NetApp ONTAP Reviews

Definitely ONTAP. The command line. It's super easy to use.

The ONTAP is so easy to use. I can do my tasks pretty easily on there. If someone needs something quickly I can give them what they need pretty quickly.

The one thing I would really like to see - I don't know if they offer this or not. I know EMC has got really good: their SRDF replication is really good for keeping consistency with your backups, or the other side.

NetApp is crash consistent. I don't know the quality of the EMC one but that one seems to work really well. EMC is primarily block storage anyway so that is what it is build for.

It's pretty stable. There have been some random crashes we have had though, from a couple weird things.

There always seems to be some random bug in the code. If there is a random bug in the code, it seems like we have so many of these storage arrays that one of them is going to experience a crash from it. We have had a couple like that, zombie deletes, causing the controller to panic. We have had a couple weird things like that.

Never really implemented one but it seemed to be pretty easy to scale out. If you have the money to buy one, to scale it out is nothing crazy.

We have an in-house resource and usually, if there is something going wrong, he is the one that will handle it and give it direction. If we ever call it in we always get the front-line people and typically we don't need the front-line people. When we need support we need someone specialized, like a certain protocol or a certain aspect. Usually, that's kind of annoying, when we call in it's getting front-line people and it is an extra 30 minutes just to get to where we need to go, really.

No, ever since I have been here at Centene, we have been using NetApp.

I know NetApp and EMC are at the top, but other than that we don't really have any. I haven't seen much for any other vendor, like Nimble or like a couple of others, we don't really deal with those.

We use it for datastores, and do a little bit of SAN on it too. We use it for both, block and file storage.

My impression of NetApp as avendor of high performance SAN storage is that it's not as good as EMC. I don't have any complaints, really. I primarily use NetApp. I only use the EMCs a little bit.

I am more likely to consider NetApp for mission critical storage systems based on my experience with AFF. The failover seems to work pretty well, they seem to be pretty reliable. If you have a lot of clusters, a cluster that's broke out, it works pretty well. If it fails or crashes, you still have to fix it but it still works.

Performance is pretty good. It's a little hard to compare because I'm not really on the OS side. I don't really delegate storage provision so I hardly ever get to see the other side of the systems.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria include is: can the vendor supply a solution that we need? If we need block storage, can they do block storage very well? If we need good replication, can they provide that? It just depends on what we need it for and if they can provide that solution the best. Our company doesn't have any really money constraint problems. It's more just about the solution than about the cost.

If someone was looking to buy one I would say: I love the ONTAP operating system. The support is pretty good. I would say the block side of NetApp is probably the weak point. It still does it well, but if you are doing file shares and datastores, you could use it for that. That is primarily what we use it for.

The primary use case is to move from Fibre Channel to SolidFire.

We see it drastically improving our organization. We are trying to move away from Fibre Channel. SolidFire with iSCSI will change a lot going forward in the organization.

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.

The solution is stable, and upcoming releases will make it more stable.

Right now, there are some limitations. However, what I am hearing is that future technologies will be more scalable than what we have now.

They have pretty good technical support. They have a different support model for the hypervisor customers, so I have been quite happy with the support until now.

The previous solutions that we have are both IP and Fibre Channel-based. We are moving away from Fibre Channel, so we wanted to look for a new solution which was IP-based.

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward.

We have seen ROI.

We looked at multiple vendors.

We use it for electronic design automation, build, and regression.

• The management stack
• Performance visibility tools
• Replications

The product already has more features than we can keep up with. 

I'm looking for a performance bump.

It is very stable.

It is good from a capacity perspective, but not as good as we need from a performance perspective, but I'm hopeful going forward. At the moment, we are always running out of CPU on the controllers, even the high-end solutions.

The technical support is very good.

cDOT is more complex than 7-Mode, but we're hoping that NetApp makes it simpler as time goes on.

We used a VAR for the deployment. We have a good relationship with them.

NetApp has been our workhorse solution for more than 20 years now. It's our main solution that we use. We have been using other vendors for the high performance stuff, but I'd like to see a future where NetApp is an option in this space again.

We use NetApp for its capacity, mid-range performance in the management stack, and its features set are unparalleled. We go to Dell EMC Isilon and Pure Storage FlashBlade for raw performance on things that we can't do on NetApp today.

I would give it an eight out of ten on its feature set, maturity, and global product availability.

Up and coming vendors can provide performance or specific features. However, compared to Hardware Universe, Unified Manager, and replication, along with spectrum, from the FAS2000 that we use out our small sites to FAS9000 that we use for big regressions, these other company don't have the breadth to the feature set that NetApp has today.

We use it to manage data in the cloud.

It has improved our mobility in managing our data anywhere and anytime.

Also, because it is deployed and managed from NetApp Cloud Manager as a software-only solution on Amazon EC2 compute instances, managing Amazon EBS storage enables customers to build a virtual storage solution directly on Amazon resources.

• Total control of data in the cloud
• Multiple consumption modes
• Rapid deployment

In addition, we have some databases hosted in this solution and are very impressed by the performance and speed of the solution.

The way you attach, move, migrate, and access LUNs is complicated, and if you do not know how to do it, it can be a great problem for your IT environment.

It can scale according to your IT needs.

There are two consumption methods: pay as you go and subscription. Pay as you go is purchased directly from your AWS account and is charged either on an hourly basis or annually. It is a little expensive but worth it.

Purchasing this solution through AWS Marketplace was secure. We purchased it there because we are AWS customers.

In terms of other products it works with in our environment, we have only tried it with database workloads in AWS.

I rate this solution at ten out of ten because NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a level of flexibility that allows you to pay for what you need, when you need it.

We use it to manage our NetApps.

We used to have to log in to each cluster per NetApp to view statistics on it or the logs, if something was wrong. But now we can use ONTAP to view all the clusters and it shows us if something is full of space or not.

The most valuable feature of the solution is to be able to view multiple clusters on one pane of glass.

I find it to be very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all since we started using it, two to three years ago.

It's very scalable. We're in the gaming industry. We had 12 casinos and now we have 26 casinos. You can just input all of the NetApps. There weren't any problems.

The technical support hasn't been that great. A couple of times we have had to call support and it took a long time to get somebody on the phone, it took a long time for someone to call us back. That's the only downside, the support.

This is a type of solution that we didn't have before. It was new to NetApp. We jumped on it right away, as soon as we learned that we could view multiple clusters on one web page.

It was straightforward. We just had to build a VM for the ONTAP and install the software on that. It was easy after that.

We installed it ourselves.

We can scale it better, having multiple clusters at once. It also saves us time. One of us can log in to check over all of our casinos at once, compared to having to log in, one at a time, to check a casino and see how its storage is going. It's a very good return on investment.

We mostly had NetApp in our infrastructure already. We really had to go with them based on that. The alternative was buying a whole new solution, software, storage, etc. We didn't really have a shortlist of other options.

Test it out, go with a PoC on it to see if it's what you need in your environment. If you have a majority of NetApp, I would say, “Go with it.” I would recommend it.

I would give ONTAP about an eight out of ten because it does everything we need it to do. The two points I took off were for customer service and technical support.

I have use this storage appliance, which they have on-premise. It is for taking backup off onsite data. This is a storage and NAS device.

Its typical use case is storing files and getting data, so it does its use case well.

When it accesses regular files, it does so as an NFS workload, which retrieves data quickly.

The initial UI integration could be quite a lot better.

I would like to have deduplication and SSD features in the product.

If you have huge data, you will see stability issues. Since we didn't have that data, our stability has been fine.

We previously haven't had a huge workload, so it scaled fine. Though, with our current use case, we will need something faster. E.g., if you have a huge scale, having SSD-based backup is better. 

We did not contact technical support, as the solution was working fine.

The integration and configuration are not straightforward. We had to read some documentation and receive support. A good UI may be helpful in resolving this.

We looked at various Dell EMC products at the time and considered using VMAX. We also looked at Nimble Storage. For some reason, we did not look at Pure Storage.

We chose NetApp because had some collaboration or a sales representative who approached us, then convinced us of the use case.

Based on the use case, it can be a good product.

We have just one application where we store data, and we haven't had problems with it.

We are a storage provider for a government entity. We serve data to profilers and other government entities.

ONTAP allows us to scale and grow as needed and also be flexible in the way we operate.

The most valuable features are:

• It's scalable.
• It's easy to failover and failback.
• There's no downtime.

They should make the storage arrays more easily tied to your accounts.

It's very stable, and definitely become more stable over time. When Clustered Data ONTAP first came out, there were quite a few bugs. However, with the latest releases, we have been pretty happy.

Scalability is good. We're happy with it.

It should be easier to put in tech support cases. For example, sometimes you have to call in for a bad disk. You have to stay on the phone for 20 minutes to speak to a person just to get a new disk. They should streamline the online support and chat. 

Most people wouldn't have this problem, but we have multiple site numbers we have to deal with. A lot of times it's just easier to go through the 20-minute conversation than trying to find for them the specific storage problem.

Over time, systems age and the amount of FAS that you could fit into a rack three years ago was a lot different than what you can now. We needed to find something flexible which allows us to customize solutions as we go.

NetApp is typically more complex than normal storage systems. I like it though. There's a lot more granularity and you can configure it the way you want it. 

We used Professional Services, and we do it on our own as well. So far, our experience with Professional Services has been great. We're still in the process. They give us guidance. We have our own way that we like to deploy, but it's nice to have their input and information. Just having them there to be able to bounce an idea off of is helpful.

We have seen ROI as we can fit a lot more storage in one rack.

We use multiple different vendors for different scenarios.

I'm pretty happy with ONTAP.

We are a NetApp distributor. We offer assistance for banking solutions, energy companies, and companies that do retail.

We distribute Netapp as well as a variety of other products, like VMware, for example. We use all our products to provide our customers with a whole solution.

Efficiency. We have found that its efficiency has reduced the amount of storage that the customers need, while keeping the same amount of data. 

They constantly develop new features that provide the customers with ways they can better use the system.

Deployment guides. If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides.

It has almost 100% stability.

The solution is very scalable. We have found that the ability to add other nodes to the online cluster during production has been really useful for customers.

NetApp has very good technical support across all of their products. They have many ways to contact support and you receive support almost instantly.

The customers like the support as well. The customer has on-site support with a four-hour response. They always have support as they need it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to deploy.

I'm a presales engineer. The way that I help customers is by architecting their infrastructure which helps them to decide which is the best solution for them. I also help plan the future of their infrastructure, the way they're going to be expanding the systems or the way they're going to renew their systems.

With the efficiencies of NetApp, the customer is going to be able to reduce the amount of storage they need. This is the way that the customer assesses the amount of money they invest in the solution.

I think because of the integration with the other products we sell, like VMware, for example, that's why they have us use NetApp as a storage solution. We sell a lot of security products that have integration with NetApp and we also have integration with Microsoft and VMware which have integration with NetApp.

It's an excellent product. They always have new solutions for their customers. They also have good integration with other partners like Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle.

Compared with their competitors, NetApp has a good advantage with their new development and new functionalities. The new platforms are competitive with other storage solutions. NetApp has better integration with all their solutions. They have only one interface for all their products as well as the same operating system. It's really easy for the customer to handle and to administer the solution.