NetApp FAS Series Reviews

It’s a decently mature product that has a lot of documentation and standards and is something to be relied on.

Predictable behavior during failure. In terms of performance, if you have two machines, you know they’re going to perform the same.

It needs better built-in monitoring. We can’t afford Insight, and v6.2 seems like it's a purposefully inferior product to make people buy Insight, which is way too expensive.

It's not on Cisco’s stability level, but it’s a 96/100.

It’s scalable, but it could be easier. Just adding shelves might require additional cards and cabling, which can be difficult.

I’m happy with the support, as they’ve been able to solve whatever I throw at them.

It’s complex as there’s a lot of variables involved. Not for the weak-hearted, if you haven’t done it before.

It loses points because of failures.

• Uptime
• Performance
• High Availability
• Disaster Recovery
• NetApp as a company is doing well

• We can failover when needed.
• In my organization, a law firm, brand recognition is important, and NetApp provides that.
• It gives us continuous uptime.

Sometimes there are bugs with firmware upgrades.

Not with deployment, but, again, there are sometimes bugs when we perform upgrades.

It just works, and when some drives go into failure status, it’s just a prediction of drive failure, letting us know when to get the drives replaced.

It scales pretty well, and the limit is how much you want to spend on blades, shelves, controllers, etc.

It's pretty good, they're very knowledgable. With other vendors who outsource support, there's difficulty getting knowledgable first-tier support, but with NetApp, that’s different.

We had help in the installation, which made it straightforward. It was also complex because lots of planning was involved.

It loses points in upgrades from one version to another is not as smooth as it should be. Also, understand your requirements and see how it fits in.

We have clusters, and can do non-distruptive upgrades with cDOT and can spin up VMs as needed. We have the flexibility to give people NAS storage.

With NAS storage in general, we can give people large amounts of storage for projects, and then remove it. For example, for SLS, they can spin up large amounts of storage to hold the output of modeling data, and when that’s done, they can delete it and move on. In that case, they don’t need the throughput.

We have thousands and thousands of file shares and we’re able to offer up to one terabyte of storage, and this gives us high compression and dedupe.

For cDOT in general, improvements could be made to the little things, such as the translation between 7-mode and cDOT. If there’s some kind of backward compatibility or translation of certain functions from one to the other, that would be an improvement.

It's very stable.

With cDOT, it's very good. It scales horizontally well, but not so well with 7-mode.

It’s top-notch support, very responsive and highly knowledgeable, very attentive to us as we have a monthly meeting with our TAM.

It's straightforward in 7-mode, but using cDOT, it's terrible.

• High Availability
• Reliability

• Reliability
• Performance level
• Great history with it, and over the last two and a half years, it's been etter than others

Depending on the use case, it needs a service catalogue you can walk through without having to use SE.

It's been great, and there's been no issues.

With cDOT, it's very easy to scale out, and that's the reason we went with it in the first place.

It's been great, and any issues have been taken care of right away.

It was very straightforward and easy.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FAS. Also, go with vendor that buys reference architecture and follows the methodology.

Today we use it for replication of our transaction data, and for storing data, for which we use the snap mirror feature. Primary and disaster recovery storage centers are connected. Snap mirror backup software does block level copy from primary site to the disaster recovery.

We’re going onto the cDot platform, which is already an improvement. The controllers are faster so we have more processing efficiency.

We’ve been using it for the last six years.

Stability has been very good. As far as we’re concerned, we update our systems (firmware, OS) consistently, so we don’t face any problems in that regard.

We've had no problems scaling. Our business has grown two and half times in size over six years, and we’ve added more disks and shelves, as well as upgrading controllers. We’ve done it without any down time.

Quite good. Recently we deployed micro-clusters with cDot, the first bank in India to do it.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it, although we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with a combination of FAS and vSphere.

Configure it properly. Today we have HA with any data loss because we did it nicely, and took our time for the beginning. We got terrific support.

Being able to run any flavor of files and block storage. It's easier to manage, and we’re looking to phase out legacy systems and to go with FAS.

It's easy to manage regardless of how you’re utilizing platform. It’s a Swiss army knife of capabilities. Flexible platform and software features are added benefits (thin provisioning, compressioning, dedupe), which help with capacity utilization. Still get a lot of return even if going with best-practices application.

Make sure there’s current centralized virtual desktops. I get caught in the upgrade matrix quite a bit, which is an indication that it hasn’t been tested. Need more currency in IMT.

It's solid, with occasional issues that surface, but are quickly resolved. No one’s software is perfect.

It’s good, but you have to do a lot of homework to scale horizontally and vertically. You need to have sales and engineering to expend effort to do that homework.

We've frequently used it, and the quality will depend on which level of support you purchased. Premium support, I have no complaints as we get the right person who’s knoweldgable. Higher level guys take great deal of personal ownership over issues. I used their support as benchmark for our organization.

It's easy. The more planning you do, the easier it gets.

The monitoring is key, and you must keep track of what’s going on. Be sure to use auto-support and have strong monitoring scenario in place.

Management, for a person who’s not a storage administrator In a couple of weeks, you can get the basics of createing virtual storage, and carving out chairs and LUNS.

Doing more with less. I can do multiple protocols, storage efficiency, data protection tool, everything is in one solution/ecosystems. There aren't many vendors who can provide that without adding third party software and apps.

Our major issue with FAS was not having one pane of glass with all products attached to it. Other major issue is the free performance monitor doesn’t provide enough information. They want you to buy Insight, which is very expensive.

It's rock solid.

I love cluster ONTAP. Being able to scale out and being able to increase performance by adding more heads to a cluster and being able to do hybrid with regular storage on same platform is huge. You can move out easily too, they provide you the tools to do that, adding a lot of value.

Great, I cannot complain. They’re there with you until problem resolved.

It's straightforward setup. Depending on how you deploy, full SAN is complex, with NAS not so complex. You have to follow best practices when building out infrastructure. So, it’s not so different than deploying it with other vendors.

With storage, what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Call your NetApp rep and tell him you want to test the solution. Get it on the floor and beat the hell out of it. Do a very thorough Proof of Concept.

• Snapshot
• Snapmirror
• FlexClone

• Huge time savings
• Large storage space savings
• In the end—time and money

They should make it faster and cheaper, but it does what we need it to do.

Good overall. We’ve hit some bugs in the ONTAP code that’s caused it to crash. We’re just coming off of seven-mode, and I'm looking forward to the capabilities of CDOT.

It's highly scalable, especially with CDOT. We can scale out quickly.

It's very good, generally first tier are wiling to help us or get us to right person pretty quickly.

It was complicated. We were coming off an IBM system five years ago. We got help for everything from cabling, terminology, and we had to relearn how we reconfigured storage. We got help from both NetApp and our VAR.

Just do it. Chances are the functionality that comes with the ONTAP software will be better than other products at a similar price.