NetApp FAS Series Reviews

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.

Its flexibility: It will support anything; from Windows CIFS shares, to UNIX NFS shares, to block-level storage; on the same platform; on the same disks; with the same interface. It's not specific to one set or another set.

I'm not sure that I can comment. This is what we've always used, so I have nothing to compare it to.

It has a steep learning curve. Once you've reached the top of that curve, though, it's much easier to manage since it is all in the same system. You don't have a separate system to manage block-level storage or a separate system to manage other types of shares.

One of the issues that we have had with NetApp in upgrading over the years is that migrating data from one system to another is one-way only. If you have a new storage system that is going to replace an old storage system, where you're transitioning slowly from one to another, you can copy the data in one direction, but that same tool, which is typically used as a disaster recovery tool, can't be used to reset it back the other direction, as well. That level of backward compatibility would be very nice to have.

In the 20-some years I've been working with NetApp stuff, the system has caused one outage. Other than that, for any of the failure that it's had, the redundancy that is built into it, has handled the failure and left the systems up and the data available.

It is very scalable. It has gotten much more scalable. With every level, it's becoming more and more scalable.

Technical support directly from NetApp is usually very, very good. As compared to others, the expertise that the individual that you talk to on the phone is usually very good. You can talk directly to an engineer, if that's required. We’ve actually talked to hardware development people on occasion, when that has been required.

The support team is very knowledgeable and very accessible.

We invest in a new solution when the existing solution goes out of its initial support. We have been looking for new options for about six months now because the extended support is very, very expensive.

I was involved in migrations from one system to another system. The initial setup, the cabling, the hardware side of it is tedious.

Have NetApp come in and do the initial install of the physical system for you. It's definitely worth the time.

We are looking at Pure Storage. We have looked at and discarded an EMC option. That's why I recently attended a NetApp conference. We were looking to see the next level of the NetApp All-Flash FAS.

We rejected the EMC option because we had an EMC piece of gear in-house that had a failure. It continued to operate, like it's supposed to. The problem was that the part on the piece of EMC gear that failed could not be replaced without causing downtime. It might as well have just caused the downtime initially. We have migrated everything off of that. It was a stupid little thing. It wasn’t like the backplane failed; it was a stupid little thing. I would not recommend it, and we will probably never go with EMC again.

Take your time. It's a very dynamic market right now. Make sure that the information that you're getting on the system is for what's currently available and not for what they're expecting to have next quarter. Because, a lot of the next-quarter stuff is vapor, where they don't actually have it. They haven't gotten around to putting that in place, yet, and they promise and promise until they get money from you.

That's one of the reasons why we're holding off on making a decision until the gear is actually available.

It takes your standard IOPS in your drives and it gives you much greater performance out of that aggregate. You can run a smaller aggregate with SSDs in the flash pool, and it'll give you the IOPS of many more spindles. What it does is it brings your SATA disks aggregate up to the SAS speed, depending upon how many spindles you're running, and your SAS aggregates perform much better.

We had an IOPS problem earlier. We were running Citrix and we were having boot storms. Part of the problem was the aggregates that we had were too small. The boot storm would basically fill up the NVRAM. It was unable to write to disk because the disks were running full. The problem was solved by going to flash pools. It was great.

I have not given the FAS a perfect rating because the All Flash Array is probably going to beat it down, in terms of performance.

I would give it a perfect rating if there wasn’t any ceiling. When you have some systems and you increase your disk IOPS by adding either All Flash Array or you add a flash pool, sometimes you move the bottleneck; you move the bottleneck up to the CPU. We did have that problem briefly. That was solved by basically moving some of the workload. That happened one time and we fixed it.

By moving to cluster mode, it's going to be a lot easier to move the workload. We are moving in that direction. We're doing the first assessment and planning right now.

We do not have any stability problems, whatsoever.

NetApp aggregates are scalable. You can keep adding shelves.

Technical support is very good. I've never had a problem.

Usually the problem is being able to hear them in our data center. :)

I did not previously use a different solution. When I started working with the county, they already had the NetApp FAS.

Go with NetApp; I haven't had a problem with it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability and, for technical support, being there.

It gives us the flexibility to work with all protocols on the same Storage Box. The WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) is the best feature implemented on this storage solution. Also, the DataONTAP is very reliable and stable, and I haven't had any problems yet. If you configure NetApp using the best practices, you should not have any issues with the performance. Lastly, the de-duplication works very well with all applications in a VMware environment, and you will save a lot of space. In my experience we save more than 80% of the space using deduplication on the volume, and if you have allflash fas you will have gain of the 3:1 and 4:1 on the your storage on the all environment without lost performance.

All the protocols on the same box can solve all the configurations problems. They also help centralize and simplify all connections into one box.

The feature snapmirror is too simple to configure and it is the best way to configure one storage environment with High Availability site to site.

Unify all backup software on the single tool to simplify the administration.

I've been using NetApp products for Ten years, and currently i am working with models FAS6220, FAS8020 using all softwares available...

I don´t find issues yet

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10/10.

In the past, I used, and still work with, solutions like Fujitsu and Hitachi, but when I have an opportunity to work with a NetApp solution, I don't want to go back. That's because the NetApp solutions give me more flexibility to work.

I think it is easy, because I have implemented NetApp in the past. I don't know if someone without work experience would be able to execute the initial setup. However, if you apply best practices, you should not have an issue.

I have experienced both in-house and vendor team implementations. Whenever it is done by the vendor, they are 10/10.

The ROI for NetApp is good, and if you use it on a VMware environment, the ROI will be even greater, and if you get the new solution Allflash FAS you will have a big gain of the storage like 3:1, 4:1 and many more dependending on the your application.

The price, sometimes, is very high, but the ROI is guaranteed.

Ye I did, but I didn't find another solution that could centralize all the protocols into one box without an appliance.

Study the NetApp solutions, and before you implement be sure to do PoCs.