NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The ability to have insight into how our systems are being used.

The benefit is that it is not just the storage itself. It also covers our switches. It is multi-vendor, therefore we are not just talking about NetApp. We also have the ability to report on VMs, which is pretty important nowadays, because almost all our systems are VMs.

The ability to better manage the graphs and the dashboards: Resizing them, positioning them, and the ability to publish them outside of OCI to websites or SharePoint.

Sold differently, the user interface (UI) would be easier. At times, it seems a little bit slow. We find when it draws data that there is a lag.

The reporting tool is very cumbersome, and it is difficult to create reports out of it. That is the most complicated part of the tool and how to use it.

I have been using it for six months.

We suffer a little bit from stability. At each batching cycle, we find some services that needs to be restarted. It has its moments. Even restarting the services does not help with the restart. I think there is work to do there to improve it.

It is fairly scalable. We have not hit the limits yet, but we believe that it will be fairly easy to scale.

We have used the tech support. Unfortunately, every time we try to get a technician specialized in the solution, it seems like we always go to the wrong department or wrong area. There needs to be improvement to direct our calls to the right place, so we can talk to the right person.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was fairly complex. Due to what this tool is capable of, I think that is expected.

It is a great tool.

This is a very good tool to see everything on an overview: Where and what are the devices, how much storage you are using, how much Apple storage, and with what connectivity is being used.

You will get a total view of your storage.

Because we can use it financially, we use it for inventory purpose. You can use it, not only for reporting, but you can identify connectivity and storage issues. You can pull performance reports.

We are a consulting company and we use it for various purposes.

• Email notifications
• Data store recoveries
• Moving into the cloud.

They should include more of these type of things.

We have used this solution for the last six years.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is nice, for all scales.

We use the tech support. They are good.

We are able to get through, and they will follow up for anything they are not able to give us the solution to immediately. They will work with internally among themselves, then they will get back to us.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, except for a firewall issue.

The flexibility to use it.

It simplified the administration of our storages and environment.

The product is not easy to learn from the materials provided. We still have questions regarding it.

I have been using it for about three years.

I executed/deployed it the first time alone. When I need support, I ask for it.

The stability is very good. We have not had a problem yet.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is good. They solve the problems/issues that we have.

It gives us the ability to report on all our storage environment. It gives us a way to monitor, visualize, and pinpoint problems.

We can focus on and project usage growth. We can also monitor and measure performance of all the stores. We can compare, use it for capacity planning, forecasting, present usage.

We can also compare performance over several years. Compare different products from different vendors and see how they perform against each other. There are many things that you can do with it.

It gives us a lot of data that, years ago, we didn't have. We can present that in order to prepare, when we're going to buy new equipment. We know, when we create a lifecycle, how long it's going to last, the current equipment, and what are we going to replace it with.

We use it for troubleshooting and to identify the root cause of problems. We also use it for proof of concept and comparisons.

We're in telecommunications and media. I would say OCI is uniquely valuable to us because it give us the data and it provides a more visual a way of evaluating our current storage environment.

I would like to see more performance features on the flash storage and also on the backup appliances.

Also the ability to analyze NAS, NFS and CIFS protocols and cloud protocols.

At least four years.

It is stable. It is mature. I have had issues, but I have resolved most of them myself.

On the reporting piece, sometimes I get a corruption in the database, but since we protect it and back it up constantly, we can always go back to before the damage is done.

I have upgraded, maybe four times, different versions. The very first upgrade was not that easy to do because we had an old version and then it required being in a different version to upgrade automatically. But after we did that first one, they've been easy.

Tech support is real good.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because of the features that it lacks and the stability, although that is getting better. It's still an eight but it's getting better.

The ability to get reports out, to see what OCI is doing for us, and we can see what our capacity is. We can also see performance reports.

So capacity and performance are two of the big things we use it for.

We're in the telecommunications industry and we're an actual service provider as well. I work in the service providing part . We have all of these external customers that have their pay-for-storage on our storage arrays. We're able to see through annotation how much each of those customers is using and we can use it for billing purposes.

It's given us a better concept of what we've got out there and where our hurt points are, where we need some more work in the different areas, where we might need to move volumes around to get better performance, and also definitely to see where that capacity is, see if we need to add more storage.

We would like to see the ability to produce more complex reports without having to go to Professional Services.

About two years.

Very stable.

Very scalable. We've recently just got the two servers for data warehouse and collection and we've haven't even hit capacity on them yet.

We've used it extensively. They're awesome, very good.

Fairly straightforward, but after that, it's very complex to use and to learn and understand.

• Performance monitoring
• Monitoring events happening within the cluster
• Notifications we're receiving, mainly for monitoring

We can see the real-time status of the systems and, of course, monitoring. We have visibility in general.

There was a minor issue where we were receiving a notification that a cluster was not available, or communication to the cluster. OnCommand Manager could not reach a cluster, which is really much like a false positive. The minor issues were communications within the systems.

We have used the product less than a year; we installed probably six months ago.

It's a stable solution. Sometimes we receive a small number of false-positive alerts, but in general we can monitor the system efficiently.

Very scalable.

I have opened a few cases with NetApp support and, of course, I received valuable information. I was able to get through to the right person.

This is part of a migration, of migrating storage from EMC to NetApp. Once we migrated some data to NetApp storage we deployed OnCommand, the application as well, at the same time.

I was not involved in the initial setup of this product specifically, but now I'm involved in migrating from our current version to the new release that is available, which will help us to resolve the issues we've experienced.

We are in the real estate industry. We are using NetApp storage to store various types of data: flat files, file servers, we have host of Microsoft Sequel Server databases, Oracle databases, so we're using a wide range of data to store.

Some of the most valuable ones are actually being able to pull statistics off of the devices within our enterprise and correlate them to predict trends which are happening. 

Biggest benefits are with analytics on devices and some of the applications. Case in point, Exchange and SQL, seeing how they are doing with trending, then as we are adding things, see how it is changing that trend.

In the government and military industries specifically, it is unique. It has helped a lot. It is a little misunderstood still, but what we are getting out of it and what we are providing to the leadership has been extremely valuable to them. 

We can't encompass everything into it yet. E.g., the plugins for the other vendors' products that we can't currently monitor.

I have been using it for just over a year now.

I came into it after it was already in place. However, it was being underutilized, so we started bringing in a few of the OCI experts to spin us up to speed on what it is capable of and how we could use it.

It is extremely stable. 

For scalability, out of a 10, I would give it a nine. Mainly, this is because we have some other vendors' solutions, like Nutanix, where we do not have the plugins for them yet.

The data analytics for helping track down issues.

It's quicker to fix issues.

They're moving away from the Java interface, but there are still some things that are only in the Java versus the web interface.

About three years.

It's a stable product. No issues.

I think there are issues with the Java Stack. Java seems to use a lot more memory than other solutions.

I haven't used it.

We're a water and electric company. I wouldn't say the product is uniquely valuable to our industry, but it is valuable.

It's moving in the right direction. I think there are some things that it still hasn't quite got but it's a very good product.