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NetApp ONTAP pros and cons

Vendor: NetApp

4.3 out of 5

93 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

NetApp ONTAP excels in scalability and seamless integration, accommodating organizational growth with ease while providing robust disaster recovery through SnapMirror technology. It maximizes storage efficiency via advanced compression and deduplication. While renowned for its reliability and protocol versatility (SMB, NFS, iSCSI), areas needing improvement include S3 integration, cloud sync, automation capabilities, backup efficiency, technical support, and scalability for block-based storage and FlexGroup volumes compared to Flex volumes.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

NetApp ONTAP excels in scalability, allowing the seamless addition of nodes and storage capacity, accommodating growing organizational needs.

The platform provides robust disaster recovery features through SnapMirror technology, enabling rapid data replication and recovery.

Its efficiency in compression and deduplication significantly reduces storage costs while maximizing capacity utilization.

NetApp ONTAP is praised for reliability, ensuring continuous uptime and performance with minimal downtime.

The technology supports various protocols like SMB, NFS, and iSCSI, enhancing operational versatility and data accessibility.

CONS

NetApp ONTAP requires improved S3 integration with other vendors and better cloud integration, including object storage deployment and cloud-based compute synchronization.

Backup capabilities and storage efficiency in comparison to competitors like Dell EMC need enhancements.

Technical support quality and response time should be improved, particularly for critical case handling.

There is a need for better automation abilities and more comprehensive API support.

Improvement is required in scalability, especially for block-based storage and FlexGroup volumes compared to Flex volumes.

NetApp ONTAP Pros review quotes

Admin at Centene

Oct 8, 2017

If someone was looking to buy one I would say: I love the ONTAP operating system.

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MR

Storage Engineer at Bank of NY

Oct 23, 2018

It has the ability to bring up disaster recovery quickly.

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AS

Enterprise Solutions Specialist at Lenovo (United States)

Oct 23, 2018

Efficiencies such as Flash Cache and Flash Pool allow us to make better use of slower, cheaper storage and have some faster storage sitting up front taking a lot of the caching and the reading. The way that has been optimized for the NetApp platform is better than the competitors. It has reduced our cost of storage because we're buying cheaper storage for the bulk capacity, which is really effective.

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PG

Chief Administrative Officer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Oct 23, 2018

We have been able to save about 10 to 15% on space using the space consumption features.

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AK

Storage Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 24, 2018

The scalability is very good. It enables us to use different product lines within the same operating system.

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Systems Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 24, 2018

Scalability is good. Now that we have the ability to add more nodes to the cluster, it's better. It allows us to grill our clusters allowing them to be larger and faster, without having to buy a whole new system.

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Storage Engineer at Evolent Health

Oct 24, 2018

Clustered ONTAP makes it very easy to manage large amounts of data, measured in petabytes. One person can manage all that.

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Executive Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward

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SS

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

I love the replication technologies which keep a customer out of risk. At any time, we can do a seamless failover/failback, and have the latest data on it. The SnapVault is another excellent feature. It's used for remote disk-based backups so we don't need to depend on tape backups with their long restore times.

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Storage Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

The most valuable features are the data deduplication, the inline compression/compaction, and the encryption as well, the security aspect of it.

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NetApp ONTAP Cons review quotes

Admin at Centene

Oct 8, 2017

There have been some random crashes we have had though, from a couple weird things.

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MR

Storage Engineer at Bank of NY

Oct 23, 2018

The toughest thing that we have right now is a cabling issue. There are so many that you need to connect.

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AS

Enterprise Solutions Specialist at Lenovo (United States)

Oct 23, 2018

I would like to see more in the public cloud space around things like object storage. A bit more granularity around how that gets deployed would be nice, but other than that I think they've got it nailed.

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Free Report: NetApp ONTAP Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NetApp ONTAP. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.

PG

Chief Administrative Officer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Oct 23, 2018

They could also improve on their ability to back up storage.

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AK

Storage Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 24, 2018

I would like to see more evolution towards the cloud.

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Systems Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 24, 2018

I would like to see more integration into the cloud, as we are pushing to do more cloud-based compute. It is just easier to get the storage and everything synced up there and move to the cloud. We want NetApp to keep down the cloud integration path. It still needs some improvement. Overall, there needs to be more cloud integration in all NetApp products.

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Storage Engineer at Evolent Health

Oct 24, 2018

I would like to see volume efficiency come closer to what Dell EMC can do with, for instance, their XtremIO platform.

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Executive Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

The vendor diagnostics, which allows for movement from one vendor to another vendor using the application technology that is available. It should be able to talk to any vendor, not just NetApp to NetApp. We should be able to replicate the data, so the next feature should not be vendor specific.

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SS

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

The only thing that they have to improve in NetApp is that they're still relying on padding each node in active/active in CDOT. That has to go away. They should look at the scalability on a platform level. The computer will have that one file system with multiple nodes on it. If even one node fails, any node in that cluster could take over the functionalities. But today, it absolutely relies on that active-active uncoupling it. That needs to be improved in such a way that it would be one namespace. If this node goes down, any node in the cluster should take over and run that environment.

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Storage Engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

Oct 24, 2018

I could see the GUI being a little bit more refined, the presentation layer being a little stronger, a little less sluggish.

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