NetApp ONTAP Reviews

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 as a file-based storage. We store a lot of unstructured and application data. Mostly data which needs to be shared across multiple mount points.

It gives us a location to store data across multiple mount points. It gives us functionality to provide Snapshots and backup outside of traditional backup solutions.

• It is easy to use. 
• It has been stable. 
• We haven't had any problems with it. 
• Getting support from our VAR and the vendor has been good.

The stability is great.

Being able to scale out at cost-effective capabilities doesn't compare to some of our other storage solutions, but it is coming along. NetApp ONTAP could improve its scalability.

The technical support is good.

We did not have another solution previously. 

We had specific use cases for file-based storage, and that's what drove us to NetApp.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used Datalink for the integration. They've been good.

Recently, we have seen ROI.

NetApp and Dell EMC were on our shortlist. We mostly chose NetApp because of its functionality. 

• Do a proof of concept (PoC).
• Understanding the high availability of the storage solutions, especially if you have rack resiliency requirements. 
• Understand how the solution is designed and configured.
• Understand what your performance requirements are.

We primarily use it for our file server environment: all our home shares, group shares, etc.

From a recovery credibility standpoint, we can recover data quickly. We are able to failover to remote sites. We can do that within minutes versus hours in the past. So, it is a lot faster.

• Reliability
• Snapshots
• SnapMirror

Snapshot and SnapMirror technologies make it easier to replicate data to disaster recovery scenarios. We can't do that with certain vendors as easily. 

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. 

NetApp needs make sure that we don't have any downtime and also keep improving on the non-disruptive pieces to avoid bringing systems down.

It is stable. We usually don't have any issues with it. Our updates have been solid.

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. We have some other competitor devices in the house that are not that scalable, like Oracle.

Overall, it has been pretty good. We usually can get responses quickly, bug fixes, and whatever we need. It is easy to escalate issues.

We have been using ONTAP for a long time. Previously, it was an old files system called Novell NetWare. It was old, and this was a lot easier to deploy in our remote locations and receive data back for disaster recovery.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were not a whole lot of issues with it. 

Give it a look. It's reliable. Now, with ONTAP Select and the ability go to virtual machines, it gives you a lot more flexibility that you didn't have before.

We use it for enterprise storage. We use data ONTAP to solution and enterprise storage for our core data centers. We use a lot of SnapVault and SnapMirror features for disaster recovery and daily backups to meet SLAs.

From a service level of perspective, we can restore it from a snapshot in a very short period of time. Whereas, traditional backups from some of our larger databases could take many hours to recover.

We use this solution for our mission critical applications, like SAP.

• Snapshots
• SnapCenter
• The ability to take an instant point and time capture of an application's consistent backup.

The PowerShell scripting capabilities right now are all over the place as far as which rich operating systems are supported. They all support Windows, but the HCI product with the SolidFire integration also supports PowerShell on Mac and Linux. It would be nice if the rest of the NetApp APIs caught up with PowerShell on other operating systems besides Windows. Because we're deploying more non-Windows operating systems, it would be helpful if we would be able to use that utility.

We have not been able to save space by using this product.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is a bit of a question. If we're only doing file-based storage, scalability is fantastic. If we are doing block-based storage through iSCSI or Fibre Channel, there are some significant limitations in the number of volumes and clients that you can put on a single data ONTAP cluster.

Technical support is very good.

We knew that we need to invest in a new solution after we did a total data center architecture. This is the product that we sought afterwards. We chose NetApp because it was the best fit for its price performance.

We started out in 7-Mode and evolved into cDOT. The initial 7-Mode deployment was very straightforward. Migrating 7-Mode to cDOT was much less straightforward.

We worked directly with NetApp for deployment, and our experience was good.

The solution has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage by doing an OPEX agreement with NetApp, we are paying based on utilization. Instead of fronting 30 petabytes worth of storage, we are paying for what we're using.

NVMe over Fabrics is a very interesting proposition. However, it's probably always going to be in a leap frog position with NVMe over traditional Fibre Channel infrastructure. Because if you look at a lot of the research data running NVMe over an Ethernet-based fabric, as the fabric gets congested, the total amount of footprint goes down significantly. Whereas the footprint is very consistent for the Fibre Channel fabric from start to finish, no matter how congested it becomes, and you're still capable of pushing it at reasonable speeds very close to the theoretical maximum.

With the Ethernet fabric, you also have to take into account that you only get the best speeds for NVMe over Fabrics if it's a dedicated storage Ethernet environment, and more than 90 percent of the people implementing it are going to share it with other things because they don't want to have a separate Ethernet infrastructure just for storage. If they were going to do that, they would have stuck with Fibre Channel. Theoretically, it has an off a lot of promise, but practically, not so much.

We do not use this solution for machine learning, AI, or real-time analytics at this time, but we are investigating them.

Make sure that you test it with your own data set. No one else's test will look remotely like what you will use it for.

We use it for VMware.

Clustered ONTAP makes it very easy to manage large amounts of data, measured in petabytes. One person can manage all that. In the old days, you could never do that.

We're using it as a virtualization platform, so not only are we buying NetApp SSD, we're also able to utilize our existing Dell EMC storage that still is under support.

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

Today, the stability is very good.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is poor. The first line people that pick up the phone are, quite honestly, awful. Once you get to an escalation engineer they're extremely talented, but you have to pull teeth to get there.

My management was all about Dell EMC. With my experience with NetApp I just kept my mouth shut and asked technical questions and Dell EMC basically fell flat. They actually proposed a mid-tier solution that was, as they put it, a number of storage silos. And I said, "This is 2018. We have storage silos?"

So I was able to work with CDW and prove that the FlexArray would front-end the existing Unity's and 3PARs we have. CDW ended up coming to the table and they won the deal. They came in late but they won the deal. The NetApp people have never come to our office yet.

We did purchase Basic Install, so it was straightforward.

Dell EMC and Pure were on our shortlist. Dell EMC couldn't come with a reasonable solution. Pure is all-flash and we needed hybrid.

I would advise colleagues who are researching this type of solution to look at NetApp. We bought it for a couple reasons. One, it took advantage of our existing storage because we could front-end that storage. It also allowed us, through native replication, to set up a DR site, which we're working towards. And three, that DR site, in 2020, is going to the cloud. NetApp has a nice solution for that. And our production in 2022 may actually go to the cloud. So all that is already in place, no additional tools. You can use the same SnapMirror and SnapVault technology to get there. To me, it makes sense.

We bought our solution through CDW. They're excellent.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten. I think it's time for a hardware refresh. We ended up buying 8200s and they've been out on the market for quite a while. There is newer hardware that we were hoping to take advantage of but we needed the storage now.

One use case is user files, when customers are trying to place their unstructured data and then access it remotely. A second case is is VDI. All the VDI uses have their home drives hosted in NetApp. In addition, we use NetApp for general-purpose, such as Unix applications, database archives, big data, when they need a lot of reads and fewer writes. That data comes into NAS. In our firm, we use it for tier-three and tier-four, which needs less than 20 millisecond response times. Those types of applications are deployed in NetApp.

In terms of VDI, pretty much every employee of our firm is a customer of our NAS infrastructure. Everybody's home drive is on NAS, so it's highly critical. Even a minimum outage would cause a lot of potential business risks to the firm. NetApp has come up with performance management devices to improve the performance. And it has all-flash and hybrid aggregates to improve performance in caching. It's really excellent.

As we scale more data, as we add more data into our data pool, we really need it for faster disk drives and quicker response times for our customers, to make sure they will get their data whenever they need it.

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.

SnapLock is the feature we would like to see enhanced. As a bank, we store data for compliance for a long time: ten years, 15 years. The data would be locked. So they should enhance the SnapLock features. 

At the same time, the customers want a seamless failover and failback for SnapLock. As a bank, we want to look at the data availability, so every quarter we failover and failback. Today, we can failover but we can't failback. We'd like to be able to do both.

On average, the data that lives in the ONTAP hardware is there for four to six years and then it moves on to its end-of-support-life years. When it gets there, it tends to have a greater number of hardware breaks and failures. From a data perspective that's a big risk for us.

As part of tech refresh, we plan the data movement. One year before it gets to the end-of-support-life, we predominantly migrate it into a CDOT, or some other latest all-flash technology that NetApp provides us.

In CDOT, theoretically, you can have 24 nodes in a cluster, but we are careful about that. Right now, we have ten-node clusters. We feel CDOT provides scalability in terms of the virtual world. You can keep adding nodes, you can keep adding disk shelves, you can scale your volumes. And then you can virtually move your failover capabilities from node A to node B, whichever node you want. When you want to do maintenance, you can just virtually move your LIFs' interfaces to other nodes and then you can safely failover. That's great, amazing.

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 would 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. It should also have stability, high-availability, and data protection. It all happens today in the virtual world, but it has to happen in the physical layout as well.

Tech support is okay. We have given our feedback. What we have seen it evolve over a period of time. So far it's okay. It still has not reached a level I would call "great," but it's okay. It's going in the right direction.

We have performance issues and capacity issues, among other things. We don't get the right engineer, the right attention the first time, so it needs escalation. We need to raise the priority of the cases to make sure to grab NetApp's attention. Those situations have to be avoided. There needs to be a proactive solution instead of reactive.

We do see ROI from the capacity perspective, although I don't have data points at the moment.

I would rate ONTAP at eight out of ten. It's an industry standard. It pretty much supports all the protocols and it delivers what the customer needs. It's operating on the use case perspective. Instead of having thousands of features - what is the use of that if a customer only wants ten percent of it - NetApp is really focusing on the ten percent, and delivering what the customer really needs.

It would be a ten out of ten with cluster enhancement and support improvements. Those are things that they should improve. I hope in a couple of years, when I come to the next NetApp Insight conference, I'll be able to tell you it's a ten.

We use it for all our storage requirements.

We use it for mission-critical applications. A lot of our users don't want any downtime, they don't want any kind of failure or bottlenecks. They want low latency, they want fast I/O, they want fast throughput - and it delivers.

It has helped us reduce the overall cost of our storage. We were able to consolidate a lot of the storage that we had in the past into a much smaller footprint, using less rack space and power. It has been great for that.

We have saved space using ONTAP, in some cases it's 30 to 40 percent.

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

Overall, for us, it's the stability, it has a solid infrastructure. It's easy to use, easy to rack and configure and start utilizing really quickly. It's been very stable, it works great, and it does everything we would want it to do.

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

We're happy with the stability and performance. They are very powerful machines.

The scalability is very good. It's much more than what we can imagine using.

Tech support is very good. They're great at following up, as well, with emails or calling you. It has been very good so far, very quick responses. It's easy to escalate and whenever we have had to order replacement parts, it's been very quick. No complaints at all.

We used a reseller for the deployment, OnX. Our experience with them was very good. They were very helpful. They really helped with the purchasing, refining our requirements to get them where we needed them to be. They have been very good.

We have considered other options but they either don't have the same kind of architecture that we're looking for or the performance isn't quite the same. We'd have to look at them a little more in some cases, part of our job is to see what the other vendors are up to. But, for now, we're quite happy with NetApp.

Go see a NetApp presentation or get a referral to a reseller for consultation. That would probably be the best way, because they can speak to the whole line of products. We're only familiar with some of their product line but they would be able to do a good job of showing all the products that NetApp has to offer.

In terms of NVMe over Fabrics, that's something we're going to see a lot of in the future. It's going to change storage. From now on, it's not going to be the same. When it comes to speed, compared to other Fiber Channel gear, there's nothing that compares, it's pretty amazingly fast. When it comes to NVMe over Fabrics with existing Fibre Channel infrastructure, the sky is the limit. It's pretty robust, it is a pretty amazing product, and the performance, especially with things like AI applications, will be pretty amazing.

We, as an organization, do not use ONTAP at the moment for machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics or those kinds of groundbreaking applications for storage, but it has a lot of potential. I'd like to use it for those kinds of scenarios, I'd like to see that happen.

We're definitely going forward, we're going to be growing with NetApp and with their products. They've improved a lot over the last couple releases, and I hope to continue to see that. There are a lot more features, advances in things like deduping and thin-provisioning. They're always improving their product.

I would rate ONTAP a nine out of ten at least. It's a very solid product, great architecture, great service and support, and very responsive.

We use it for cloud. We have a big VMware environment with CIFS, NFS, and other applications. Most of the data is on NetApp.

It has the ability to bring up disaster recovery quickly.

• High availability
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption

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

I would like to see more S3 integration with other vendors, objects, or instruments. We are a big Dell EMC shop and would like to have this integration.

It is very stable. Given you have so many nodes in a cluster, the volumes, connections, and lifts can be moved anywhere within the cluster.

It is better than some of the other solutions that we have used. It is easy to expand nodes.

We are a premiere customer. When we call, we get someone on right away.

We have grown with NetApp. As they grow, we grow.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there is some complexity. 

We used professional services from NetApp for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression.

We have a mixture of NetApp and Dell EMC.

NetApp does NAS well and better than other vendors.