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.
Storage Tech at General Dynamics Mission Systems–Canada
Dec 19, 2018
We over-allocate our aggregates and it still works, it's great, it's fun. We dedupe everywhere, we get huge savings. We went back and deduped the whole thing again, we could get more, so that's what we do. We go back and look to see if there's an option we can set and do it from the beginning, but still 13 terabytes, that's a lot of dedupe savings. Sometimes we get 50% or more in our savings, so we love dedupe.
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Oct 28, 2018
We have been using it for our entire environment, so we use it in file shares and in our VDI environment, at least for user data. That has reduced our user login times by about 50 percent.
I would rate this solution a ten because of what NetApp provides us from a quality layout. The partnership that they provide us and their assistance is very important and the work that they communicate with us on a regular basis is outstanding.
The most valuable feature is the throughput. You tend to get to your data very quickly. That's why we decided, eventually, to move into NetApp, because of the speed. Also, as a support engineer, this solution is easy to use, compared with SAN storage.
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.
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.
Storage Tech at General Dynamics Mission Systems–Canada
Dec 19, 2018
We're at 9.3 so when we go to 9.5 we would like the synchronous SnapMirror because our users would like that, especially the ones that do the conveyor belt of data. We'd like that.
There is a lot a lot of functional integration that we look forward to for improvements. I'm learning where they're going and I'm very interested to see those improvements and how they can help us.
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.
The additional features I would like to see in ONTAP, and NetApp in general would probably be the single pane of glass software. Over the years that's probably the biggest area that we've struggled with. NetApp has had a lot of good products, but a lot of them haven't necessarily seamlessly integrated with each other and you have to go to multiple management consoles to manage their software or their hardware. From a customer point of view, I think that single pane of glass where you could just add modules and enable functionality would be the most beneficial thing that NetApp could add.
