're sitting at multiple petabytes of storage on our NetApp infrastructure. We're talking hundreds of thousands of shares across thousands of volumes. Even with that size of infrastructure, it's being supported by three people. And it's not like we're working 24/7. It gives us the ability to do a lot, to do more with less. Those three people manage our entire NAS environment. I've got two intermediate and one senior storage engineer in our environment who handle things. They're handling those multiple petabytes of on-prem and I'm just starting to get them involved in the cloud version, Cloud Volumes ONTAP. So, for the most part, it's just me on the Cloud Volume side.

In terms of the storage efficiency reducing our storage footprint, the answer I'd like to say is "yes." The problem I have is that nobody ever wants to delete anything. We have terabytes of data on-prem in multiple locations, in both primary and DR backed-up. And now, we're migrating it to the cloud. But eventually, the answer will be yes.

I'm very familiar with working from the command line, but Unified Manager, System Manager, and Cloud Manager are all GUI-based. It's easy for somebody who has not been exposed to this for years to pick it up and work with it. Personally, for the most part, I like to get in with my secure CRT and do everything from the command line.

We do a lot of DR testing of our environment, so we're using a couple of components. We use Unified Manager to link with WFA, Workflow Automation, and we do scripted cut-overs to build out. We use the mirroring to mirror our volumes to our DR location. We also create snapshots for backups. Snapshots will create a specified snapshot to be able to do a DR test without disrupting our standard mirrors. That means we can create a point-in-time snapshot, then use the ability of FlexClones to make a writeable volume to test with, and then blow it away after the DR test.

We could also do that in an actual disaster. All we would do is quiesce and break our mirrors, our volumes would become writeable, and then we would deploy our CIFS shares and our NFS mounts. We would have a full working environment in a different geographic location. Whether you're doing it on-prem or in the cloud, those capabilities are there. But that's all done at a lower level.

The data protection provided by the Snapshot feature is a crucial part of being able to maintain our environment. We stopped doing tape-based backups to our NAS systems. We do 35 days of snapshots. We keep four "hourlies," two dailies, and 35 nightly snapshots. This gives us the ability to recover any data that's been accidentally deleted or corrupted, from an application perspective, and to pull it out as a snapshot. And then there are the point-in-time snapshots, being able to create one at a given point in time. If I want to use a FlexCone to get at data, which are just pointers to the back-end data, right now, and use that as a writeable volume without interrupting my backup and DR capabilities, those point-in-time snapshots are crucial.

The user can go and recover the file himself so we don't have to have a huge number of people working on recovering things. The user has the ability to get to that snapshot location to recover the file and go however many days back. Being that it's a read-only a file to the user community, users can get at that data, as long as they have proper rights to that file. Somebody else could not get to a file for which they don't have rights. There's no security breach or vulnerability. It just provides the ability for a user who owns that data to get to a backup copy of that data, to recover it, in case they've deleted or had a file corruption.

We also use their File Services Solutions in the cloud, CIFS and NFS. It works just as well as on-prem. The way we configure an environment, we have the ability to talk back to our domain controllers, and then it uses the standard AD credentials and DNS from our on-prem environments.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the cloud, versus Data ONTAP on-prem, are the exact same products. If you have systems on-prem that you're migrating to the cloud, you won't have to retrain your workforce because they'll be used to everything that they'll be doing in the cloud as a result of what they've been doing on-prem. In that sense, Cloud Volumes ONTAP is the exact same product, unless you're using a really old version of Data ONTAP on-prem. Then there's the standard change between Data ONTAP versions.

Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now. We're working with them on straightening it out.

We're moving a grid environment to Azure and the way it was set up is that we have eight SVMs, which are virtual environments. Each of those has its own CIFS servers, all their CIFS and NFS mounts. The reason they're independent of one another is that different groups of business got pulled together, so they had specific CIFS share names and you can't have the same name in the same server more than once on the network. You can't have CIFS share called "Data" in the same SVM. We have eight SVMs because of the way the data was labeled in the paths. God forbid you change a path because that breaks everything in every application all down the line. It gives you the ability to port existing applications from on-prem into cloud and/or from on-prem into fibre infrastructure.

But that ability wasn't there in Cloud Volumes ONTAP because they assume that it was going to be a new market and they licensed it for a single SVM per instance built out in the cloud. They were figuring: New market and new people coming to this, not people porting these massive old-volume infrastructures. In our DR infrastructure we have 60 SVMs. That's not how they build out the new environments. 

We're working with them to improve that and they're making strides. The licensing is the only thing that I can see they can improve on and they're working on it, so I wouldn't even knock them on that.

I've been using it since its inception. Prior to it being called Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it was named a couple of different things as it went along. I've been working with the on-prem Data ONTAP for about 16 years now. When they first offered the Cloud Volumes ONTAP, I started testing that out in a Beta program. It's been a few years now with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I'm our lead storage engineer, but I'm also on a couple of our cloud teams and I'm a cloud administrator for our organization. We started looking at it when AWS ( /products/amazon-aws-reviews ) first started coming on the scene, at what we could do in the cloud. And as a company direction, we're implementing cloud-first, where available.

We've had no issues.

In an HA environment, it will scale up to 358 terabytes. That's not bad per-system. We've had no difficulties.

We will be moving more stuff off-prem into the cloud. Right now it's at about 15 percent of our entire environment, and we plan on at least 10 percent, or more, per quarter, over the next few years.

We'll be doing the tiering and using the Cloud Sync as well. We're a financial and insurance company, so some things have to remain on-prem, and some things, from a PCI perspective, have a lot of different requirements around them. And because we're across multiple countries worldwide, there are all sorts of HIPAA and other types of legal and financial ramifications from a security perspective. In the UK and in Europe there are the privacy components. There are different things in Hong Kong and Singapore, in Spain, etc. Each country unit requires different types of policies to be adhered to. Everything we have is encrypted at rest, as well as encrypted in-flight.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP will also support doing data encryption at a volume level, a software encryption. But from a PCI perspective, we use the NSE drives, which give us hardware encryption. So they're double encrypted. They are hardware encrypted. We're having to use a management appliance to keep and maintain the encryption keys, and we do quarterly encryption-key replacement. But there are also the volumes that are encrypted as well. We also use TLS for transporting the data, doing encryption in-flight. There are all sorts of things that it supports which allow you to be compliant.

Another feature it has is disk sanitize, a destruction component which allows you to do a DoD wipe of the data. Once you've decommissioned an environment, it is completely wiped so nobody can get access to the data that was there previously. That's all built into Data ONTAP, including Cloud Volumes.

NSE drives are a little different because you are not getting physical drives in the cloud environment, so you couldn't do that. But you can do the volume encryption, from Cloud Volumes. In terms of a DoD wipe, you wouldn't be doing that on Azure's or AWS's environments because it's a virtual disk.

I've rarely used tech support. I've got so much experience deploying these environments that it's like breathing. It's second nature. And when they first came out with OnCommand Cloud Manager, I was doing beta testing and debugging with the group out of Israel to build the product.

The initial setup was very straightforward. If you use an OnCommand Cloud Manager to deploy it into AWS or Azure, it's point-and-click stupid-simple. It takes less than 15 minutes, depending upon your connectivity and bandwidth. That 15 minutes is to build out a brand-new filer and create CIFS shares on it. It automatically deploys it for you: the back-end storage, the EC2 instances, if you're in an AWS. In Azure, it creates the Blob space. It creates the VMs. 

It's all done for you with just a couple of screens. You tell it what you want to call it, you tell it what account or subscription you're using, depending upon whether it's AWS or Azure. You tell it how big you want the device to be, how much storage you want it to have, and what volumes you want it to create; CIFS shares, etc. You click next, next, next. As long as you have the ability to provision what you've gone into, whether it's AWS or Azure, and turned on programmatic deployment, it gives you the access. The only thing you have to do outside Cloud Volumes ONTAP under OnCommand Cloud Manager is turn it on to allow it to run. It picks up everything else. It'll pick up what VPC you have, what subnet you have. You just tell it what security group you want it to use. It's fairly simple.

If somebody hasn't utilized or isn't familiar with how to deploy anything in either AWS or Azure, it might be a tad more complicated because they'd need to get that information to begin with. You have to have at least moderate experience with your infrastructure to know which VPC and subnet and security group to specify.

In my opinion, we're getting a good return on investment.

I always try new products. I've used the SoftNAS product, and a couple of other generic NAS products. They don't even compare. They're not on the same page. They're not even in the same universe. I might be a little biased but they're not even close. 

I have looked at Azure NetApp Files, which is another product that NetApp is putting out. Instead of Cloud Volumes it's cloud files. You don't have to deploy an entire NetApp infrastructure. It gives you the ability to do CIFS at file level without having to manage any of the overhead. That's pre-managed for you.

For somebody who's never used it before, the biggest thing is ease of use. In terms of advice, as long as you design your implementation correctly, it should be fine. I would do the due diligence on the front-end to determine how you want to utilize it before you deploy.

We have over 3,000 users of the solution who have access to snapshots, etc. but only to their own data. We have multiple SVMs per business unit and a locked-down security on that. Only individuals who own data have access to it. We are officially like a utility. We give them storage space. We give them the ability to use it and then they maintain their data. From an IT perspective, we can't really discern what is business-critical and what isn't to a specific business unit. We're global, we're not just U.S., we're all over the world.

We've gone into doing HA. It's the same as what's on-prem, and HA on-prem is something we've always done. When we would buy a filer for on-premise, we'd always buy a two-node HA filer with a switch back-end to be able to maintain the environment. The other nice thing, from an on-prem perspective with a switched environment, is that we can inject and eject nodes. We can do a zero-downtime lifecycle. We can inject new nodes and mirror the data to the new nodes. Once everything's on those new nodes, eject the old nodes and we will have effectively lifecycled the environment, without having to take any downtime. Data ONTAP works really well for that. The only thing to be aware of is that to inject new nodes into an existing cluster, they have to be at the same version of Data ONTAP.

In terms of provisioning, we keep that locked down because we don't want them running us out of space. We have a ticketing system where users request storage allocation and the NAS team, which supports the NetApp infrastructure, will allocate the space with the shares, to start out. After that, our second-level support teams, our DSC (distributed service center) will maintain the volumes from a size perspective. If something starts to get near-full, they will automatically allocate additional space. The reason we have that in place is that if it tries to grow rapidly, like if there's an application that's out of control and just keeps spinning up and eating more and more of the utilization, it gives us the ability to stop that and get with the user before they go from using a couple a hundred gigs to multiple terabytes, which would cost them X amount. There is the ability to auto-grow. We just don't use it in our environment.

In terms of the data protection provided by the solution's disaster recovery technology, we use that a lot. Prior to clustered ONTAP - this is going back to 7-Mode - there was the ability to auto-DR with a single command. That gave us the ability to do a cut-over to another environment and automatically fail. We're currently using WFA to do that because, when they first came out with cluster mode, they didn't have the ability to auto-DR. I have not looked into whether they've made auto-DR a feature in these later versions of Data ONTAP.

OnCommand Cloud Manager doesn't allow you to do DR-type stuff. There are other things within the suite of the cloud environment that you can do: There's Cloud Sync which allows you to create a data broker and sync between CIFS shares or NFS mounts into an S3 bucket back-end. There's a lot of stuff that you can do there, but that's getting into the other product lines.

As for using it to deploy Kubernetes, we are working through that right now. That process is going well. We've really just started getting through it and it hasn't been overly complicated. Cloud Volumes ONTAP's capabilities for deploying Kubernetes means it's been fairly easy.

In terms of the cloud, one thing that has made things a little easier is that previously, within the AWS environment, we used to have to create a virtual filer in each of our subscriptions or accounts because we really wanted the filer to be close to the database instances or the servers within that same account, without traversing VPCs. Now, since they have given us the ability to do VPC peering, we can create an overarching primary account and then have it talk to all the instances within that storage account, or subscription in Azure, without having to have one spun up in every single subscription or account. We have a lot of accounts so it has allowed us to reel that back by creating larger HA components in a single account and then give access through VPCs to the other accounts. All that traffic stays within Azure or AWS. That saves money because we don't have to pay them for multiple subscriptions of Cloud Volumes ONTAP and/or additional virtual filers.

For my use, Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for SAP production environments. We are running the shared file systems for our SAP systems on it.

It's helped us to dive into the cloud very fast. We didn't have to change any automations which we already had. We didn't have to change any processes we already had. We were able to adopt it very fast. It was a huge benefit for us to use the same concepts in the cloud as we do on-premise. We're running our environment very efficiently, and it was very helpful that our staff, our operators, didn't have to learn new systems. They have the same processes, all the same knowledge they had before. It was very easy and fast.

We did a comparison, of course, and it was cheaper to have Cloud Volumes ONTAP running with the deduplication and compression, compared to storing everything, for example, on HA disks and have a server running all the time as well. And that was not even for the biggest environment.

The data tiering saves us money because it offloads all the code data to the Blob Storage. However, we use the HA version and data tiering just came to HA with version 9.6 and we are not on 9.6 in our production environment. It's still on RC, the pre-release, and not on GA release. In our testing we have seen that it saves a lot of money, but our production systems are not there yet.

The high availability of the service is a valuable feature. We use the HA version to run two instances. That way there is no downtime for our services when we do any maintenance on the system itself.

For normal upgrades or updates of the system - updates for security fixes, for example - it helps that the systems and that the service itself stay online. For one of our customers, we have 20 systems attached and if we had to ride that customer all the time and say, "Oh, sorry, we have to take your 20 systems down just because we have to do maintenance on your shared file systems," he would not be amused. So that's really a huge benefit.

And there are the usual NetApp benefits we have had over the last ten years or so, like snapshotting, cloning, and deduplication and compression which make it space-efficient on the cloud as well. We've been taking advantage of the data protection provided by the snapshot feature for many years in our on-prem storage systems. We find it very good. And we offload those snapshots as well to other instances, or to other storage systems.

The provisioning capability was challenging the first time we used it. You have to find the right way to deploy but, after the first and second try, it was very easy to automate for us. We are highly automated in our environment so we use the REST API for deployment. We completely deploy the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance itself automatically, when we have a new customer. Similarly, deployment on the Cloud Volumes ONTAP for the Volumes and access to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance are automated as well.

But for that, we still use our on-premise automations with WFA (Workflow Automation). NetApp has a tool which simplifies the automation of NetApp storage systems. We use the same automation for the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instances as we do for our on-premise storage systems. There's no difference, at the end of the day, from the operating system standpoint.

In addition, NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because, again, it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well. It's pretty good.

Another feature which gets a lot of attention in our environment is the File Services Solutions in the cloud, because it's a completely, fully-managed service. We don't have to take care of any updates, upgrades, or configurations. We're just using it, deploying volumes and using them. We see that, in some way, as being the future of storage services, for us at least: completely managed.

Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair. My guess is that those will be the next challenges they have to face.

One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have. That was something of a challenge for us: where to use HA disks and where to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP in that environment, instead of just using Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages.

Right now, the scalability is sufficient in what it provides for us, but we can see that our customer environments are growing. We can see that it will reach its performance end in around a year or so. They will have to evolve or create some performance improvements or build some scale-up/scale-out capabilities into it.

In terms of increasing our usage, the tiering will be definitely used in production as soon as its GA for Azur. They're already playing with the Ultra SSDs, for performance improvements on the storage system itself. As soon as they become generally available by Microsoft, that will probably a feature we'll go to.

As for end-users, for us they are our customers. But the customers have several hundred or 1,000 users on the system. I don't really know how many end-users are ultimately using it, but we have about ten customers.

Technical support has been very good. The technical people who are responsible for us at NetApp are very good. If we contact them we get direct feedback. We often have direct contact, in our case at least, to the engineers as well. We have direct contacts with NetApp in Tel Aviv.

It's worth mentioning that when we started with Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the past, we did an architecture workshop with them in Tel Aviv, to tell them what our deployments look like in our on-premise environment, and to figure out what possibilities Cloud Volumes ONTAP could provide to us as a service provider. What else could we do on it, other than just running several services? For example: disaster recovery or doing our backups. We did that at a very early stage in the process.

We only used native Azure services. We went with Cloud Volumes ONTAP because it was a natural extension of our NetApp products. We have a huge on-premise storage environment from NetApp and we have been familiar with all the benefits from these storage systems for several years. We wanted to have all the benefits in the cloud, the same as we have on-premise. That's why we evaluated it, and we're in a very early stage with it.

To say the initial setup was complex is too strong. We had to look into it and find the right way to do it. It wasn't that complex, it was just a matter of understanding what was supported and what was not from the SAP side. But as soon as we figured that out, it was very straightforward to figure out how to build our environment.

We had an implementation strategy: Determining what SAP systems and what services we would like to deploy in the cloud. Our strategy was that if Cloud Volumes ONTAP made sense in any use case, we would want to use it because it's, again, highly automated and we could use it with our scripting already. Then we had to look at what is supported by SAP itself. We mixed that together in the end and that gave us our concept.

Our initial deployment took one to two weeks, maximum. It required two people, in total, but it was a mixture of SAP and storage colleagues. In terms of maintenance, it doesn't take any additional people than we already have for our on-premise environment. There was no additional headcount for the cloud environment. It's the same operating team and the same people managing Cloud Volumes ONTAP as well as our on-premise storage systems. It requires almost no maintenance. It just runs and we don't have to take care of updating it every two months or so for security reasons.

We didn't use a third-party.

We have seen return on investment but I don't have the numbers. 

The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company. We have an Enterprise Agreement or something similar to that. So we get a different price for it.

In terms of additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees, you have to run instances in Azure, virtual machines and disks. You still have to pay for the Azure disks, and Blob Storage if you're using tiering. What's also important is to know is the network bandwidth. That was the most complicated part in our project, to figure out how much data would be streamed out of our data center into the cloud and how much data would have to be sent back into our data center. It's more challenging than if you have a customer who is running only in Azure. It can be expensive if you don't have an eye on it.

We have a single-vendor strategy.

Don't be afraid of granting permissions because that's one of the most complex parts, but that's Azure. As soon as you've done that, it's easy and straightforward. When you do it the first time you'll think, "Oh, why is it so complicated?" That's native Azure.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Cloud Volumes ONTAP is that from an optimization standpoint, our on-premise instance was a lot more complex than it had to be. That's was a big lesson because Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a very easy, light, wide service. You just use it and it doesn't require that much configuring. You can just use the standards which come from NetApp and that was something we didn't do with our on-premise environment.

In terms of disaster recovery, we have not used Cloud Volumes ONTAP in production yet. We've tested it to see if we could adopt Cloud Volumes ONTAP for that scenario, to migrate all our offloads or all our storage footprint we have on-premise to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. We're still evaluating it. We've done a lot of cost-comparison, which looks pretty good. But we are still facing a little technical problem because we're a CSP (cloud service provider). We're on the way to having Microsoft fix that. It's a Microsoft issue, not a NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP issue.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. There are improvements they need to make for scale-up and scale-out.

Our primary usage is as a repository for the application servers. It's mostly for NFS, with very good replication options and backup features. There are also tools that we need to put there and replicate between our on-prem and AWS locations.

We tried to use EFS, for example, but one of the cons of EFS was that the performance was degraded once we had a lot of files and very large storage. It took it a while to handle everything. Also, backing up was harder and we needed a third-party. With NetApp it's much easier. Performance is very good and there was no need to change our environments, our speeds, or our automation because we have NetApps on-prem as well. When you have 100,000 files on smaller volumes, or you have bigger volumes with millions of files, it's almost impossible to work with EFS. With NetApp we didn't even feel it. It's all flowing really well.

The snapshot ability we're using is very good, SnapMirror. For example, we have a vault account and we can SnapMirror our volumes to that vault account. It has a NetApp that sits on it as three buckets and acts as our offset backups.

The FlexClones make all the management easier for us.

They're making the right improvements right now. The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that as well. That's a good advantage.

We've been using it for two years already.

The stability has been very good. The only time that it was down was because someone took the machine down. That was in the beginning and then we fixed the permissions. But it wasn't an issue on NetApp's end that caused the system to go down.

Both performance and scalability are really good. We started with a small system but have grown really fast. We needed to change the type of system and the license. We were able to do that online with no issues. Doing so, and going with the bigger type of system, also gives us better performance. 

So if you need more performance, you can always change the type of system. Working with NetApp, they provide us with a consultant, if needed, to determine what the best type of system is for our use case, based on the performance that we need. They're flexible.

We're growing all the time. We have several sites already and we're adding more sites when needed. We are keeping the on-prem as well because it doesn't always make sense to move to the cloud. It depends on budget, the CapEx and OpEx. But we are growing.

The support has been great. Every time we've had a question or something that we didn't know how to do, a setup issue, they have helped us. There was one time that we set up a new one on a new version and there was a small bug that was fixed really fast. It wasn't within how the system functions, it was a bug in the deployment part. They helped us really quickly and we were able to manage that as well.

There was a lot of downtime with our previous solution. Also, the performance wasn't what it should be. Any update that we did required downtime, and there were quite a lot of updates because there were a lot of bugs. That's where Cloud Volumes ONTAP is very good because they're using the same software as in their devices. There are no special needs or special bugs. They're using a very mature a solution.

The initial one we set up was more complex until we understood the parts. There is a manager that is doing everything for you, but you need to know which IP, what are the prerequisites, etc. It took a while to understand that. But once we did the first one, it became very easy to deploy. My team can now do it in one or two hours, with all the integration that we need.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we get the requirements from the business. Whenever we need a new environment, for example, my team sets it up really fast. We can set all the configuration like any other systems we have: with our monitoring tools, the backup, snapshots; everything the same way. It's easy to manage and replicate things to look the same.

Migration was pretty easy. We could use SnapMirror or we could use NetApp's XCP Migration Tool. That was pretty awesome. It replicated the data faster than any other tool that I've seen. That was a big help.

For deployment, there are two guys from my team who work together. Of course, we have a network guy setting up all the network stuff, and there's the cloud team that is doing that part of the configuration. Once we have all the prerequisites, they can set it up really fast.

For maintenance, it requires less than one person. We have a small group, about eight people for 150 systems, which manages systems worldwide, not just on the cloud but also on-prem. It's part of managed systems and it's being managed with the management tools. We don't see that as something where we need to add more people if we add another system.

We used a third-party, mostly for the cloud itself, for the VPC configuration, the environment-related stuff that my company uses. But we did not use one for NetApp itself.

Since we're a SaaS business, we need to have stable environments for our customers. We can't have downtime every week or so. Stability is very important for us, as well as a guarantee that data is being backed up. If someone, even by mistake, deletes something, there is a way to recover it. Stability, availability, performance, all these kinds of things, mean we're eventually getting more customers and more satisfied customers.

We've been working with NetApp on pricing. They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair.

In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage, the instances, the storage. It's using EBS drives or S3 buckets. So there are all the Amazon fees that you usually have. But overall, we compared the price we have with NetApp and the price for going with DFS and there was a difference, but it was worth the performance, stability, and to have the capabilities NetApp has for doing backups. All these features are covered.

It's NetApp. It's what we know. Our NetApp on-prem has been really good, so we continue to maintain that.

There is a 30-day trial that you can use to get a feel for it. You can work with NetApp in case you have questions in deploying it. They're helpful with that. If you're planning big, to deploy in several sites or a few systems, and you have plans for the future, you can always talk with NetApp and work on getting the right price for you and what makes sense. It depends on your growth and how big your footprint is. They will help you, of course. 

I would rate it between nine and ten out of ten. I don't have any complaints. Maybe it could be cheaper but as for how it functions, it's really doing what it needs to do.

The tool integrates very well the contents that are deployed there. Each aspect is well structured and responsibly what allows it to advance and achieve success. 

This tool allows working with clean and safe servers. We made a complement and therefore we made progress in optimizing each launch platform in a matter of days.

One of the features of this tool is the ease of use, in addition to the control access and the dynamics with which it is structured.

It does not have tutorials in languages such as French, German, Spanish. Adding these options would improve the support service of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

It provides flexibility for our VM environments. We use it to transport data between on-premise systems and the cloud.

AWS is the biggest and most common use case for integration with ONTAP.

We have a number of systems that we run on-premise and have not been moved to AWS for various reasons. ONTAP allows us to manage our portfolio across two domains. 

It manages our environments with a single purview of data management, especially as each variant of ONTAP uses identical metadata and file system formats. Then, data can be universally managed and manipulated throughout the data fabric.

SnapMirror helps mirror metadata and data volumes between endpoints in a data fabric.

The navigation on some of the configuration parameters is a bit cumbersome, making the learning curve on functions somewhat steep.

I would like them to make upgrading simpler. I would like it if they could offer a simpler upgrade guide which you can generate through their website, because their current version is full of dozens of complicated CLI commands. 

It is very stable and versatile, but you need to have an advanced degree to administer or monitor it.

Since it has seamless integration with AWS, scalability is not an issue.

NetApp ONTAP and AWS work really well together. ONTAP was designed to run within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances. Once Cloud Volumes ONTAP is installed, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes are assigned to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP EC2 compute instance to create the equivalent of a Data ONTAP storage array.

Purchasing this solution through the AWS Marketplace was simple, which was why our organization chose to go through it. The AWS consumer-based pricing model makes it easy for developers to use their credit cards to spin up virtual servers immediately.

Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration.

We are making good use of the product. It has a lot of features and is an efficient/stable product. The recovery using Snapshots is a big plus, alongside the flexibility in volume creation for Unix, as well as Windows environments. Its challenges are on the learning curve, as well as its pricing could be improved.

Lo usamos para la seguridad en la navegación y la administración de fuentes de datos alternativas con el fin de mantener activos todos los procesos.

Nos permite sincronizar los métodos de sincronización, basados ​​en la plataforma B2B, para agregarlos correctamente a las listas de correo electrónico del cliente. Nos proporciona calidad y seguridad al mismo tiempo, utilizando estrategias tecnológicas avanzadas. Los resultados son sorprendentes en términos de funcionalidad y defensa contra terceros. 

La característica más valiosa se define por la seguridad en la que se muestran los datos y las acciones recíprocas para establecer los criterios de búsqueda. Su funcionalidad y soporte técnico son adecuados para ayudar a prevenir fallas debido a errores.

Funciona muy bien con datos externos cargados en la nube desde otras plataformas. La integración ha sido exitosa y segura. 

El producto mantiene un enfoque arraigado en los procesos no alternativos. Esto logra dificultad en la conexión de la vulnerabilidad en los procesos. Me gustaría verlos mejorar la perspectiva de inicio y búsqueda en los paneles. Esto permitiría una mejor visualización de los contenidos que se capturan en la herramienta. 

Actualmente, no tenemos ningún problema al enfatizar la herramienta. Confiamos plenamente en la estructura de seguridad que gestiona esta plataforma multifuncional.

Lo usamos en toda la empresa.

El trato con el vendedor era aceptable; El precio es razonable. Los recursos adquiridos con esta herramienta valen el costo.

Es una herramienta que nos permite mantener una perspectiva sobre el estado de la información.

It just gives us the capability to get cloud resources.

The primary use case for ONTAP Cloud is getting data into the cloud.

We are using the product for our future planning in the following:

• Disaster recovery in the cloud
• Backup in the cloud
• Development in the cloud.

• SnapMirror
• SnapVault
• Fast, persistent storage in the cloud

Just more scale out. It can only do two nodes. One SVM, which would be okay as long as I can scale easily.

It needs to be matured with more capabilities.

So far, so good.

It's limited. We're trying to figure out better methods as we need to scale out more.

We have built-in support. It is good. They are an onsite resource.

We needed persistent storage in the cloud for platforms, and there's really not options right now in AWS or Azure.

We also use Avere Gateways. That's pretty much it.

I was the one who evaluated and approved the use of ONTAP Cloud.

It functions and I think in the future it will be a reasonable method of getting NFS and the cloud.

The most important factor that lead us to use OTC versus a native cloud storage solution was having enough fast capabilities and social capabilities. It is extremely important that our storage enable us to render and integrate on-premise systems with cloud services. Cloud integration is also very important for us in our selection of a future on-premise storage system.

We use AWS cloud service.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We are 95% on NetApp on-premise. We wanted compatibility with their on-premise solutions.

We use it for file services, both CIFS and NFS.

The university didn't have a centralized file service before we moved to NetApp. Now, departments can share information across 24,000 students, across 10,000 faculty and staff. They can share data without doing it through email, which was the old way.

It has definitely helped reduce the overall costs of storage. We actually started out with the IBM M-Series seven years back. We switched to NetApp. The same hardware from NetApp is a better price than it was through IBM, and the support is better. So it has reduced our expenses through that path. And since it's so easily supported, we don't need a lot of people to support it, so our support costs are lower.

We've had a lot of centralization going on. We have 13 schools, each of which had its own IT department. All those IT departments are now out of business because their work has been centralized into our department. Part of that was due to the economy changing and the school changing its business models, but that put our NetApp storage heavily into use. So it's hard to distinguish cause and effect.

I can't specify the amount of space saved, but the deduplication and compression in ONTAP are very effective. We're probably getting 35 - 40 percent savings because of dedupe and compression. And because every volume we put out is a quoted Qtree on a volume, we don't have wasted whitespace. I'm billing for 800 terabytes every single month, that's running on one petabyte of rotating disk. So, it's very good at saving me space. I'm running with about 20 percent available disk, above and beyond what I'm billing. So it's pretty good at that.

We're charging four cents per gigabyte per month and, unfortunately, I'm making money at that rate. We're not allowed to make a profit. I've been looking at reducing what we're charging our customers because it is so cost-effective.

The ability for our users to restore data from the Snapshots is very valuable.

I would like to see more cloud integration. NetApp had nothing for cloud integration about three or four years back and then, all of a sudden, they got it going and got it going quickly, catching up with the competition. They've done a very good job. NetApp's website has seen phenomenal changes, so I greatly appreciate that.

It's very stable. We've only had two outages with NetApp in seven years. One was a planned outage to fix a problem - that one was seven minutes long. The other was an unplanned failure, which caused us to be down for about five hours. Overall, we're still within our five- and six-nines of availability, so we're happy.

It's completely scalable, as long as you're willing to buy the hardware. That's why we're looking at cloud for the future, so we can stop buying hardware and maybe use the cloud instead.

It's excellent. The technical support has been very good.

One thing I find very annoying is the new web interface, where it takes you through a little AI assistant, a little robot thing, to try to answer your question first. That thing is infuriating because we've already done the research, we know we need support. Fortunately, there's a link so you can get past that quickly.

What I like about NetApp Support is that, generally, the person who takes your case is the one who works it to the end. There aren't a lot of handoffs or a lot of callbacks.

We had always done block storage and we had a large IBM infrastructure, a large ESX infrastructure, physical servers. We knew that we needed a file service, so we set that up. It was really a first for our university. We switched from IBM to NetApp because we thought we'd get better support from NetApp, and we really have. IBM did a good job, but it was obvious that IBM and NetApp didn't always play well together. IBM was slower to put out patches and fixes compared to NetApp. When IBM was telling us to go to the NetApp site to find support, we figured we'd just switch to NetApp.

The initial setup was quite straightforward because we knew what we were going to do with it and we hired Sirius on for a limited part of the job. We did most of it on our own.

I know we're providing our service very cost-effectively, and it's selling faster than we expected. Money is coming in faster than we expected and, therefore, I need to drop what I'm charging per gigabyte per month so I don't make a profit, because we're not allowed to. So it's obviously successful.

Our shortlist was really only NetApp. We looked at about a dozen other products, Hitachi and everything else, but NetApp really had the best product.

Talk to any peer you can find about what products they looked at. We spoke to a dozen peer institutions - universities, colleges - about what they were doing for file services. We found a lot that were failing and a lot that were successful. The successful ones were mostly on NetApp.

It's a very solid product. I've been using if for about seven years, and it's been mostly bulletproof. They have very good support and a very good quality hard drive.

We use it for mission-critical applications but less than we used to. A lot of our mission-critical stuff is now going out to cloud. That's why I'm here at NetApp Insight 2018, to see how we can tie this into the cloud. Absolutely, all of the university's "crown jewels" used to be on NetApp storage. Now, some have gone out to AWS and we're integrating into AWS more and more. For example, Blackboard is no longer running off out NetApp storage. It's now running out of the cloud. The same is true for all the financial stuff, all the Workday and the like. They've moved off of NetApp and out to the cloud.

In terms of machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, and those kinds of ground-breaking apps for storage, that's more the research support side. We're not doing that. We're doing more of the general file systems support, for general-purpose use.

I don't have any opinion about NVME over Fabrics, I haven't researched it yet.

We bought our equipment through Sirius Computer Solutions, and we're very pleased with that. They care. We've had a couple different senior salespeople with them over the years and they've both been excellent. They're very committed to their customers.

I rate NetApp ONTAP Cloud at eight out of then. I won't give a ten. There's always something that's better out there, but you're going to be paying double or triple for it. For the price, the quality of the hardware, the quality of the support, the features it offers, I'm thrilled with NetApp.

The primary use case for ONTAP is both on-premise and in the cloud. For on-premise, we utilize it for hosting our virtual infrastructure environment through VMware, as well as hosting personal and shared drives. Then, in the cloud, we also host personal and shared drives within AWS and Azure.

An example of how ONTAP is improving our organization is through back-up and restore, as well as offsite replication capability. We utilize SnapMirror very heavily on our sites and then also to replicate it offsite to other sites in our organization to make sure that we have very fast local restores if necessary. As well as offsite replication for disaster recovery capabilities as we have certain events that impact our facilities from that perspective.

We use ONTAP for a number of mission-critical applications. Some that specifically run some of our facilities. I'm in the energy industry and we had a certain scenario earlier this year that one of our systems went down and after a few hours I had to start having the conversation with some of the other supervisors if we couldn't get the system back online. However, NetApp support was able to get the system back online with us without having to do an RMA for another device. Support really helped bail us out in that situation of getting the system back online and not having to shut our facility down.

ONTAP has allowed us to keep cost down in the storage environment based upon the deduplication and how we're utilizing it to replicate from a number of different sites and centralize some of our offsite replication capabilities.

Some of the most valuable features of ONTAP for us are the reliability and availability. We have a lot of built-in functionality within ONTAP to provide back-ups and restore at the volume level. Also, individually if we need to restore specific files within a volume. It's been very helpful us to have that.

Within ONTAP, some of the new features that we've been utilizing recently are the FabricPools which we think is great. One of the new services is the cloud volume service that's available within AWS and Azure that we're really liking.

We use ONTAP in the public cloud for Linux NFS mounts, as well as Windows CIFS volume shares. A lot of times multiple applications or systems will need to share that data and NetApp ONTAP in the cloud really allows for all those applications to utilize shared data in their application communication.

NetApp ONTAP, easily, in our environment, allows for a 3:1 compression ratio on average. That's really helped, whether it be on-premise or in the cloud, to help drive down cost utilization in our systems. There's a number of systems that we have that run pretty high utilization. That data reduction helps us prevent from having to continue to expand those systems.

The key feature, that we'd like to see in that is the ability to sync between regions within the AWS and Azure regions. We could use the cloud sync service, but we'd really like that native functionality within the cloud volume service.

One to three years.

ONTAP has been very stable for us, specifically in the cloud environment. It allows us to have high availability as well as standalone systems if that's what we want within our specific workloads. Also, on-premise has been a very stable environment. We have very few outages and when we do, we work with support to get systems back online in a timely manner.

I would rate ONTAP as an eight. It has a lot of great features, some features that we didn't even know we needed until we talked with our account team and they walked us through some of the reasons for some of those features and then we look at implementing them. The stability of the environment really helps us have that as a key solution for our organization.

In terms of advice I would give a fellow colleague or friend about implementing ONTAP, it would be to just continue to work with your account team to make sure that you're finding the right solution to fit your workload need. We have a very generic workload in terms of virtual machines infrastructure. NetApp really provides a great solution there for us in that environment.

We use it for the data that we are using, etc.

We have a dedicated team of 10 people who manage the storage.

For the daily activities, we needed the faster storage, faster throughpt, etc. That is why we started using SSDs in certain areas which made the application faster.

The support is its most valuable feature. They provide on-call support and responds to issues in a timely fashion It also offers disaster recovery.

AWS has come into the picture, so we want to move into AWS. Therefore, we don't want to do anything more on on-premise anymore. NetApp has to come up with a cloud version.

I would like to have more management tools. They are difficult to work with, so I would like them to be a bit more user-friendly.

More than five years.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the stability a ten.

The scalability is very good. Our environment is about 20TB.

I would rate the support as a nine out of ten. NetApp is native here in Bay Area. We are also in the Bay Area. If anything happens, they will come onsite and fix it.

There are some limitations with the integration and configuration. Though, Cluster Mode is more relatable than 7-Mode.

We purchased the product directly from NetApp.

We evaluated Hitachi and IBM, but still we are using NetApp because of its marketing.

We have not started using the cloud version. We are using the on-premise version with FlexPod.

We use it for file storage.

It is mainly being used with our Windows environment.

• Ease of file storage.
• Ease of use.

The data tiering needs improvement. E.g., moving hard data to faster disks.

It is pretty stable. We do not put too much stress on it (about 45 percent).

The scalability is very good. Our environment is 25TBs.

I have not used NetApp's technical support.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase. 

We went through the AWS Marketplace because we were testing the product and have not evaluated the pricing yet.

I would recommend NetApp because it is a stable product.

The AWS and on-premise versions of the product are about the same. 

It is currently not being used in the AWS environment. It is just being tested. The integration and configuration seemed okay.

The primary use case of NetApp in our company is providing NAS services. This includes both CIFS and NFS.

I have been working with ONTAP for five years. So, I started with NetApp ONTAP 7-Mode, and now, I'm working on NetApp ONTAP C-mode. My familiarity and skill with this product is quite good.

Autodesk has been using this product for more than five years. 

The most valuable feature of Data ONTAP is it's very user-friendly, It gives the administrator or engineer a lot of scope to look into the locks. It has a fair amount of visibility into what is happening. We do not have to depend on the support all the time. 

If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily.

NetApp could certainly improve on the support side. They do not need to improve so much on the product side for now, because we have procured a high end system.

Stability is quite good. However, when it comes to bugs, this is where we are taking a hit. We have ended up in situation where new releases of the ONTAP create an issue in our current infrastructure. We either need to go back or find a solution to fix the bug created by the bug. This is the issue that we face now.

We are not putting a lot of stress on our environment, about a five out of ten.

The scalability of NetApp is good. In NetApp, we have close to three petabytes of data.

We cannot compare the scalability of the on-premise solution with the cloud solution because cloud works in a different way from the on-premise version. 

When it comes to the logical partitions, the scalability is fine. Though, after a set time limit, you need to procure physical boxes to increase your storage capacity.

I would rate the technical support as a five out of ten.

When it comes to support provided by NetApp, they have room for improvement. Every time we go through their support, we end up answering the same routine questions. We don't reach out to support without doing our initial troubleshooting. After, our initial troubleshooting, we find something, then we reach out for support. Once we reach out to support, support takes us back to the same basic level of troubleshooting, which takes away some time in urgent cases. This is where NetApp support should create an improvement plan.

We did not consider anyone else for NAS.

NetApp is a user-friendly solution. I would recommend it to colleagues, because of its user-friendliness for implementation and running your operations.

I use the on-premise version of this product.

Our company is in the transition to the cloud. We are focused on cloud solutions going forward.