NetApp FAS Series Reviews

Our use case for NetApp FAS Series involves a coastal IT company where we used it as common storage for the SQL cluster between HP servers for document management. We initially used 10k RPM SAS drives as primary for common server storage. In 2016, we needed a huge amount of data, and at that time, the hard drives were only 2 TB and 4 TB. Today, we have reached 16 TB, but that 2 TB was in a volume concept of RAID 10 because the data is highly needed. We have two NetApp FAS Series systems syncing as data deduplication between the storages.

The main capabilities we utilize with the product are data management, data protection, and taking snapshots. We use deduplication between the storages and utilize SAN for the servers and NAS for the CTM.

For monitoring purposes, we normally use flash access storage exclusively. We utilize a hybrid system because we need performance, combining NL-SAS for the volume and SAS flash to use as a fast cache system that provides more IOPS.

We normally implement RAID 10, which we prefer over RAID 6's n plus 2 combinations. We utilize it for data redundancy, even with write intensity on.

Regarding the unified storage architecture for NetApp FAS Series, we normally opt for exclusivity unless budget constraints exist. Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k. The high performance ensures minimal latency. An advantage we've seen with NetApp FAS Series is that snapshots provide very rapid backup and fast recovery.

We basically use snapshots for data protection as first-level protection, with deduplication between the two storages serving as second-level protection.

The main area for improvement for NetApp FAS Series is price. Unfortunately, in India, NetApp price clearance takes longer than EMC.

They should add ransomware protections, which are major targets today. About a month back, Land Rover faced a major hit. Similarly, in India, Taj also got hit with ransomware, which happens due to the file system, particularly Windows NTFS file system or Linux extended file system. Our experience shows this is not occurring on the Oracle file system, OCFS. Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.

I've been working with NetApp FAS Series from around 2013, almost 12 years now. I can say it's from 2013 or 2014, though I'm a bit uncertain without checking my documentation.

I have not faced many problems. Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands. Both NetApp FAS Series and EMC Unity have similar systems. Users just need to become familiar with the system.

There are no issues integrating NetApp FAS Series with the IT environment. The only hitches we encounter are with HBA drivers and especially the Unisphere software and HBA client software. We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers. We have a community where we share updates, addressing compatibility issues collaboratively.

I would rate the scalability and ability to expand as seven or eight out of ten.

I would rate technical support from NetApp FAS Series as nine out of ten. The support is particularly good when the system is under warranty or maintenance.

Positive

The deployment process for NetApp FAS Series is very simple. We are accustomed to it as a routine task and don't experience any problems with deployment.

I work through the distributor, Redington India, for the purchase process of NetApp FAS Series.

Both NetApp FAS Series and Dell are equally good in my opinion. It depends on the customer's budget. We present both options without specific vendor preference, providing prices and letting customers choose what they want.

My main competitors for NetApp FAS Series in the market are basically Dell and sometimes IBM.

I currently work with Dell products, particularly the bigger storages such as Unity XT, XT 380, 480, 380F, and all-flash storages. I focus on higher models since my IO performance requirements are more substantial, working exclusively with 380 XT and 480 XT and F models.

With Dell, I work only on Unity XT because my storage requirements range from 200 TB to 1 petabyte or 2 petabytes. VNX is now end of life, with VNX 3200 being more in production. I worked with Hitachi almost a year before, and the current last three storages are all made.

Regarding NetApp FAS Series, I use the FAS 2750, which provides several all-flash options including NVMe, E-Series, and EF-Series.

My final rating for NetApp FAS Series would be seven out of ten. My main issue with NetApp FAS Series is the availability of parts after five years. In contrast, with Dell, I can often find third-party support. In India, we might only rely on the company's pricing, and sometimes they quote prices that are unavoidable, leaving no other alternatives.

I usually recommend NetApp FAS Series for medium to enterprise companies.

The most valuable features of NetApp FAS Series that I find are unified storage. I think their snapshot technology is very good; the entire ONTAP package is very easy to use, user-friendly, and usable.

The unified storage architecture is very easy to manage, which has positively impacted administrative processes. The data management features of Data ONTAP are all very unique and easy to manage. The usability is very good, and the integration part is also strong.

There is room for improvement when it comes to response time and first-level support quality.

If a new feature needs to be added, it takes some time because it is altogether a new development; otherwise, it is good. I would like to see more features focused on the cloud part in the future to make NetApp FAS Series even better. I would like more in-depth integration with the cloud; currently, they have integration with the hyper-scalers, but more comprehensive integration is required.

I have been working with NetApp FAS Series for a very long time.

I would rate the technical support by NetApp an 8.5. There is room for improvement when it comes to response time and first-level support quality, though I have not faced any challenges.

Positive

I do not handle the pricing part of NetApp FAS Series since it is managed by the sales team.

I provide both NetApp solutions and also work with their competitors; we work with Hitachi, Dell, and HP.

The integration with cloud environments has benefited my customers' storage strategy by providing cloud volume ONTAP. I see no disadvantages, weaknesses, or room for improvement; it is a full-blown, foolproof product with everything needed.

Whether NetApp FAS Series is the best option on the market at the moment depends on the use case; no storage is universally good or bad, as it is use case specific in determining what product is appropriate. I would rate this review an 8 overall.

I usually use NetApp FAS Series for the shares, CIFS share, replication, SnapMirror, retaining volumes, LUNs, and other things.

NetApp FAS Series handles disaster recovery and backup challenges with a feature called SMBC, which is great for having SnapMirror between two clusters. It allows you to have one cluster in one data center and the second cluster in another data center. If there's a problem in the first data center, it automatically migrates through a witness VM called Mediator without any downtime.

There is also a really good feature called SnapVault and SnapMirror, but for me, the best one is SMBC.

In NetApp FAS Series, I appreciate the visibility. We can see the compression, how it works, the ONTAP, the deduplication, and how SnapMirror works to copy and transfer the snapshot of the volumes from one to another. It is not complicated to configure it for the SAN and CIFS.

In NetApp FAS Series, there have been areas for improvement. I have encountered problems with the aggregate, space, disks, node replacement, recreation of volumes, recovering volumes, and breaking the SnapMirror.

I have been working for two months to achieve something inside the ONTAP, and there was a problem with the custom role, which requires digging really deeper. It was not possible to have a custom user inside ONTAP without the delete permission to delete the volume. We wanted others to be able to create a SnapMirror and volume, but have no volume deletion permission. In the newest version, it seems to already be in place, but there was a bug enabling this one in older versions 9.11, 9.10, or earlier. There was a bug when creating new custom roles that automatically gave volume deletion permission, which was a problem, but they finally fixed it.

I have been using NetApp FAS Series since 2015.

I would rate the stability of NetApp FAS Series as a nine out of ten.

NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay. I would rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The support is fast according to my experience. I am a partner with the vendor, and we sell some of the NetApp clusters to clients. We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol, and daily, we fix issues and create something inside ONTAP. 

Neutral

I have worked with HPE, IBM, Dell, and many other solutions. NetApp FAS Series is one of the best for storage, but it's not compute.

When comparing NetApp FAS Series to other vendors, it is one of the best. While I don't have vast experience with the NetApp cloud, it's one of the best in the storage area.

I deployed NetApp FAS Series on-premises. In my organization, we currently have about 12 clusters with HA for NetApp FAS. My clients vary from small to medium and enterprise businesses.

The deployment I've done for clients depends on the request and how the client wants to do it. We typically need to have the experience, theory, and practice beforehand, so it's of medium complexity and depends on what they want to achieve.

Deploying one cluster of NetApp FAS Series takes at least eight hours or a complete day. Including configuration and cabling, I estimate two days because first, the configuration and cabling to the data center need to be done, followed by the application part. There may be some extra configuration if any compute is involved, but for the cluster, a maximum of two days could be sufficient depending on how fast the client wants to achieve this.

The maintenance includes ensuring everything is working fine and updates are done. There is good support from NetApp. The ONTAP updates can be done via CLI or GUI. It usually takes an hour for each cluster.

The deduplication and compression are really great and save a lot of money, but the addition of disks on the cluster is really expensive. However, if you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.

The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They focus on storage only, which is really good; it works. 

The deduplication in NetApp FAS Series really depends on the data. If the data provided is not yet compressed, the maximum deduplication I used to have is 3:1, meaning that if you have 1 terabyte of volume, you can have up to 3 terabytes of volume to use the space. If it's already compressed, it will not gain anything.

I would definitely recommend NetApp FAS Series to other users because it's stable and really handy for IT personnel who manage it. It provides visibility into how it works and what needs to be done, and if there is a problem, how it can be monitored. It simplifies tasks without the need to connect to CLI for monitoring or managing volumes.

I would rate NetApp FAS Series an eight out of ten.

Currently, our usual use case with NetApp FAS Series is only archival. If a customer wants NFS storage, we offer them the NetApp FAS Series because many customers want to do backups on NFS, so we offer it as an NFS solution. Apart from ASF, we offer NFS on NetApp FAS Series, so it can be used for both archive and backup purposes, depending on customer requirements.

Regarding the technologies we use inside NetApp, they include Snapmeter and SnapLock, along with normal storage allocation.

In my opinion, the best features of NetApp FAS Series are that it's simple storage. The most valuable aspect is that it still uses the old way of doing things. It is simple, and while it has hard disks that are prone to failure when compared to NVMe, its biggest asset is simplicity.

Regarding data protection capabilities, NetApp FAS Series has the same functionality as other NetApp storages products provide, such as RAID protection solutions. We can use RAID one, RAID two, RAID five, RAID six, RAID DP, and RAID tech. The biggest advantage that makes NetApp FAS Series better is that we can use RAID technology on the storage. With larger disks offering ten or fifteen terabytes of storage, RAID tech becomes more cost-effective. While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.

There aren't any areas in NetApp FAS Series that have room for improvement apart from the existing bugs. As an end customer or storage engineer, addressing bugs falls under NetApp's responsibility. The process involves contacting NetApp support to report bugs and receiving either a bug ID or a fixed ONTAP version. When we discover new bugs, we open a case with NetApp, discuss the problem, and typically receive fixes in the next ONTAP release.

I am currently working on NetApp in my present project.

Regarding the stability of NetApp FAS Series, I would rate it seven or seven point five because there are frequent panic messages. When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues. This is why I would rate it lower than the current faster storage solutions, as we have encountered multiple issues with the NetApp FAS Series in the last six months.

The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves. When purchasing NetApp FAS, it comes with installed disks, but scalability depends on installing disk shelves. If customers are willing to pay for an archival solution, understanding that it won't be lightning fast, the scalability rating would be nine. It maintains simplicity while being slower in performance.

I would rate NetApp technical support five out of ten. Recently, we have experienced many issues, and the knowledge quality has deteriorated. They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor. These basic solutions impact customers by causing degraded performance and requiring scheduled maintenance windows. They also don't respond in time, even for P1 situations. P3 and P4 cases might receive responses after five or seven days.

Neutral

I have fifteen-plus years of experience with NetApp, starting my career in 2008 with NetApp FAS Series. Modern customers rarely use the NetApp FAS Series because of its slower hard drives, primarily using it for archiving and backup purposes.

Implementing NetApp FAS Series didn't provide significant benefits as it serves mainly as an archival solution. We offer it as a cost-effective option, but only a small number of customers use it for NFS or archival data.

Artificial intelligence is not currently used for archiving purposes.

I would recommend NetApp FAS Series to users seeking an archiving product. The NetApp architecture and design capabilities surpass other storage providers. While vendors Hitachi or IBM offer similar capabilities, my extensive experience with NetApp makes me prefer it.

Comparing NetApp FAS Series with current market vendors is challenging as my experience with other hard drive solutions involves older systems IBM ESS from the late 1990s and IBM SVC twenty-one forty-five. The storage landscape has changed significantly since then, making direct comparisons difficult.

As a storage engineer focused on space creation and management, I cannot comment on pricing as I don't handle those aspects directly.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

NetApp helps streamline our internal operations. I come from a background as a VMware administrator. For me, SnapCenter alone is a great product for when something goes wrong with a virtual machine, even though we have a separate data protection solution besides that. The speed at which you can recover from when it is all snapshot-based is good. You do not have to wait for copies across the network. It is a real game changer in a situation where we tried to do an upgrade but that did not go well and now that needs to be reverted back to where we were an hour ago. Usually, in 30 seconds, we get that VM back up and running. It makes the recovery quick. Even though we have another solution, which is also pretty fast, being able to take advantage of those logical operations inside the array is a real game-changer performance. The data reduction that we get is fantastic because some of our applications have so many copies of different versions as they are going through different levels of testing and development. Being able to deduplicate against each other saves a lot of the footprint.

The All Flash series in general has delivered the most value to our organization. That took care of the daily performance issues that we had. When I started with the company, there would be overhead announcements on the PA that some of our internal systems were running slow and asked people to stop using them for a little bit while they caught up. All of those went away overnight when we switched to the All Flash FAS solution. There has not been any performance issue with storage so far. It has been eight years. Our account exec says that if we go to BlueXP or Cloud Insights, we can look at all the performance data. I never go ahead and look at it because our latency is under a millisecond all the time, so all of our applications are happy. Our developers are happy. Our internal customers are happy. I do not spend a lot of time worrying about performance anymore because we just have it.

I would rate this technology a solid eight out of ten. I only have one criticism, which I have also shared with my account exec in the past, but it is not a strong criticism. I understood 7-mode very well back in the day. It was a pretty simple concept. When you are making a leap from there to cluster data ONTAP, there are so many more interfaces, and I have so much more going on in what I do in my job. It is like I do not have quite the mental map in my head of how the whole system works as I used to. Fortunately, we have a great partner we work with. They have helped us for over a decade. They are now CDW, but they used to be Sirius previously. They have a couple of great resources with whom we have worked for a long time. They have helped build our environment over the years, and they are always happy to answer our call if we call them. So, for me, that counterbalances some of that complexity. I do not understand it at the level that I would like to because I do not have the time to dig into and understand all the lifts versus the physical interfaces versus all of the networking that goes on in there. However, I can always call our partner that we work with, or even text them. They will answer my call even if it is eight o'clock on a Friday night and help us out. It is not that the solution does not work for us. It is just that I used to know how 7-mode works so much better just because it was simpler, but I understand that some of that complexity comes as a result of the flexibility and the power and the cluster data ONTAP unlocks. We can have multiple SVMs and the ability to have all these different identities and tenants contained inside of one platform, which we could not do with the 7-mode previously.

Because of the All Flash technology, we do not have any performance issues. Another benefit that we are seeing is the reduction in footprint when we replace the old spinning disk system. It was a rack and a half of a disk. The A700 that we are about to load in there is going to be 5U or 8U. It is really small. Especially, at the Colo facility where our DR site is, we pay by the rack. That saves us money every month on a reduced footprint. I cannot say how much money it saves, but I know it also saves us the power bill. Flash is so much more energy efficient. We do not have that cooling load and power load, and then, we obviously have the performance. Performance is not a concern that we have anymore.

A couple of years ago, we decided to make an investment in hardening. It is a little bit stronger against ransomware. We made the commitment to purchase an additional FAS 8300, and we are using SnapLock technology to take daily snapshots of our environment and send them over to that separate FAS 8300, which is in a separate authentication domain using the Cyber Vault concept. All immutable snapshots are over there. We have hardened our primary arrays too with MFA technology and everything else. If we are ever attacked or a victim of a ransomware attack for some reason, we at least have another copy locked away immediately that goes back several months in that other environment. Even if we lose some short-term data, we will still have more long-term copies of our data to go back to. That was another big chunk of spending for an array that does not do anything in terms of production. It just sits there. We hope we never need it, but at the same time, it is nice having that peace of mind that we have done the immutable technology in the NetApp's technologies, and we have done immutable technology inside our Cohesity backup product as well. We have two levels of immutable copies of our data, so we are fairly confident that we will be able to recover something.

It gives us the performance we need and the reliability we need to make sure that our systems have the uptime that our internal customers demand. It has been a very reliable solution for us. Especially since we have moved to the All Flash series, we have not had a single performance-related issue.

When we were going through all the MFA hardening and the anti-ransomware setup, I gave some feedback to our executive. The MFA process for getting that set up on the AFF systems was cumbersome compared to some of our other systems. With one of our systems, there was a little QR code. We could point our phone at it and get our MFA going. We did a lot more heavy lifting to get that going on the NetApp side. This is clearly a technology that exists and just needs to be prioritized by the development staff. Given how sensitive we are to ransomware, they should do everything to make it almost a no-brainer for every admin to get those kinds of protections turned on. This is something that should be prioritized. We have got it working now, but we could have done it a lot sooner if it was easier for us to do that.

I got my first NetApp array in 2008 or 2009. So, it has been 15 years.

When I was hired at the company nine years ago, we had what was the IBM N Series, which was like IBM's relationship with NetApp. It was a spinning disk system that was way past its prime. It had been pushed so far. It needed to be replaced. The CPUs were at the point where we could not enable any of the data reduction features like deduplication or compression, so we did an overhaul of all that in 2016 and moved to the 8040s. That was the first AFF flash series that we went to. Since then, we have had zero issues with performance. It has been a great platform for us.

Back in 2016, we were looking at what was then Dell's Compellent line, which does not exist anymore. That was one that we considered.

One of the other technologies from NetApp that we have leveraged and invested a lot in is SnapLock. We use it when we receive correspondence or paperwork from our customers. If you fill out a form saying that you wish to change the beneficiary of your life insurance, that gets scanned in and fed into our workflow product. It then gets written out to a SnapLock volume where it is made immutable after 24 hours. If there is ever a point down the line when somebody passes away, and their policy is to be paid out, and there is a dispute over who their beneficiary was, we can guarantee that when that form was entered and written out there, it was not changed. It has been immutable since that time. We do not have the ability to change that form even if we want to because we have locked it down. That is the kind of thing that makes our legal department sleep a lot easier at night because we know that once the data has been written, it cannot be changed. We can stand behind that and work well if we need to. Fortunately, it does not usually come to that, but if it does, we know that we have got that data there to guarantee the outcome.

SnapLock was one of the reasons why we chose NetApp. We were very happy with this technology. It works very well. The other was the savings through the efficiency of the deduplication and compression. That is something that has only gotten better over time. It used to be only at the volume level, and now, it is at the aggregate level. All those kinds of greater efficiencies allow us to store more data in a smaller footprint, and it is just a better way of doing business.

The cost was definitely a part of the decision-making process. Our partner was another reason. Our partner at the time was Sirius. We were very comfortable with them. We are very happy with the level of service we get. Those were the two greatest reasons. We also have a very good relationship with our account exec from NetApp. He used to be our SE before he became an account exec. He knows our environment very well because he has worked with us for over a decade, as an SE and now, as an AE. We have good relationships with all those people. That helped in working with them to try to fit within our budgets, timelines, and everything else.

Being a life insurance company, we are highly regulated. We have to be cautious about what we adopt in terms of AI to comply with many different state regulations and federal regulations. It is a technology we are watching. We are going to start using it probably around functions like marketing. We have a data team that is looking very heavily at that and coming up with maybe using it for the internal knowledge base that we use to help our customers. Life insurance products can be very complicated. There are a lot of rules and a lot of different ways the products work. Having a way even for our internal associates to ask AI how something works and get back some of those answers could also be a useful training tool. That is what we are looking at right now. We are not going to be using it for business-critical decisions and certainly nothing as highly regulated as underwriting or anything like that. It would probably be around making this a resource for internal employees to begin with, and then I would imagine marketing will follow from there as well.

We are starting to move into a hybrid type of future with Azure. Some of the data that lives on our NetApp today does not need the performance of All Flash. One of the things that we are looking into is whether that can be put into Azure NetApp files. We can then use cold tiering or something like that. Some of it is just archive data kept around for legal reasons, but it does not need that super, top-end performance. We have also got imaging of some computers before we dispose of laptops and things like that. We are writing that to the E-Series today. It might make more sense to move some of that to the hybrid cloud solution. It will probably save us some money long term and reduce our on-prem footprint. We struggle a little bit with how long we want to be in the data center business on-prem. We think that the cloud is most likely our future, but it is not going to happen overnight. It will be a ten-year journey, and we will always have something on-prem. At the same time, we will be able to put away some of the systems that are not mission-critical and some of the archive types of things and know that they are taken care of from a technology we trust.

In a keynote at NetApp INSIGHT, they talked about how so much of the data is going to be inside the purview of NetApp, and we will be able to use AI technologies to look at the data we have. One of the things I heard mentioned there which I thought would be useful is the ability to find all the duplicate copies of the data. Especially in the unstructured data world, everyone is just throwing everything under the file server shares and never deleting it. There is so much data out there that is redundant or has not been read in more than a decade. That data could probably go to a colder tier or be surfaced for review and potentially deletion. I see the potential in some of those technologies to help us understand the data we already have. 

In terms of our next technology investments, coming from a VMware background, we are still using NFS to attach all that. One of the things in the back of my mind is at what point do we start evaluating switching over to NVMe Connectivity and seeing the performance benefits around our larger database server by having much wider and deeper queues for IO.

Our upcoming investments will be prioritized around cybersecurity. We made a big investment two years ago, and I am sure we will make more investments in the future, but we are pretty happy with where we are right now. AI is under the purview of a different department than me, so I do not have a ton of visibility into it, but I know there is a committee that is looking at that and deciding which use cases are safe for us to use given our regulations. They also make sure that we protect the privacy of all the people who entrust their data to us. We will definitely look at private solutions and not public solutions for a lot of this.

We would like to move forward a little faster than we have in the past. Our company has been around for over 130 years. We are not new, and that has some of the benefits in terms of stability. It also means that we have a lot of legacy systems that we would like to move forward. We still have LUNS-connected AIX machines. They certainly continue to work great, but at the same time, we would like to start spinning down some of those platforms. AIX does not lend itself to running in the cloud very well. We want to move the company forward faster and use something that helps us navigate to what I call our new normal in terms of the hybrid nature of our data centers. As we start spanning Azure, anything that makes that easier would be helpful. I see the value of NetApp in making those migrations as easy as clicking a few buttons. For example, if an application from a share is moving to Azure next week, I should be able to take the share and move it to Azure as well so that I can easily keep the data locality next to the application.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

NetApp has greatly increased our ability to offer storage and data throughput for jobs and services we provide to our customers, enabling them to further enhance their development and modeling work.

Switching to NetApp allowed us to grow the ESXi environment we use as a backbone, increasing storage, throughput, and speed. We could also increase the number of virtual machines we could host, greatly increasing the productivity and speed at which customers develop and manage the software that they create.

We could streamline our operations by adding controllers to increase the capacity we could use. Our environment is isolated, so utilizing some of NetApp's tools allowed us to better manage the clusters, the management host, and the additional requirements for the system's inputs and outputs.

The most significant outcome for us has been growth. We can get the storage off the server, increasing our virtualization and the number of file systems we can offer our customers. There was a time when we had one site that would order 30 different servers to complete the mission. With the new setup, I can do the same with four servers and a single node.

One pain point that drove us to adopt NetApp was a reduction in staff. My team originally had four people to support 30 sites and 600 customers on average.  Now we're down to me, my partner, and a contractor. NetApp has helped us grow and keep pace with the requirements. 

We've been tasked to develop an AI base incorporated with the bigger company Okay. They want us to extend down and expand our site to 40 additional sites and company subsites. The company wants to look into developing that through 2024 and beyond. 

We expect to expand greatly. I have to be careful with our spending, so it's a little hard to get things approved because of how the company is, but this is the task we've been given, and the number of networks that we support will require us to increase our NetApp systems across multiple networks.

We hope to create a cloud simulation of what's out there so the technicians know that the cloud is somebody else's computer. However, we need to develop that so our end users don't confuse what they perceive as the cloud with what we are actually providing to them.

Our investments will focus on cyber security and data storage because the amount of information they need to store in that repository is tremendous. We also need to simulate what's out there regarding Zero Trust and duplicate what the broader company is doing on a smaller, isolated scale. 

For innovation, we expect to present to company leaders what things could look like for other mission providers and all the additional offsets they have in other environments. We must present a way forward for them to move in future developments and outlines of how they place the equipment and provide the equipment to their outside entities.

We had the 840 model, but it became outdated, so we brought in some fast 2750s, and we plan to add some 250s to step up with technology. The ONTAP tools make managing VMware easier.

We look forward to using NetApp's zero-trust technology. We've been looking into new ways to develop it, and we've got a hybrid FlexPod situation because we do not use Cisco UCS servers. However, we still use that capability due to security requirements that are tied to Cisco. It allows us to address the zero-trust architecture as we develop it for our site.

It's hard to find in-person training that fits our schedule in our area. They offer a lot of online training, but we need somewhere to go because we can't really get away from the office. 

Dell EMC and HP are two storage providers we looked at. We decided to go with NetApp because of the high-quality support we get for Cisco systems and the fact that we can actually make a single call to Cisco or NetApp to get answers from either. 

We're in a disconnected environment and their standalone support systems that don't require cloud access or access to a host provider help. We can take some of our logs off the system and email them to tech support. It helps us because we don't always need somebody to come from the vendor for an on-site visit. 

Support is always our priority. When NetApp develops new technologies, we appreciate that they're willing to share that information and provide a roadmap outlining a transition from where you are to where you could be. This is a critical factor in choosing them as our storage provider. 

I rate NetApp solutions 10 out of 10. You have the right tools, knowledge, and phenomenal customer service, so it helps with everything we're doing and enables us to complete our mission quicker and easier. We can't just reach into the cloud to get support. NetApp allows us to call and start those tech cases. It's great.

NetApp has allowed us to get all of our storage onto one platform across various facilities, and it's eased the management of that storage.

It's enabled us to allow admins across the IT organization to more easily manage their own subset of data within our organization.

NetApp has allowed us to streamline internal operations. It makes it very easy for us to provision storage when we need it. So when storage needs come up, being on this product, it's typically very easy for us to meet those needs without needing to make large changes to our environment.

We're pretty much just using the solution's hardware. We're using FAS systems. We're not really leveraging the cloud services yet. At this point, it's mostly the on-prem hardware and the product ecosystem that we're leveraging.

A big upside is being able to restore from previous snapshots. With this product, we have good snapshot availability and good snapshot retention. On lesser storage platforms, we didn't have the ability to so easily go back to previous versions of our data. That's a big reason that the solution is beneficial to us as an organization.

There is some learning curve that goes into it. It's been a bit of a journey for us to to learn how to leverage everything. That's not a knock against the product; it's just sort of a learning curve so that it does take a little bit of time to introduce it to an environment. It's not like you can just know how to use it right away.

A big problem with physical appliances is that updating them can be a bit burdensome. It can take a lot of labor time. I would like to see the ONTAP platform become a little more hands-off with upgrades.

We're considering expanding. We're not committed to it yet. We're weighing our options and considering expanding our usage. It can help us manage our data more effectively and get our data better governed, which will prepare us for the future. It could also help us get to the cloud. AI is coming and it could help us there.

We've used Dell's storage offerings, which are not as mature, even though they add storage. We've used Synology as well. NetApp is in a class above those two offerings. When we acquired these products, it was a bit more of commodity hardware. As we've integrated into that ecosystem, we are beginning to try to leverage some more of what the product offers.

It offers a level of compatibility, protocol offerings, and management options that other products lack.

Cost is a big factor in our decision-making process. When we're buying storage, the first thing we look at is how much we're paying per gigabyte. Cost has been the driving factor when choosing this solution. It might not be the cheapest option; however, when you see the value you're getting from it, then it begins to be more cost-effective.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a really good product. It's a really powerful product, which makes it an eight.

We've had this product prior to the whole AI surge that's going on right now. And at this point, we haven't really changed our environment to react to that yet. We may do it in the future. 

For future investments, our goals will focus on performance needs and increasing workloads. Cybersecurity will be prioritized. It's our biggest priority. Safeguarding the data is the first job that we all have as data administrators. Having good cybersecurity, and hopefully, with the help of this product, will allow us to more confidently go down new innovation journeys and try new things. A lot of times, when you want to innovate, you need to consider first how it will impact your security. If we have good visibility on our cybersecurity, it'll allow us to innovate more effectively.

We are a big unstructured file data storage company. We use NetApp solutions like AFF for our unstructured data. NetApp is primarily for provisioning storage and maintaining unstructured data.

We love NetApp. We haven't had any significant issues, and it's a great technology. They are going in the right direction. NetApp has helped us serve data to customers through NetApp. We host multiple applications. One of them is next-generation sequencing (NGS), which is one of the critical operating platforms or applications, and NetApp has been instrumental in this.

The NetApp solution has streamlined our operations, incredibly improving the time it takes to deliver to businesses. Their cloud offerings are great. You can spin up the NetApp instance within a few minutes, reducing the total time it takes to offer service to the customer.

We plan to expand usage in the future. Our renewals are coming up next year, so we hope we'll have the greatest systems installed at our site. Our future investments will prioritize data storage, optimization, and cybersecurity. 

We are not doing AI now, but we look forward to it. From the ransomware perspective, it's excellent that NetApp offers a guarantee when you sign up for that feature.

NetApp's cloud-based FAS has been a massive help for unstructured data. 

NetApp could improve costs while making the solution more straightforward to use and deploy. 

We have Dell EMC Unity arrays. NetApp offers better reliability and cost of ownership for unstructured data. 

I rate NetApp eight out of 10. If they could bring total costs down and make it easier to deploy the on-prem systems quicker, I would give it a 10. 

There are many different use cases, but the main use case for NetApp, as I know it, is NAS. It is among the top contenders when it comes to providing a robust solution for establishing a connection between applications and storage. NetApp is probably first or second in this field.

It provides easy integration between applications and storage. It helps implement storage provisioning services and protection services and automate everything from the application to the storage. That is the best outcome for the customers.

NetApp has everything when it comes to regulations, compliance, and security. When it comes to AI, things are not that simple, but AI can help a lot with preventive maintenance and anticipation of any threats.

One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments. If the customer wants to engage with the technology, whether it is a block or a file, he has the same UI to manage, automate, protect, and implement something. Netapp offers unified protocols in the same machine, which I find very easy to use.

The same GUI manages and automates tasks, protecting and implementing applications seamlessly. This represents a software approach with hardware support.

One area that needs improvement is the hyper-converged solution. Although NetApp has a solution, compared to Nutanix, it falls short. Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio. Today, NetApp does not provide a server because it is not in their business model. For AI, they can provide storage support, but they lack computation solutions. It may be more effective for them to work with partners, such as Cisco, to provide the CPU, etc. Only companies like Dell and HPE can currently provide these solutions, but not NetApp.

I have used the solution for five years. I used it in my previous organization.

Good globaly

Depending on the product your are using in NetApp portfolio but they can scale easily.

It is dependent on the country because sometimes the support is delivered by the local partner providing level one and two support. From our customers' perspective, support experience can vary. It greatly depends on the country and the size of the business. Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined. If the implementation was wrong from the start, the support could not fix fundamental issues.

Positive

NA

The choice depends on the company's strategy, but I believe Dell is predominantly the leading vendor globally in storage. I cannot engage without considering Dell. While Huawei offers good products, being a Chinese company, it may not be viable for public sectors. Dell is NetApp's primary competitor, followed by HPE and IBM. Covering all of NetApp's portfolio, Dell seems to be the foremost competitor, followed by HPE or IBM.

Overall, I would rate the product an eight out of ten.

We sold a very big solution this month. We sold two AFF 1K, A1K, and R2 with high availability with ONTAP on-premises to a large financial company. 

We are now working on an upgrade for another company. We are working on an upgrade to NetApp FAS Series 9150. They have a fiber channel MetroCluster, so they cannot move to an IP MetroCluster.

It helps us meet all customer requirements. Customers have been using NetApp for many years. They are very satisfied with NetApp and continue to use NetApp and upgrade to new solutions. They are very comfortable with the technology.

At this moment, autonomous ransomware protection is the key feature. Artificial intelligence, deduplication, and optimization are valuable. The AFF C-Series solutions that NetApp offers are great. I have sold a lot of AFF C-Series solutions because the cost of the disks is cheaper.

The adoption of the cloud in Argentina is very slow. Customers do not move most of their applications to the cloud. Moving applications is a simple task, but the cost is a concern in Argentina. There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

I have known NetApp for twenty years. I started working with NetApp in 2007 and continue to this day.

I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

It is a little complex. It is not the complexity of the product; it is the complexity because of the money.

We sold our own professional services. We have a professional engineer who installs and trains the customer, and we install the product. The satisfaction with our solution engineering is the best. We provide our own services, so the customer is happy with the service we provide them.

Customers always consider all companies and most of the business decisions are based on the global price at the end of the day. The competition offers similar solutions, but they are not the same solution. At the end of the day, the customer chooses the cheaper solution in most cases.

When the customer needs a NAS solution, NetApp is the first vendor they think of. In Argentina, most customers use SAN solutions, and for SAN solutions, they think of EMC, HPE, and IBM. Now, with the ASA solutions, NetApp is considered but not like with NAS solutions.

For me, it is a ten out of ten.