NetApp ONTAP Reviews

The main use cases for NetApp ONTAP are that it's a feature-rich file system technology, which can be viewed in different operations from my experience working as a subject matter expert on the management side and the AWS side. 

It's an operating system that works the same way as a traditional file system, where you need to have a separate compute for it, and it's quite intuitive that you can interact with it the way you would a Unix or Linux system. The operating system itself is uniquely based. Some of the use cases that customers use it for include file shares, which could be for protocols such as Linux or Unix protocols, as well as Windows CIFS and SMB file shares. 

The nice thing about it is that you can have these systems use the NetApp ONTAP file share, whether you are a Unix or Linux user, and the most helpful thing about it is that you can manage all those users and allow them to have permissions, finding different configurations when it comes to that. 

Another noteworthy feature is compression, which optimizes space, as it helps with deduplication to manage redundant files and optimize space. Moreover, it has its own disaster recovery and archiving solution called SnapMirror, which is their snapshot replication technology that replicates data to a secondary site for high availability and durability. 

In terms of emerging technologies, NetApp ONTAP can interact with large language models and perform natural language processing tasks, acting as a data source to train AI applications and efficiently query data. Additionally, with its in-built monitoring capabilities, NetApp ONTAP aids in indexing due to its structured file system.

The impact of NetApp ONTAP technology on the way I do business is significant because, unlike traditional file systems, it has different features that enable it to operate as an operating system. This intuitiveness means that customers have a much more centralized place to manage everything, providing a broader scope of control. It's more centralized, allowing different types of storage in terms of network storage, whether it's file shares such as SMB, NFS, or iSCSI block for low-latency use cases.

Global customers greatly benefit from the ability to bring volume closer to end users who may be far from the original site. As for integration, I am slightly biased as an AWS user, but it integrates very well with Azure and has the tooling to interact with GenAI services on AWS and Azure, with Google Cloud offering integration capabilities as well. I observe that businesses admire NetApp ONTAP for its cache mechanism, allowing for cloning of volumes on the fly without complications. NetApp ONTAP also saves costs by utilizing intelligent tiering for data storage, balancing between cold storage and SSD, and using thin provisioning to manage storage capacity efficiently.

Currently, I don't have any notable suggestions for improving NetApp ONTAP; however, there might be potential in incorporating more AI features within the NetApp environment. 

A greater level of integration and smart capabilities, allowing the system to provide suggestions based on usage patterns without user intervention, could enhance the overall experience. Observing common issues, such as configuration discrepancies, could inform improvements in user guidance.

I started working with NetApp ONTAP technology in 2022 or end of 2021.

In choosing NetApp ONTAP, my organization did not consider specific competing companies; rather, the decision was made by higher management to move from traditional file systems to something that offers better replication capability for our customers across different sites. NetApp ONTAP technology presented an appealing solution, and upon announcing its availability, we noticed an increase in customers utilizing the technology, indicating its growing popularity.

The impact of NetApp ONTAP on my customers has been positive, simplifying their experience compared to traditional file systems, as the technology centralizes their data easily and allows them to take full advantage of its features. There are emerging business needs that can be supported by expanding the use of NetApp ONTAP for my customers. 

They continuously present intriguing ideas on utilizing the technology, particularly regarding AI integration. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate NetApp ONTAP an 8 out of ten.

I choose NetApp ONTAP over their competition because NetApp ONTAP and its devices are very powerful, with excellent scalability and efficiency in input/output operations per second. The ease of use of their operating systems is something you cannot compare, as they are very stable, and I am always happy with this.

The impact of the NetApp ONTAP product on my business is significant, as productivity and seamless scalability are crucial when increasing data capacity. It has a powerful effect on the organization and the costs of running the business, as well as on the technical personnel handling these tasks behind the scenes, which greatly helps improve decision-making in the organization.

I cannot pinpoint what I would like to see improved in the NetApp ONTAP product for now.

NetApp ONTAP has a very powerful tool in its operating systems and is robust for storage purposes, but I cannot pinpoint any specific features or functionalities I would like to see enhanced at the moment.

In the last 14 years before I started working on NetApp ONTAP, I worked with Oracle and Oracle's Sun Microsystems, their storage, and the servers of storage in the past. I also worked with HP, Dell, and IBM, which makes me think that NetApp ONTAP has an edge over all these vendors.

In the last 14 years before I started working on NetApp ONTAP, I worked with Oracle and Oracle's Sun Microsystems, their storage, and the servers of storage. I also worked with HP, Dell, and IBM, which makes me think that NetApp ONTAP has an edge over all these vendors.

The costs of NetApp ONTAP filers are very high, but the performance outweighs the costs, especially when working with larger organizations that generate bigger data and need their data to be well preserved; therefore, you must go for quality, which is what NetApp ONTAP provides.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of AI have influenced the technology decisions for my organization, leading to powerful improvements. Though I have not personally been involved much in the use of AI within the organization, we have other teams that handle those cybersecurity aspects, and I focus on the storage aspects.

I definitely have plans on the table for the management regarding how we will expand our use of the NetApp ONTAP solution, as NetApp ONTAP will always be in the forefront.

I am not aware of emerging business needs or growth opportunities that could be supported by expanding our use of NetApp ONTAP, as I am not part of the management. I will only recommend it when there is a need.

I do not have any goals for the next technology investment at the company at the moment.

What would have made my rating a 10 might be related to the pricing, as I know it to be quite high. However, I am sure that NetApp ONTAP will continue to maintain good quality in the storage enterprise, and I think the cost of these devices could be reviewed.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP as a product a nine, as I believe there might be other areas in which they will want to make some improvements, but I want to be fair and put it at nine.

My usual use cases for NetApp ONTAP include configuring both SAN and NAS services for mail systems, web hosting systems, and also cloud services.

NetApp ONTAP has impacted the way I do business and serve my customers by being a very smart solution. By using the same appliances and thus the same disks, I can switch the volumes between different services. I can also migrate the volumes and clone volumes from one service to another in case we need to integrate more services.

NetApp ONTAP has addressed key challenges for my business, particularly responding to customer needs in terms of speed and capacity. The network traffic in NetApp appliances is very fast, and we can also count on the promptness of the support service in case of damaged or broken disks.

NetApp ONTAP has helped streamline our internal operations and adapt to changing market conditions by offering automated solutions with SnapMirror. It allows me to quickly replicate volumes and services from one site to another.

Aggregating more disk technologies into one has been beneficial. It enabled us to have a single cluster of several storage systems that were previously independent. It was able to integrate them into just one cluster with one pane of glass. We now have a single GUI or control center to provision storage content. We can do that with a click of a mouse or through the command line.

The specific feature of NetApp ONTAP that I have found most valuable is SnapMirror. The feature that allows me to replicate volumes from one site to another and the possibility to reuse all the storage appliances by aggregating them into one cluster are also valuable. For instance, I can do some storage tiering and move volumes from SAS to SATA or from SATA to SAS disks, effectively tiering storage content from one technology to a better solution by choosing the capacity and speed.

In terms of areas where NetApp ONTAP could be improved or enhanced, I believe they should improve the volume replication, specifically the synchronous replication in a block-based SAN environment. It should be more resilient to network outages since I noticed that it suffers a lot from network gaps at the moment.

I have been working with NetApp ONTAP since 2012.

Their technical support is excellent. However, the support from India is a little rigid. They tend to work with a checklist and are not very smart and flexible when it comes to specific issues. The generic level 1 engineers have a very basic knowledge of storage.

Positive

I believe NetApp ONTAP offers the best return on investment among all storage vendors, due to the possibility of doing a technological refresh, such as changing a motherboard instead of the whole storage while keeping the same disks and chassis.

Before choosing NetApp ONTAP, I considered competing companies like Dell Technologies, particularly their Dell Compellent appliances. However, we experienced many service outages when deploying highly accessed services. NetApp proved to be the best solution in terms of cost, service accessibility, and service continuity.

The NetApp ONTAP capabilities that differentiated it from other solutions I evaluated include the ability for a single NetApp storage to offer both NAS and SAN services with the same reliable infrastructure. In contrast, Dell Technologies only concentrates on SAN services and block-oriented services.

The evolving cybersecurity landscape and proliferation of artificial intelligence have influenced my technology decisions. NetApp ONTAP offers many cybersecurity solutions. There is a solution that we haven't released yet or haven't put into production, but it is present, and we can surely count on it when we need it.

The goals for my next technology investments regarding NetApp ONTAP don't depend on me since I'm not making any decisions for the future. However, I see that NetApp ONTAP is open to any technologies, and they do this very well.

We definitely have plans to expand how we use NetApp ONTAP in the future. We plan to expand the infrastructure for mail, cloud, and web hosting services. We can do a technological refresh very quickly.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

We're a software development firm, so we use it internally. We have two NetApp ONTAP systems at the office, and we have a DR site where we replicate everything. For client purposes, we are using CVO in the cloud to host our clients on it, using our software.

We saw the benefits of NetApp ONTAP almost immediately. Snapshots are amazing. The auto-grow on the volumes and SnapMirror are also notable features. There are so many things that make it a good product.

There are more than one features that I appreciate, but what I appreciate the most about it is the ease of management of the volumes.

There's a feature called multi-tenant approval. Currently, it's one size fits all. I cannot specify that one person is allowed to work on certain volumes, a second person on different volumes, and a third one on everything. It's all or nothing, so I would prefer it to be more precise regarding who could do what on which volume.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP since approximately 2008.

We encountered a downtime once for about two or three minutes, but it didn't crash; it was my fault due to a misconfiguration.

Scalability is quite easy. You just add nodes and grow your cluster, and it's good.

The quality of the support is quite fast; I have never had an issue that was not resolved. Our issues were more about how to do specific tasks or what's the best way to accomplish something. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have never used any alternatives to NetApp ONTAP. I have seen others, but why we selected NetApp ONTAP was that it was better.

It's quite easy. If it's physical, the time depends on the size of your environment, but when we used CVO in the cloud, it was up and running within the same day. The learning curve is not that long. It's quite easy, but it also depends on your experience.

It does not require any maintenance after the deployment. The first NetApp ONTAP that we had, after maybe six or seven years, had some drives that were spinning, not SSD. When one of them failed, we placed a service call and received the disk the next morning. We just swapped the disk, and everything got rebuilt by itself. The new system we got two years ago is all SSD, and so far, nothing has broken. Everything's running smoothly.

For its deployment, one person is enough. You do not need a team.

At first, it's expensive. Once you start using it, it's not that expensive. When you see all the benefits, it's acceptable. It could always be better, but you get what you pay for.

My advice for new users is to take the time to learn and have a good plan for what you need to do. It's so easy to use, and you can do many things with it, so there's no secret to success. You just plan whatever you need to do, and you go forward.

I would rate NetApp ONTAP a ten out of ten.

My use cases right now are to provision enterprise storage to any end user in an enterprise.

As an architect, I design things using NetApp ONTAP, and I see benefits overall since it integrates into many more ecosystems in IT than any other product. The amount of development it does towards public cloud integration is huge, so that's a welcome move.

What I appreciate the most about the product is its resiliency; it is very robust, and most of the time, a good configuration does wonders. 

One area where they could improve NetApp ONTAP is their ability to migrate to and from different enterprise storage. I love NetApp ONTAP, however, as businesses get narrower in mainstream IT, I don't see a great future for NetApp as dedicated storage; it needs to find its way into public clouds.

I have been using it for close to four years now.

Stability depends upon the use case. The way we have set up systems, they have fared well with no question about data responsibility, however, we have seen issues beyond NetApp ONTAP that have led to problems we were unable to diagnose.

They are great at scalability. The whole configuration that is set up is always ready to be scalable, which has been my experience working with that product.

NetApp ONTAP has improved significantly since a decade ago, growing towards one platform support for all types of products. I would rate their support as getting better at delivering services than they were a decade ago. On a scale from one to ten, I would give the support an eight.

Positive

I have implemented other products beyond NetApp ONTAP which have cost at least two to three times less and are still able to deliver enterprise-grade solutions.

The initial deployment was very simple for me. Our setup took less than a day. That timeline makes sense, provided that you have all the logistics arranged and the network setup. We were to consume and have storage ready to use within 24 hours.

There isn't really any maintenance needed, unless there's integration into other systems. The compatibility matters a lot. If I use ONTAP, I need to confirm what is the protocol that supports it currently. And I have to validate if that protocol is supported in the next version of NetApp. That demands a bit of maintenance on my side.

For the deployment, on our side, I was alone handling the setup, however, from the NetApp ONTAP team, professional services did all the work for me.

Regarding pricing, if I am an enterprise, there's something called a license agreement that happens between platinum customers and NetApp ONTAP, where they offer the best pricing. 

However, as a new enterprise wanting to start with NetApp ONTAP, I might not get all the benefits, and NetApp ONTAP might be losing out on those types of customers.

We're an ONTAP enterprise customer.

NetApp ONTAP does not really require maintenance on my end, but I do find that the integration to other IT systems, such as virtualization or databases, and the compatibility of such configurations matter significantly. 

If I have to use NetApp ONTAP, I need to confirm the supported protocol and validate if that protocol is supported in the next version of NetApp ONTAP, which demands some maintenance from my side. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution a seven.

ONTAP is Netapp's data management solution for on-premise and cloud datastores.

ONTAP itself hasn't really "improved [our] organization", but the Netapp IP that we leverage THROUGH ONTAP is a cornerstone for our data management and our disaster recovery/business continuity programs.

The solution is extremely stable and easily scalable.  The snapshot capabilities protect against data loss due to corruption and human error, the snapmirror replication methodology provides efficient disaster recovery, and the data compression/deduplication technologies provide amazing storage efficiency.  Add to that the seamless management of hierarchical and object storage on-premise and in the cloud and you have a compelling solution for broad data management under a single platform.

The ONTAP UI is constantly evolving, and it is always a work in progress.  Several management constructs (e.g. disk aggregates) have been removed from ONTAP and relegated to the command line only, seemingly to streamline the UI.  It would be nice if future releases would allow us to turn the features we actually use back on.

Since 2005.

Rock solid and bulletproof.

It's scalable. You can have many, many nodes in a cluster. You can have multiple clusters as well. It can scale up or out.

Overall, my experience with Netapp support has been excellent.  Like all large tech providers, they have had occasional lags in their support services, but I have had very few major problems, and I have never had an issue that they could not or would not resolve.

Positive

Many years ago, we were an EMC shop, but we moved to Netapp in 2005, and have never seen a reason to leave the Netapp platform since.

The initial complexity really depends on the architecture required to support each customer's data needs.  That said, once the systems have been set up, ongoing maintenance is very straightforward.

We absolutely used a vendor team, and I would recommend that most Netapp customers do so.

We've never really calculated the ROI, but the value of Netapp's compression and deduplication technology should not be underestimated and will become all the more important as we increasingly move workloads to and from public clouds.

Great enterprise-grade IP is never inexpensive, but Netapp successfully delivers a lot of value for the money.  Netapp offers its data management solutions in an ala carte fashion which makes licensing a bit nebulous, but there are valid arguments on both sides.

Find a good channel partner.  If you are in a very large shop with plenty of storage experts, then you might go it alone.  For the rest of us, having a capable partner to help with architectural and technical considerations is a total game changer.

We use it for both our all-flash FAS and traditional FAS systems. We have a relatively large FAS 9,000 cluster.

It's easy to manage and has a good CLI, API, and GUI. It also has good role-based access control, allowing me to grant specific commands to users without full administrator privileges. It's a mature product that works well.

ONTAP encompasses the entire operating system, including the file system layout on the backend is valuable for me. 

There is room for improvement in areas related to hardware constraints—for example, more storage efficiency, especially in terms of deduplication. You don't have a global database for deduplication like some competing systems do. So, you can benefit from storage efficiency when you have a large-scale data system.

Another area of improvement is pricing. Pricing can be complex to decipher. It's not just about ONTAP; it involves hardware costs and capacity licenses.

There are some somewhat obscure features like managing QTree's and other relatively obscure things. So, I would like to see more clarity on that front.

I have been using this solution for eight years. The previous cluster data was also on top of ONTAP, but just an older version, called ONTAP 9.

Currently, we use version 9.12. 

I have seen an ROI. It's extremely reliable, very easy to manage. I've been able to reduce the number of people I have managing the storage systems because of the software.

Our pricing with discounts is reasonable, but it may vary for others. If you're paying rack rate, it might be a different situation. But I think with our discount level, the pricing is reasonable.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We manage all of our storage with it. In terms of the version, we're in the process of going to the newest version. It's probably 9.12.

Resiliency is the big one for us.

Its ease of use, for the most part, through the interfaces is valuable.

It's very expensive.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability. It's being used by the entire organization of about 400 people and probably 300 or 400 systems.

We have plans to increase its usage. I just bought up a whole bunch of new equipment.

I'd rate them a 10 out of 10. If possible, I'd rate them even higher.

I didn't use any other solution previously.

It was largely handled by NetApp themselves with me watching. So, it was pretty simple for me. For the actual software or system deployment itself, there was one person.

We have seen an ROI.

It's very expensive.

I'd advise others to go for it if they can afford it. It's very expensive, but I like it because of the support and because of its ability to just work without me having to touch it very often.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.