NetApp OnCommand Insight Reviews

The analytics over it. The ability to connect to any type of storage device that I've got, then extract and report in a centralized manner on all my SAN infrastructure.

It's a centralized structure that has the ability to connect to any storage platform, it doesn't matter if it's NetApp or not, and be able to report consistently on all my fabric. It's the greatest advantage that I've have.

I would like them to change the licensing model. It costs too much.

It goes on raw instead of going on usable storage. It doesn't necessarily have a value when you deploy, for example, a 400TB storage and I'm only using 60GB out of it at the beginning. Then, I have to pay for the entire 400TB, which is very costly, instead of having a growing up session.

It's very stable.

Scalability is fairly reasonable.

We just increased the number of agents that we have, so we didn't have any issues in deploying it. NetApp has been there with us since Day One to do the analysis and to iron out a plan for deployment. No issues there. That's very standard.

We go directly to our account manager, who we feel is knowledgeable and responsive, and put in the requirements there.

It's probably the performance trending and the analytics that we have on that. We didn't have good insight into what our systems were doing until we had that product.

We also started installing the anomaly piece of that, so that's neat to see, and source. We're still just learning about that.

The benefits are just allowing us to get a better view of our environment, because today we just don't know what's happening. I know it's going to help us change our services that we offer today. Now, we're going to be able to set up different tiers and service levels based on our actual usage.

It has a lot already. But if they would just continue the platform support for other vendors besides NetApp on the OCI part. Just to get more of our storage vendors involved.

The UI is friendly. But I think we'd like to see more graphics on it, more graphical reports for management and the like, so we don't have to actually put stuff together. Anything we can pre-generate or that is canned is a lot better.

Like I said, we're still learning about it. I don't know if there are any features that they can improve right now that I know about.

Six months.

So far, it's been stable. No issues whatsoever. Knocking on wood we won't have any.

It scales to our environment, so I would say it's fine.

I think we have used the technical support. I haven't personally, but I know the guy that's setting it up has. We love it. They're very responsive and they follow up. We get the results we need. They're knowledgeable.

We've had lots of outages before. Like I said, they came back in and they followed up, gave us the right technical stuff. A lot of times, they'll do it proactively. There will be a bug out there and we won't have hit it yet, but then they'll tell us about it beforehand, so we can proactively fix it before it happens.

No. Before, we were just using the native tools on ONTAP. We needed to have a way to look at our performance statistics.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

In terms of upgrades, when I was doing it a long time ago, it was straightforward.

We're in the Finance field. But I wouldn't say this solution is uniquely valuable to finance. It's just good for all the storage environment.

I like the performance side the most. When we have an issue going on currently in the environment, the graphing of all the data helps pinpoint where the issue might be.

For the reporting side, the data warehouse side, if you're good with that, it can get really detailed reports that are good for showing people, at any level of the company. For the performance side, obviously it's good for troubleshooting.

I'd say for the cDOT side of it, yes. We had a solution for 7-mode, but for cDOT we didn't really have anything yet, so it helped by making sure that our NetApp source is staying healthy and our implementations are working.

They've already got better stuff coming out. I don't know what else I could need, honestly. Before, they had the fiber channel for switches on there; I think they are already coming out with ethernet, the other boards. That was what I wanted and they're already working on it.

One thing they could improve is making the data warehouse side easier to use.

A little over a year.

It's very stable once you get it into place. There were originally some issues; NetApp was very helpful in working through them, getting patches, and it's pretty stable now.

In terms of those issues, It wouldn't connect to some of the NetApps sometimes, so we would have incomplete data on certain NetApps because there were bugs with certain ONTAP versions. But, they will come out with patches if you need them.

You can add as many NetApps in there that you need to, I think. As many NetApps that you can put in there, even EMCs. We have our EMCs in there, SAN switches, and even VMware. So it's definitely scalable.

They were really helpful, they helped to troubleshoot the issue and to get as quick a fix as we could.

We initially invested in OCI to improve our reporting in our environment because we wanted to be able to predict purchases in the future. So that was what the tool seemed to be good for.

We chose NetApp because we have something like 50 NetApps, so it seemed like the right way to go.

I felt like it was complex. They said it was simple but, they have a guy who will come out and help you through the process. He gave me a slight tutorial. Like I said, the data warehouse side is a lot more complex. So it had more of a learning curve, versus the performance side, which is pretty straightforward once you learn everything.

Regarding upgrades, the first one was complex, I think because we didn't have a lot of space on the server. But the backup wasn't working, so they wanted to back it up and then you restore from the backup to the new version. But the last one we did was very easy. So it's getting better.

We do web.com, basically web hosting. I don't think this product is uniquely valuable in our industry. I think its pretty much good for anyone that has a NetApp, if you want the performance, or however you're doing it. It helps us maintain up-time for our customers, such as websites; that's why it helps there.

• The tracking of utilization of our storage systems.
• Seeing the throughput.

These are the most important metrics for having a working operating system and working storage system.

It's centralized. It's got a lot of data in there. We can utilize the data that's in there and the output to other systems to run scripts off of it. Therefore, it's pretty versatile.

Any increase in loading times, or anything like that, would be useful for us. It's slow, the user interface could be improved a little bit. You have to click through a lot of things in order to be able to find what you want. Also, the dashboards aren't very user-friendly.

We've had Insight for two years.

We haven't had any issues yet.

Very scalable, as long as you have the licenses. You just have to buy more licenses for more storage. As long as you have the money, you can support it.

We don't really use technical support for Insight. We haven't needed it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

It already uses restful API, so it's on top of things.

What I get out of it: the day-to-day monitoring. In my role as an administrator, I'm primarily responsible for operational functionality, so I mostly use it to keep an eye on the system and make sure that we're meeting our SLAs and we're up and running.

Since we have to monitor multiple systems, it gives us a single pane of glass to look at all of our environments. Also, to compare and contrast, if one environment is having some issues, we can judge it against the other environments to make sure everything is on par with one another.

In the financial services industry, customer responsiveness is very important. Financial advisors cannot sit in front of a customer and say, "I can't get your data." Thus, being up and running and constantly available is a very important area for our client.

Alerting: It's not complicated, but with so many groups involved in setting up something like an SNMP trap, or even an email alerting system, so many different groups have to get involved. If there was a simpler way to do that, to bypass a lot of that bureaucracy, that would be helpful. Then, just to make it even easier for management to have their own dashboards, possibly customize it.

I've been using this solution in my current position in the financial services industry for about seven months.

It's been very stable. The entire NetApp environment has been extremely stable. We really don't have issues across the board with uptime.

We actually have a relatively low footprint, so we haven't scaled it up very much. Though I know we're not even close to pushing the boundaries of what we could do with it.

I have not specifically used tech support.

We chose NetApp because we look for a vendor who can provide value-added support, not just break and fix, but best practices, advice, roadmap information, information about other case studies from other customers in similar situations, and the ability to really help us (not just install the product), but to use the product and extract the maximum value out of it. Also, they really know our environment.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We also have not upgraded yet.

I would not have been privy to that. When those decisions were made, it was before I started.

If you're going to do any reasonable-sized NetApp installation, you need to have it. You just can't manage it effectively without that level of support. You can try to roll it out your own, or you can bring in a third party, and there are some good third parties out there, but if you really just want to get something up and running and you want to be able to manage it, it's the fastest way to get it going.