NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Reviews

We've invented a brand new internet protocol for privacy at our company, so it's a privacy-preserving internet protocol. We do end-to-end encryption but if your phone's offline, then we need someone to install that encrypted stuff that you might be sharing with somebody else. We have a technology called Docker Swarm running across multiple data centers. Files need to be put somewhere that can be accessible across multiple Google data centers. So we actually ran our system, something called GlusterFS for a while and hit a whole bunch of problems. That meant that we had to have somebody, me because we're a startup, looking after it all the time and that just became pretty boring. That's a boring job. 

I was looking for a vendor to come up with technology that I didn't have to look at every single day and that's where we came across NetApp. I set it up, deployed it, and haven't had to touch it. Our use case is really having a network file system across multiple data centers that is highly resilient. 

NetApp has helped our customers to quickly move large numbers of files to the cloud. The offering that we have allows people to share encrypted data between themselves, like large files. If you have a file on your phone and a picture and you want to share it with somebody else, you can use our applications to move that data across so only the person that you're sending it to will be able to open it and look at it. We allow people to do that and NetApp is underlying that. The NetApp machine only ever sees encrypted data because it's end-to-end encrypted, but it's enabling people to have to send files and enable them to use their mobile devices for that. Nobody will be able to snoop them while they're up there.

Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better.

The service allows us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time. That was one of the things that I was firstly concerned with was if we need more storage, how easy is it? With the NetApp solution, it's as easy as logging into a browser and saying, "I want more storage." It's that easy and completely pain-free.

Our compute and storage costs went up frankly, but I was okay with that because I got more time back. So it's fine. We have a data store that's shared across all of our compute nodes, it's pretty reasonable economy-wise. It's a little bit more expensive, but I think that the value is there. We don't have to pay that cost in having humans watching things, so it's a fairly reasonable trade. The service has increased our cloud infrastructure spend by a reasonable amount, but I'm perfectly comfortable with it.

NetApp delivers High Availability. It's critical to our work. That was the main driver for using NetApp. We have a highly resilient service and if you have a highly resilient service, you are only as resilient as the least resilient part of your infrastructure. That's what we were having trouble with our file system before. It was becoming troublesome, so we needed to find something that was much more highly resilient so that's why we moved to NetApp.

The complexity of moving large numbers of files to the cloud depends on what you're trying to do. But for us, it was really simple. I imagine for large enterprise customers it is probably pretty tricky. They're probably on all different technologies inside a large corporation and they may or may not have very large pipes going to them. So if you're in a data center to the cloud then it's going to be easy, but if you have hundreds of branches like if you're a bank and have lots of branch banks, they might have very small pipes out to the internet. It might take forever. In our use case everything's brand new files, so it was pretty trivial. We didn't migrate to the cloud, we were already on the cloud, so it was a nonissue for us.

NetApp enables us to share data across VMs. It actually reduced the amount of data storage we need. We were having to have storage attached to each VM. And now we can aggregate that storage across multiple VMs, so that actually gave us a net reduction, which was a good thing.

We switched from using block storage to file storage to share data between our VMs. It made it easier, frankly but I worry about the scalability in the future. For the moment it made life easier. We were using block and then we moved back to file with NetApp.

I would like for the sales team to get in contact more often and let me know what I should be doing next, what we should be doing about new features. So it would be nice if I heard a little bit more from him. From a technology perspective, I have no complaints.

I have been using this solution for just over a year. 

So far I've had no stability problems. It's been rock solid.

We're tiny so I don't think we're going to hit any scalability problems.

Our clients don't even know that they're using NetApp. We have about 2,500 people using the platform that we provide. They wouldn't know that they're using NetApp, but all of them are.

We do not require any staff for deployment and maintenance.

We've certainly got plans to increase usage as we get more and more clients and we'll have more and more need for more and more storage. As we scale up, the NetApp implementation will get bigger and bigger.

I would rate NetApp support a ten out of ten. They're spectacularly good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, although I did get a hold of the technical team at NetApp just to make sure I was doing it right. They were extremely responsive, surprisingly good, and helped me through it. No complaints.

It's essentially an extension of the Google GCP UI. Once I activated the application in Google then it was just click and point to the web browser. As long as you knew roughly what it was supposed to be doing, it was pretty easy and simple to set up. What wasn't clear to me at the time was whether I'd set it up properly or not. I'd set it up and it was working but had I done it right was my big question. That's when I reached out just to have somebody check over what I had done and make sure that it was set up right. It turned out it was set up right but it was nice to have somebody look over. Sometimes you can get things working, but you might have made some errors that might bite you in the future. I just wanted to have somebody take a second look at it. It was pretty easy.

The implementation took around a week. My strategy was to get it done as soon as possible.

I raised a ticket on the NetApp website and was expecting nobody to get back to me, but I had an engineer on the call within an hour or two. It was pretty impressive. They actually knew what they're doing, which is highly unusual. It was great.

The ROI is my time. I was having to spend time managing it before and now I don't, so the ROI is pretty easy for me. I got time back, so that was a good thing. It wasn't really so much spend as it was time in our case.

We pay for the minimum we need, and what was good about this was as we need more, we just pay some more. That matched quite nicely with what we're doing as a startup, trying to start small. And as we scale, we will have to pay more money if we need more storage.

We pay monthly.

I don't get to see the whole thing anymore. It's put into a Google bill, a GCP bill, so it's sort of mixed in there. We actually work with a Google reseller who gets us better pricing. Our total for all of our infrastructure every month is $3,500. NetApp is a part of that $3,500, I couldn't tell you how much it is. It's a part of that. We're pretty small, we're very economical with our infrastructure.

In terms of additional costs, we have to pay for some virtual machines that run the infrastructure, which is absolutely fine. I have no issue with that. There are a few sides that you have to pay for, but that's okay.

We looked at running our own NFS server and we looked at something called GlusterFS. We decided on using GlusterFS and it worked fine for our test environment and continued to do very well for the test. But we knew it wasn't production-ready so as we moved to production, we looked for the best we could find and that was NetApp.

I never have to deal with anything. More importantly for me, is that I don't have to buy an admin. We're a small startup and definitely, our most expensive resource is people. I was looking for something that I could just set up and not have to pay for an expert. Let the guys at NetApp worry about all that jiggery-pokery and I just say, "Yes, this is what I want. I want a file system that's shareable across six data centers." So that's what we needed, I just didn't want to pay for somebody to be looking after it. It seemed like a pretty good solution. We gave it a go, had a couple of problems setting everything up, and they helped us out. I don't think anybody's touched it ever since, it's been off and running without any problems.

My advice to anybody considering this solution is to try it. Try it and experiment with it before you put it into production, just to make sure that it scales to the needs you have. In our case, we don't have very difficult needs, so it was pretty easy for us to test that.

You can implement things on the cloud with GCP as a service and have a well-known brand behind it and have a good experience. I was sort of surprised that Google actually didn't provide their own solution, but after using NetApp now I see why. They just didn't have the technology so their partnership with Google was perfect in that case. It worked out pretty well for us.

I would rate NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud a ten out of ten. I've had zero problems, so I can't complain about anything. My only issue is not with the technology, but the salespeople getting in contact with me to make sure I'm up to date. We're a very small fish, so I understand why we get ignored. But we're obviously big fans, so that's good.

We do electronic health records, electronic billing, and telemedicine, using artificial intelligence.

We're quite pleased with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and we're using it for HIPAA compliance, as well as in Luxembourg, where we have another one of our business units, for GDPR. It's meeting both of those requirements. Google is opening up a new data center in Luxembourg this month, so we've been coordinating with NetApp on that.

The tools are very nice and we've been working with them on upscale and downscale of storage. We've been working with them on the architecture for doing backups and how we do that for the U.S. and in Europe, and they then work with Google.

On the administrative side, the tools are very good for our backend guys. Their console makes it easy to look at our backup and storage availability, and the tools make it easy to manipulate the volumes on the storage and move things around.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud has multiple performance tiers that allow you to closely align it with your workload performance requirements. From the console you can move different volumes around, based on the CPU setup that you want to use. With backups, you need less compute to move the data around, so we use their tools very effectively to tune the environment for storage.

We are able to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly, as our needs grow and shrink. We're using their tools and their dashboard, which allow us to view our peak loads and to tune the system as we go. That probably reduces our storage costs by 25 percent in the way we are currently using it. It has also lowered our costs by cutting about 10 percent of our time. We need fewer manpower resources to run it. We've got two people, whereas in some cases, in other environments, it takes four to five people.

We also see Windows infrastructure savings. A Windows Server is a little over $1,000 a month. Instead of needing two, we only need one, so the service has helped in regards to our compute costs.

The service enables us to share data across VMs. Those VMs are based on the environments that we have, including dev, test, and production. We move volumes around pretty rapidly when we need to do load testing and scale testing. When you're doing scale loads, you're running routines that will scale up and you look for the failure points, where the VM will crash. Those test loads help us to understand scale.

Confidential Computing is really the key for us because of the security requirements for HIPAA compliance. With HIPAA compliance, there are policies and rules in place on the ability to look at a patient's data. There are rules around security, encryption, and decryption on any part of that data. When you put in the data, it is encrypted when it goes to storage, and when you pull the data back, it has to be decrypted. And you have to have two-phase authentication built into that. The Confidential Computing adds another layer of security to the storage infrastructure, which is pretty slick stuff.

The NetApp service's high availability is very important when it comes to upscale and downscale. Our system is a digital system so it requires immediate response for telemedicine. When your patients are going through a telemedicine session, you need the video to work properly and respond in a timely manner, and the doctors are actually taking notes regarding that specific patient session.

In terms of its storage snapshot efficiencies, the service is highly efficient. We are only doing things in small batches right now because we have not converted all of the data, but we have tested them in the Google Cloud and they work efficiently.

It would help if they increased the area in which they employ artificial intelligence, by starting to do assessments on the environments, to project those. They're not using any AI tools, currently, on the administrative side.

We've been using it for about three months now. We're getting ready to scale up our solution, which is a patient management platform, so we're looking at very large doctor groups to use our platform. We do all of the diagnosis, billing, telemedicine, and we use Google AI in it as well. It's a new-generation digital platform for healthcare providers. We're replacing some of the older players in the field that aren't very efficient in the new digital age. We're a new startup. In the last nine months we've been building the system out to take it to market.

We'll be launching in the next two weeks and we have proposals in to Luxembourg to provide it to the whole country, as they are putting all of their citizens under one storage area. We're looking to be the front end for that repository. We have proposals in Dubai and several large ACOs in the U.S., as well as for some large healthcare networks that have up to 8,000 doctors.

It's industrial-strength technology. I wouldn't use it if it wasn't.

The technical support is very good. They're very responsive. I worked with the partner group and we have used the support when we have questions or issues. And if I need to escalate, I call our partners.

Overall, they have very impressive technologies. I worked with NetApp in the past, a few years ago at a major entertainment company where they were the core storage provider, worldwide. That's the reason that I reached out to them to partner with us. They've got very solid storage technologies and different grades of complexity.

The Confidential Computing is key for us. Our criteria also include administrative tools and the ability to upscale and downscale these environments rapidly. Those are our key criteria and they're meeting all of those.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They were very supportive. They were with us, walking us through the details so our guys could get up to speed faster. We were able to assimilate the tool sets for administration pretty quickly.

The deployment took about three days because we had to set up all three environments from scratch, and a big part of that was Google. That was really the minimum amount of time it could take because this is an enterprise-level application, so we had to configure it properly to run properly.

For our implementation, with Google and NetApp we actually created a whole hierarchical structure for our computing environment. We laid out the number of CPUs, the storage that was going to be required, and what region of the country we were going to put the center in. All of that is about where your business is and where you are going to get the most transaction support, for speed. Our headquarters is in New Jersey and we set this up in Virginia. That was the best place for us, and it's also a hub for the internet.

NetApp helped us with the setup and our experience with them was very good. They were good guys who know their stuff. They did a lot of knowledge transfer and helped our guys get everything set up. That's a good reason why we chose them. They're very professional. We have weekly calls with them on how we're doing and on any needs we may have. Especially with a startup, you need to make sure that you're doing everything properly so you don't have any failures.

We see it reducing our cloud storage spend. Being a new startup, I can't really say by how much at this point, because we have not loaded the whole environment in it. As we move into more regions and into Europe, that's when we'll know more about that. We don't have enough time on the system to say more, at the moment.

You have to understand what you're going to do with your app. From there, they're very good about working with you to get you set up and make sure you've got adequate storage. Their account people are very good about making sure there's a plan in place and where you're going to be in three months, six months, and 12 months. They work with you on laying out your growth pattern and what markets you want to be in. It's a very professional organization.

You need to plan out your architecture before you jump into any of these cloud environments. The good thing about NetApp is that they run on all three platforms, Azure, AWS, and Google. You need to have some idea of the architecture that you're putting in place, so you don't have to re-tool the thing later.

We're using NetApp's admin tools, but not all of them yet because we're new to Google. And their team has been very proactive in working with us and helping us configure our environment.

The service helped us to quickly move large numbers of files to the cloud. We have 15,000 patients' data that is being converted into this new system and we are doing data migration of about 100 gigabytes of storage. It's complex because we have to use HL7 protocols for that. That is an EDI language used for healthcare. That language stands by itself and there are different protocols to use when doing the migration and the mapping, and then the conversion of the HL7 transactions.

We use it for shared volumes in some environments as well as for high availability.

We use the Snapshot systems to store the backups for security. 

The service allows us to fine tune storage and capacity on the fly, as our needs grow and shrink over time. 

The service enables us to share data across VMs. It is mandatory to share these volumes with multiple VMs, so we use it for shared volumes.

• High availability - there is no other way to achieve this. 
• Shared volumes, because there aren't any options from Google Cloud to have shared volumes.

High availability is very important to us because we have a production environment. High availability is the highest priority for us to continue keeping our systems running.

We use a Snapshot every day. It is well-implemented and very easy to use.

The user interface has room for improvement. We would like this service to be more integrated with Google Cloud. In Azure is very easy to manage and use. It was easy to create volumes and add capacity pools in Azure, but in Google Cloud, we can only create separate volumes. We need more management or configuration options in the user interface.

We would like them to improve the deployment of the service in other regions of Europe.

For six months.

It is very stable. In six months, we haven't had any issues with the service.

The SLAs are a bit slow at 99.9 percent which is the SLA of the worst resource in place, that is networking at Google's. 

We haven't had any issues with the scalability. It is very easy to scale up.

This is for application storage used by 90,000 users.

We have had some consulting meetings, and they were very helpful with us. They shared everything.

We did use another solution (GlusterFS), this is a unmanaged solution and had no Regional  HA.

The initial setup was very easy. 

The interface provides you the comments that you need to deploy (including gcloud commands). Then, you create the network layer and volumes, which is very easy. This takes 20 minutes.

I deployed the service myself. We always had NetApp team support if required.

NetApp is cost-efficient. We don't have to manage it. It is managed by Google.

This service has lowered our cloud infrastructure spending by about 300 euros per month.

The pricing is fine. It is a good service, though maybe a little bit overpriced. However, I am comfortable with the price. The problem is the minimum storage space is one terabyte, and we don't need so much for each volume, but we still pay. 

We don't need so much space, and there is no option to pay as we go or use just what we need. Also, the only way to increase performance is by increasing the level of the service what sound a bit tricky.

There are no competitors to this service for now.

It is a good service for high availability that is very easy to configure. It is also very easy to put into our system running with NetApp.

Currently, it is being used approximately 10 times a month. We have plans to include this service in other systems.

Keep in mind that the network feeds require a special configuration.

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