NetApp FAS Series Reviews

We used NetApp FAS for both block and file sharing but we have now switched to another product by HP.

The most important features are SnapVault, Snapshots, and SnapMirror.

Netapp closed their local offices in our country leading to no technical and sales support representation.

We've had issues with scalability because the product that we were using went end-of-life many years ago, and we were not able to expand because there were no spares available.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment took just a few days.

We had in-house experience for implementation and deployment.

Before choosing this product originally, we evaluated others and were ultimately impressed by the Snapshots, ShapVault, and SnapRestore features. These were what we really wanted, and at the time, we could not find another product that had similar capabilities.

We had been using NetApp for quite some time, but the equipment was quite old and we wanted a new system. Between NetApp and HP, we chose HP because the NetApp support is not very good. They used to have partners in the country, but they have left.

My advice for anyone who is considering NetApp FAS is that it is a good product and our only real complaint is the lack of technical support. If they live in a country where technical support is available then I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Snap mirror as it gives us a way to snap to our two disaster recovery sites to instantaneously bring up VMs
• Dedupe helps us to save a lot on OS files for VMs

It provides a relatively cost-effective solution, as we have all our virtual infrastructure on NetApp.

They should provide more specific how-to guides. For example, I want to implement Sharepoint, but how do I do that?

Upgrades are always hold-our-breath situations. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve heard horror stories. I’m also dead-ended.

It’s been good. We haven’t had a complete outage (other than when our network the went down). We’ve had some challenges with hardware, but this was done non-disruptively with failover.

We’re still on 7-mode, but it still scales fairly well as the 6240 is a hefty machine.

It's used for repairs. We got outside help with set up and to put processes in place. Once done, it was seamless.

Very straightforward. We’re using 7-mode, so nothing fancy, and I had no difficulties. There were a couple things I didn’t know, but our partner, DataLink, helped. Specifically, I didn’t understand the rate groups and when you expand aggregates, you have to do a full regroup, which wasted a lot of space. I had 16-disk rate groups, added five disks, and it unbalanced things.

Six to eight months ago, I would have said go for it, but now I’ve been getting a lot of doubts about the stability of NetApp itself as a company.

I use NetApp FAS Series for storage consolidation, database management, performance, and data protection. We also use it for unified environments where you run multiple protocols. You can run it through a FAS or an AFF system. Our core applications are running on it, so it's always up.

I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. Although it has the capacity to do multiple, you have to go the route to enable that. Sometimes it isn't convenient. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.

Interfacing with the cloud environment could be better. I want to be able to move some cloud volume and integrate it seamlessly with my home on-premise storage. Sometimes I have issues with port permissions. NetApp probably needs to improve more on the integration side from on-premise to the cloud.

Capacity management could also be better. The difference between AFF and FAS has always been an issue, but now we have the advanced disk partitioning technology on the whole FAS systems that can give us more usable capacity. That has been the bigger issue that I had with NetApp in terms of improvement, and they seem to be working on it now.

I have been working with NetApp for more than ten years.

It's a stable solution. The trouble we have with stability is the trouble we created ourselves. Once the system is installed and configured, it's stable. Except sometimes, we want to check out things, and they create some trouble for us. If it weren't stable, we wouldn't be investing in it for the past ten years.

NetApp FAS Series is a scalable solution. We scale transparently, and we scale out and scale up. If we are scaling up with heavy capacity, it's very simple. Once we loop it, we have it and send it. We don't even have downtime for that. 

Sometimes it's tricky when we need to cluster several controllers and to scale-out many times. But it doesn't really have a major effect on our business. Sometimes we schedule it to let the business know that there might be some downtime for a period. We are finding ways to reduce the impact, and I think it's seamless. If I have to rate it, I'll give it 85%.

My experience with technical support has been very good. In fact, most of the things I'm able to do, I learned how from the technical support team. They don't just work. They work, and then they allow me to learn with them. As they are doing it, they put me through, and I'm able to pick up one or two things every time I get their support.

Although it's in two layers because of the kind of customer I am, we have what we call dedicated service accounts managers. Even before your issues come up, the guy triggers it, and then they are proactive in managing our whole system. 

But sometimes, we will have issues where we have to raise support cases, and we have a good contractor there. We have four hours of premium support. So far, we always get a response within four hours, and sometimes we have our resolution.

The initial setup was a complex process, but it's better now.

We use a local vendor and integrator most of the time to implement this solution. Initially, the system always comes with about three years of support. I have very good vendors around, and it's great all around. They also come around to support, but first level support, I do it by myself. When it gets complex, I invite the integrator and sometimes the OEM.

It's not cheap, but at the same time, it's also inexpensive. It's somewhere in between.

I would recommend this solution to new users because it's easy to implement. It's easy to install, it's easy to scale, and there is what we call investment protection. If there's a new controller that comes up, your existing controller can integrate with it. You don't have to trade in what you have. It always has forward compatibility and backward compatibility. I will always recommend NetApp FAS Series.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give NetApp FAS Series a nine.

Most of my customers utilize this solution in the banking sector. They use it for their banking applications. They use it as their main storage.

One of the features that are so nice and which the bank loves so much about the NetApp FAS Series is its cloning feature. You can clone a database of any size, and when you clone it, the clone itself at the time it is created only occupies a very, very small footprint on the storage. It is when you sever the clone from the main database that you'll have a larger footprint.

For example: You have a database of one terabyte, then you clone that, and it will occupy just a few gigabytes. This means you now have a clone which you can use for a number of things: reporting, backup, or anything you like. You can even use it to test a new product you are trying to bring into the market. However, the moment you sever the clone from the main database, then it becomes WORM-free terabytes on its own, so that's one advantage.

The other advantage is that when you want to do a backup no matter the size of the database, you can do a snapshot. The snapshot takes up a very tiny space on the disc. From that snapshot, you can then take your data and migrate it to a backup storage. The backup storage could be via disc storage. It could be cheap and you can migrate it without any performance implications on the production systems, and that's very, very good.

You can also do replication. You can do one-to-one replication when you have a multi storage and replicate it to under storage, which is located long distance from where you are running your production system. You can do one too many replications and that is okay. You can replicate the data, not just to another data storage, but to multiple data storages, so there's flexibility.

This solution also has deduplication capabilities, so you can compress the data and deduplicate it so that the space to occupy, or the footprint becomes smaller. 

There is a lot of data management tools today, and in the past you have to buy your data management tools separately. At present, when you buy NetApp storage, all the software tools are made available to you as a bundle, so that's another thing I like about the NetApp FAS Series.

The only improvement to this solution that I can propose is for NetApp to make the price more attractive. If the price is more attractive, then it will have a bigger market share. I can't think of any other area for improvement because the price is the only one that really comes to mind.

I've been dealing with the NetApp FAS Series since 2003.

This solution is very, very, very, very stable. Notice how I mentioned "very" a few times. You can rely on this solution because of its stability.

The NetApp FAS Series is scalable.

Technical support from NetApp is excellent.

In general, the setup for this solution is straightforward.

If the customer is migrating from a non NetApp storage to a NetApp storage, what we have to do is to map all the data from the non NetApp storage to the NetApp storage, after we have done the initial setup and configuration. Once we've completed that, from there, the customer can use the NetApp FAS Series straight away. We've done quite a lot of that.

An example is the case of Novacom: a telecommunications company. They were using EMC at that time, so we migrated that data from EMC to another platform, and it went very well. Now, if you're migrating from a NetApp storage to another NetApp storage, e.g. your current NetApp solution is already obsolete, then you want to do a technical refresh and you bought the latest version of the solution, so migration from NetApp to NetApp is the easiest. It will be the easiest data migration because all the tools are there.

Pricing for this solution is not very high, but could still be improved and made more attractive.

I've been a NetApp reseller for more than 10 years. I've supplied NetApp storage solutions to quite a number of customers in Nigeria, particularly in Lagos, so I have familiarity with the NetApp products, but that doesn't mean that I've sold all the various types. I've not sold all the various types, but I've sold quite a lot of backup storages, even when they were still producing virtual tape libraries.

My customers have been using NetApp for more than 10 years. In Nigeria, the most popular NetApp product is the FAS series. My customers always start with FAS. I've just placed an order for a NetApp Storage Acceleration Appliance (SA300) for Unity Bank of Nigeria. The NetApp FAS products: these ones are the most popular products in Nigeria, but there also other variants here.

Scalability and reliability are what my customers like about the NetApp FAS Series.

How long the full deployment for this solution takes depends on the complexity of the environment. It also depends on data volume. In some cases, you can get it done within two days, and in some cases you can get it done within one week to two weeks maximum. It could take up to two weeks when migrating from a non NetApp storage to NetApp storage. Otherwise, deployment can go very, very fast.

My customers love NetApp a lot.

The number of users of this solution, particularly those in the commercial banks, depends on the size of the customer base of those banks. The customers of the commercial banks are the ones interfacing with the commercial banking application, and there are usually millions of customers, but all of them cannot be on the application at the same time.

There are also internal users of NetApp within the bank itself: the bank staff who are making use of it for their normal day to day work, e.g. when closing at the end of the day, at the end of the month, or at the end of the year, etc. When you take into consideration the customers of the banks, the number of users of this solution would be millions.

I'm giving the NetApp FAS Series a rating of nine out of ten.

Creating a DR site using SnapMirror technology from NetApp.

• NetApp improved our organization because their features are more friendly and create environment to tests, like dev. The FlexClone technology is easy to use.
• The flexibility to create scheduling backups on the VMware platform is very useful when you need it. We can save space using VSC.
• The migration of the volume on the cluster is very useful and easy to use.
• It is very useful to verify performance problems on the any environment and move volumes to another aggregate without downtime to the application.
• Compression of the backup Oracle by RMAN on NFS saves space 5:1, for example.

• Flexibility.
• Saves space with deduplication.
• All protocols on the same box. This means that you don't need to have a appliance to export. For example, an NFS volume on CIFs volume.
• Easy integration to some cloud environments, like Amazon AWS.
• Deduplication, now on cluster mode, runs on aggregate and no more on volume only. This means that you must put all their VMware environments on the same aggregate. If you have volume from prod, dev, and homolog that shares the same virtual machine, you will have a big gain on space saving.

NetApp for all these years has been improving their storage.

The only area that could be improved is to lower prices for their All Flash FAS.

You must have "flash cash" if you used the box to Oracle, any database environment, or any application that requires a lot of reads all time.

We have used some solutions like Hitachi, Dell, and EMC, but NetApp has more flexibility and we decided to stay with NetApp.

• My first case was migrate all solutions from Hitachi Storage to NetApp FAS on SAN with brocade.
• Migrated all VMware environment to NetApp storage.
• Migrated all backup solutions that were running on Veritas Backup to VSC on NetApp.
• Migrated our whole Oracle database running on HDS storage to NetApp storage.

Setup is very easy, but you need a partner to execute your first configuration, after that the administration is easy.

The first setup must be done by any partner or a NetApp field engineer.

The price it not low, but comparing features to other vendors, the price can be balanced.

The product is flexible. 

Everythink is ok. 

I have been working with the product for four to five years. 

The product is stable. 

The solution is scalable. It is recommended for medium companies. 

The product's setup is easy and takes one working day to complete. One person is enough to implement the solution. 

The product's pricing is reasonable. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The tool is the best one in the market in terms of pricing and features. 

We use the solution for data storage. We are customers of NetApp and I'm the assistant director of our company. 

One of the valuable features of the solution is data consolidation and visualization - and snapshots of course. The solution is easy to manage. 

We'd like to move to a solution that does more beyond just data, like starting to get more to servers and network specialization and data visualization and things like that. Server network and management specialization or consolidation. And also, trying to see a bit more single plane of glass in terms of managing, so that it gives you more insight in terms of what's happening. 

Ideally the solution should have one console, the ability to use a single plane of glass across the enterprise. Because we have one VRR, one size duplication so just to have one console where you can manage everything else in harmony would be a good additional feature. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

This is a stable solution. 

The solution is scalable at the data level because it uses aggregates so you can easily increase data. But of course it's dependent on your provision for growth reports. I don't know how many use the solution but our company has around 600-700 employees and we have two people dealing with maintenance on the product. It doesn't require more than that. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. If you're good, you can get it up and running within a week. 

I think the pricing of this solution could be lower because really it's just storage consolidation these days. I think this technology has matured so much. It's time to make it slightly more competitive, it's on the high side for now.

Obviously anyone looking at this solution must have primarily a data storage use case. If they have a strong case for data storage, it's a good solution. From there it's just a matter of managing work flows between SAN and NAS which requires planning. You can then manage your capacities very well if you know your data requirements. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

NAS for the enterprise including unstructured data, EPIC Systems + the other 3,520 applications. I love those innovative healthcare data solutions that let me securely manage vast amounts of patient data (32.9 PB), use and share it enterprise-wide, and gain efficiency of scale through cloud solutions and virtualization.

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Powerful
Easy to use
High availability

DFM

OCI

Data fabric

FPolicy

Cluster-mode

Hybrid cloud solution

I have found it to be expensive.
It is good as a NAS, but not a good option for SAN.We use it for storing medical images.

Some

Not yet

Customer Service:

Solid

Technical Support:

Good

Pure Storage for SAN

OK

Vendor team

18 months

Research fully

EMC

Think carefully before you jump into NetApp. There are so many competing products and you should do a proof of concept before you buy it. I'm a bit worried since NetApp is competing against the big boys like IBM and EMC. So what happens if NetApps get acquired by one of the big boys? Will they be around in another 3-5 years?