NetApp FAS Series Reviews

You can use different protocols at the same time. Monitoring is also very easy in NetApp FAS Series. There is a free tool for monitoring. 

Its licensing cost can be improved.

It is very stable. We have a lot of customers in Turkey, and we haven't got any major issues or complaints from our customers.

It is easily scalable. You can easily scale up and use old and new products together. NetApp products are very scalable.

Their technical support is very good. They work very tightly with us.

The initial setup is very easy. It can be set up in five to ten minutes. We have a lot of technical knowledge of this product.

It is expensive.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

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. 

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.

We have deployed a four-node cluster to host multiple services like NFS, CIFS, FCP, and iSCSI with SnapMirror enabled across the cluster.

NetApp FAS has provided an HA environment that has improved the up time of our entire infrastructure.

The most valuable feature for us is the combining of HA and SnapMirror.

I would like to see an improvement in the licensing on Data Mirroring (SnapMirror) features.

Currently, the newest release is not HCI friendly.

More than five years.

In my nineteen years of being a storage administrator, I have never seen NetApp storage cause significant downtime that was connected to hardware failure.

One of the big features of NetApp FAS is the clustering of storage, which allows you to scale up the whole cluster using different models. This is broad and each HA is expandable.

Their team is one of the best support services that I have encountered.

Previously we used the IBM N Series storage system. We switched because of its limited features.

The initial hardware setup is pretty straightforward because once you set up one node in the cluster, the whole system can be joined seamlessly. The setup for the NetApp hardware is a very short command menu that is user-friendly.

Our policy for the initial setup is to get service with the vendor. This provides a warranty just in case we encounter issues. NetApp support is highly knowledgeable about their product and they are trained to do the initial setup perfectly as planned.

Licensing is still proprietary which is one of the advantage of some Netapp devices to some of the storage systems.

We evaluated the HP and Dell storage solutions before choosing this product.

We use this solution as general unified SAN storage for different workloads.

This solution provides us with easy management and great vendor support.

The most valuable feature is that this acts as unified storage, both SAN and NAS, for all types of workloads.

Dedicated storage efficiency accelerators could improve the overall performance of the system.

Used SnapMirror for replication and DR. It's a good case for a storage-based DR. Good results on RPO and RTO.

• Efficient usage
• Good pricing
• Good solution architects and deployment guys are available
• Licensing is easy.

• Lesser resources needed for snapshot and recovery
• Easy to manage
• Recovery process is easy
• Integration with other tools is available.

• Integration with most of the third-party BR tools
• A clear roadmap for next releases should be available.

We use it for storage and it has performed fine, but now we need to upgrade.

We like its resilience. It's reliable storage.

I would like to see less latency and higher IOPS.

Stability is very good.

I'm satisfied with the scalability.

We did our research and, at the time, NetApp was what we chose. Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is reliability. The price is, obviously, always an issue but reliability and the quality of the product are most important.

The initial setup was very, very straightforward.

If you need reliability, definitely go for NetApp.

I rate it at seven out of 10 because it has been very reliable but not very good when it comes to IOPS and latency.

The primary use case is for regular databases and file systems. So far it has been good. The performance is solid, it's robust, availability is solid.

We're able to keep data for a longer time because we are able to manage it well using the features that NetApp provides. It has also helped us to quickly deploy our test environment and finish all of our testing before we deploy on the customer side or the customer systems. It has really helped in our operations and our productivity.

One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. You can experience two disk failures and still be up. Another feature is the deduplication. It saves a lot of space. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage.

I want to see the system automatically tier; we call it auto-tiering. When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives.

The stability is solid. You can go over 3,000 days without a reboot or any downtime. It's so stable.

The scalability is also good. You can scale on the fly, just connect the cables. If you're adding a controller or you're adding big shelves, it's easy to move. It's excellent.

I'll give technical support a "good" rating because sometimes it's slow in getting people to respond, other times it's okay.

When I arrived at the company they were using NetApp, and we are still using NetApp.

When selecting a vendor, I first look at how robust the solution is that they're proposing, and how available they are to answer calls if there are any issues. This is very critical. The robustness of the solution and the availability of the vendor to attend to queries are important components of my selection criteria. After-sales support is also very key.

The initial configuration is very straightforward. You just cable up your system, power up, connect your power cables, connect to the console, boot up the system, do your system configuration, IP configuration, and all the other configurations, and the system is up and good to run.

If I were to advise someone researching NetApp FAS Storage or a similar solution, I would want to understand what they really want. I would advise them to go with NetApp because it's unified storage. It supports both NAS and SAN environments, so whether you're doing block storage or you're doing file storage, it is a good solution. Also, the operating system that it runs is called Data ONTAP, and is cloud-ready, so in the future the file storage that you have can be deployed to the cloud.

I rate this solution a 9.9 out of 10 because it's never failed me so I'm very comfortable with it.