NetApp FAS Series Reviews

• Reliability
• Rich features
• Ease of management
• Excellent support

A reliable and easily managed storage system is a key performance factor. The system also has more features than we require.

Naturally, there would be room for improvement. As I see it, there could be more interfaces, more cache, etc., but those challenges are solved by just getting some other model.

Four years.

None whatsoever.

No issues, as expansion was a breeze.

We do use third party support. On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the support to be an eight.

During the years, we have had quite a few storage solutions, none of which did give us the same level performance, reliability, and manageability as the FAS-series has.

The initial setup was quite easy and pleasing. Just enter some key values and there you go.

For a number of years now, purchasing a storage system has been actually purchasing software. There is no plain storage anymore, more or less intelligent software solutions. Thus, licenses are required to fulfill the business demands. One considering between different storage system should carefully investigate what software options they get bundled in and what optional software they actually would need. Most storage vendors also have software, or licensing bundles, which may offer the required licenses considerably cheaper, but do also maybe offer licenses, which are not needed.

No other solutions were evaluated at the time. Actually, this system was familiar to use and fulfilled the business demands.

You really can't go wrong with NetApp products, They perform well, are rock solid, offer good space saving technologies, and the support is above par.

• Fast Snapshots
• Thin provisioning
• Simple management

With scalability, we feel the system is limited. 

From 2013 until now; four years.

No issues. The system is rather stable.

Yes, we have encountered issues. The system is limited by the number of enclosures.

The tech support is very good. We use a third party support.

Previously, we used VNX5300 NAS. We found this one better suited to our needs.

Initial setup was straightforward, not very complicated.

We used a third-party for setup.

No, we did not. We were given direction from the University.

I would recommend it to anyone. It is good for some of the NAS and VMware implementations.

Better performance and lower costs.

It is a great help.

It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays.

Over 10 years.

Nothing special.

Not really.

No.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Cool.

EMC.

Straightforward.

Vendor.

Three years.

Be careful.

EMC.

Keep up the good work.

It changed the way we do Disaster Recovery (DR) around NetApp replication.

• Cluster mode needs to be more ubiquitous.
• The process for going to cluster mode is expensive.

Unexpected costs and some systems were not compatible with cluster mode.

Yes, we encountered stability issues with the LDAP integration and with user logins on the web front-end.

Nope.

The customer service is awesome.

The technical support is great. The partner company (Bytes) has a close relationship with us.

The initial setup was straightforward, though there were a lot of hidden costs going to cluster mode and the amount of usable data was way lower than expected.

We used a vendor team, and they were excellent.

EMC.

Double up on the amount of storage that you expect to buy.

• Redundancy
• Snap mirroring
• Home-drive capability, which looks at a user name and gives the correct rights to folder

• Rendundancy
• Security

We hold a lot of information for our customers, so the information has to be secure and reliable.

I'm not sure, because every time I’ve gone to them, they’ve said “yes, we can do that.”

I sleep well at night because of its redundancy. I hardly even know when it has a bad drive. The Call Home capability sends a message automatically if there's a bad drive to NetApp who then sends a new drive.

Amazing how scalable it is. As a comparison, we looked at EMC vBlock as well, and if you want to upgrade, you have to use a forklift. With FAS, you just put in new shelves or heads.

They’re extremely technical. Everyone I’ve talked to has been very knowledgeable, and I can’t say anything bad.

It was complex. There's a lot to do, but I had their assistance and went through everything step by step. So while complex, it was also simple.

One thing that burned me, is that it surprised me how much overhead it uses, like 30% right off the top. So don’t forget the overhead. It’s not usable space, but that percentage is coming down. It all has to do with deduplication.

NetApp, as a design group, builds solutions that are reliable. Other companies don’t have the fortitude of NetApp. They have a very strong commitment to the multimedia industry, for example.

Other products lose performance over time, but NetApp OS is speed-optimized.

NetApp is also a very stable company that offers various storage options at the highest level of build and reliability. Products will be supported for the duration of a customer’s needs.

With NetApp’s dedication to the market, customers aren’t dealing with a fly-by-night organization. The company will follow through with support which, with FAS, is for multiple petabytes of data. For example, in the government and medical sectors, they are well provided-for.

My ability as a VAR is solely connected to NetApp, my value is solely connected to the commitment of NetApp. In any particular vertical, NetApp is technically superior, price conscious, and superior at price-for-performance.

They provide a lot of expertise on marketing and technical teams, and helps make our customers look good.

There’s always areas for improvement. For example, it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer.

My primary selling point is stability of the solution. It provides ongoing performance, which is proven to have no degradation.

Scalability depends on how it’s ordered, which is the job of an integrator and dependent on the customer's needs.

I work with their technical team, but not on a day-to-day basis. The teams I do work with are great, but there are so many of them it’s sometimes difficult to find correct teams.

It’s complex because there so many areas where you can make a mistake. For example, the site survey may not have enough power and something as simple as that can ruin an installation.

It loses points because of the price, but it can’t be everything to everybody.

Make sure you buy the product that’s right for you. If it's competitive to NetApp FAS, great, but just know both products before making a decision and do a point-by-point comparison.

All SIFS and NFS are valuable. It allows our Windows and Unix teams to have a centralized point to share data between the two. When a potential army recruit provides info at various locations, FAS gives us a drop point where the system can pull info from various locations.

NetApp allows us to take arrays and pass through. NetApp now has the capability of both SIFS and NFS that we didn’t have before. We don’t need to have separate OS boxes. And we don’t have duplicate data.

I’ve found that I use command line more often than I thought needed. Some things should be done in the GUI, and command-line switches can be overwhelming and take up a lot of time. In a GUI, I can just hit options or boxes. However, cluster mode will address a lot of that, but 7-mode definitely doesn’t.

Some issues where some of my stuff is not failing over. I’m the eighth person handling the system, and my impression is that it wasn’t configured correctly. However, I very rarely have a problem. It’s been stable.

I haven’t had to scale in my department, but I foresee change in the near future because we’ll be taking on other portions of the government (medical, for example). Other portions will be somewhat isolated, but there is overlap.

I’m part of a five-person team with in-house support. If that doesn’t work, then I go to NetApp support. We work with specific people within NetApp. I like that tech supports sticks to it until the issue is solved and that they follow up. Any delays are on our end because we move slowly.

Five or six years ago, we used a Hitachi solution with fiber channel.

I wasn’t there, but I will be involved in the 8080 installation in 2 weeks. NetApp will come in and do it for us.

It’s difficult for us to get money, so make sure you get everything in order, because there’s no going back and saying “oh, I missed this or that”, so make sure you plan well and well in advance.

It does a good job at what it’s designed to do.

The most valuable features are the snapshots, the flash pool that we’re using, and cluster mode. When we are doing an upgrade, there is less of an impact on the customer when you use cluster mode. It still has some with CIFS, but at least it has less impact.

Compared to the previous solution, I would not say that it has really improved anything. We were with the HPE EVA before the NetApp. It takes more of my time to manage them, as opposed to HPE EVA, with which I created LUNs and it's done. I have a lot more tasks to do. At least now with NetApp, we can provide NAS services, which HPE EVA did not have.

I would like to see antivirus that works, and generally a working solution. They just provided Vserver DR, which is good.

Now we need to have a way to do some tests only because to do testing we really need to failover to the second site, destroy everything, rebuild it, and failback. I really need a test mode that is not as destructive, at least. There is no test mode. Maybe there is with ONTAP 9. I’m not sure. That’s probably a feature that doesn’t figure into the short-term roadmap.

For more detail:

With Data Ontap 7 if something was wrong there was a real passthru that was protecting us against a loss of service if something was wrong with McAfee.

Now with Cluster Data Ontap they introduce the AV connector and the passthru is not working correctly. We have delayed our migration to the c-dot environment for over 2 years now with open call at netapp. It tooks them over 8 months to admit there was a problem until a second customer get hit with the same problem we had. This has cause us service impact with our external customer, so we are running with the antivirus disable in our c-dot cifs shares since (at least they are used mostly by applications, not direct users).

We have 2 specific cases that happen:

* A McAfee agent upgrade that cause the Virus Scan Enterprise for Storage (VSES) to stop working
* A bad config in EPO pushing an invalid user to start the VSES preventing it to be able to read the file on the netapp

In September, a new version (1.0.3) of the AV connector that was supposed to fix these issues was available but it didn’t help the file access are still being denied. The test we did was for the second problem which is easy to reproduce. Just after that I was being interviewed during the Netapp Insight which has given that review.

Since we have worked with Netapp and McAfee, I have seen no real intent to have a functioning passthru. They instead finger point McAfee for not replying. We have tried an hotfix from McAfee but it is still not working.

For vserver DR this is a new functionality which is really good and very helpful for our DR solutions. The improvement that should be done to it is a better way to fallback, there is none currently so we need to delete all the setup, on the secondary : reconfigure it, copy everything to primary and then fail it back to primary. Then to reconfigure it properly, we need to delete, reconfigure and copy to the secondary.

It is very unstable. We have a lot of issues with antivirus programs interrupting us from providing services to our customer. As soon as something happens with McAfee, the customer had problems with our services.

With the 7 mode, we were okay. There was a real pass-through working correctly, so if something happened with the NT file server, the files were still being served to the customer. With cDOT, it's completely the opposite. It's completely out of service. We have a lot of service impact.

We have been delaying the CIFS transition a lot because of this.

We have been using technical support for over two years regarding services been down. Support was not efficient in that case. They are available. They tried. I was supposed to have a solution with the latest version. That was last week. I did the test, but it’s still not working.

Before the admin, there was an issue, it took close to a year until a second customer had the same issue. Then, they finally admitted that I wasn't the problem. It was an issue with the software. That's certainly why I rate them poorly.

When we moved from HPE EVA to FAS, it was to have NAS services. For NAS, NetApp was probably the best one at that time.

The initial setup was straightforward. I had no problem with that.

We also considered EMC at that time and HPE. For what we needed, NetApp was the best one.

The most important criteria we look for in a vendor is good service and quality of the product.

Properly define what you need first. After that, talk with people who know NetApp well, know how to set it up, and properly define the design architecture before doing it.