NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We use ONTAP to take care of the filers. We have quite a few filers and we use it to increase and decrease storage and make new volumes. All the stuff we use Data ONTAP for makes managing all the filers very easy to take care of.

The reason that we use Data ONTAP for everything is that we have it on all of our systems, we have a lot of customers. We use it for our virtual environments in which we make a big data store. Our way to tell people is to just pop in VMs and they use it. We have a cloud environment and a lab environment. We either do NFS VM stores, people just pop in VMs or we put them on iSCSI, they connect to the VMs and poof they're there. We have NetApp and then the networking, so we're right on top as an oxygen service. It's used everywhere, production, development, whatever you got, we're there.

The way it has improved our organization is that we get a lot of requests for new volumes and new data structures. We go and talk to the user and tell them what we can do with it. We also find that we're a very diverse organization and they want to move data around. We provided SnapMirrors for them and they put data in one location and then we SnapMirror it to the other, and they can do their data. They get it, no need to worry about it. Just poof it's there. I call it the conveyor belt of data. You put it here, we snap it, it's here, it's available, and they love it. They love that feature and that they don't have to worry about shipping it, they don't have to worry about commissions, it's just there. They love the speed of use. 

We look at the numbers because we make sure everything has been provisioned and deduped. There are other products that we've put into Data ONTAP. We have the OCUM, the On Command Unified Manager, which helps us figure out when we do things for Data ONTAP. We put all of our tools that go into Data ONTAP and we have the unified manager where we can see any of our alerts or anything. Then we can do our performance manager. All the tools that we hook into Data ONTAP make it very easy to run because it's a tool that can feed other products and it's the tools that we get from NetApp that makes it very easy to figure things out. It makes it more efficient, we can see things. People complain that their NAS is slow and we're able to bring up the performance manager. It makes life a lot easier because these are tools that we don't have to pay for. Management loves that, they're free tools, we just install them and away we go. 

Ease of use is the most valuable feature for us. We brought a new storage person online, he knew another product, we easily taught him what he needed to know using Data ONTAP. He came up quickly, became very valuable to our team because he could use Data ONTAP. It was poof, he was done and became a valued member of our team. It didn't take him months and months to spin up on the product, so it's very nice. It took longer to spend on all the names we had and where all of our locations were. Data ONTAP was no big deal for him.

We know how much space we'll save. We have compression. Within provision and dedupe, one volume that we have problems with is we do 30% and it's around 12 terabytes. It's a very large volume and we dedupe everything and we get huge savings. 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.

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. A lot of the other ones, I'd like just to see go to HCI, but that's just another investment to go to. I'd have to go back and look at everything else. For ONTAP 9, 9.5, we like to keep up with everything that's going on because we don't let anything lag too much.

Stability is great. It's very stable. A couple of times we've had to reset some of the settings. We just go look on the web and it tells us that we just have to turn certain settings on or off and everything's back up for the web. That's the only time we've only not had the web interface come up, but all the other times it's there. If it's not there, the NAS is having problems, we have bigger problems than just ONTAP. Otherwise, ONTAP is very stable, it's always there. It's great.

ONTAP scales because it's always on the NAS, and our NAS scales. Right now our business is growing so we keep hearing that they need more storage. We tell them that they need to buy some shelves and we just keep connecting shelves onto our NAS. With ONTAP we have more shelves, more disks, and aggregates. We just go click, click, click and it does, and we're good. It makes it very easy to use the product overall. It's not a big deal to scale out on Net App ONTAP. Then it tells you on the shelf, if the disk goes bad, ONTAP knows about it, it'll send auto support off to NetApp because we have the maintenance contract. Then NetApp points out that they need new shelving. 

I'd rate it about a nine because I just don't want to give anything a ten. We love it. We also have production on the backup filers that we use. It's great, it's easy.

I would advise someone considering this solution to take the classes and get some education. Especially if it's cluster because cluster's a little bit different, you need to know how to take care of that. Make sure you know all the networking parts of cluster ONTAP and go take the class and then implement it. Then if you have problems, call up and find out what the problem is and go forth and do it because it's great.

Our primary use case is network-attached storage.

It's much easier and faster to deploy our storage with ONTAP than some of the other solutions that we have.

We use it for everything from payroll to home directories.

• Availability
• Resiliency
• Ease of use

It stays up. My people can easily manage it. It just works for us. It has been very stable. Upgrades have worked. We've had very minor to no real problems with it.

We would like to have additional cloud integration and the ability to Snapshot directly to Amazon. This would help us reduce costs, provide us additional disaster recovery, and give us a site that's not owned by us.

It has been very stable. Otherwise, we wouldn't have put our mission-critical applications on it.

We can do upgrades without taking it down. We have had nodes fail and people just kept working.

It has scaled really well for us. We started off with several nodes and are up to about 16 node clusters now.

Support has been great. We also have professional services in our offices, and our professional service guys have been awesome. They are super-fast in finding problems and fixing them.

We switched solutions because were at capacity as far as size. NetApp was also cheaper and easier for us to deploy.

The initial setup was very straightforward and simple. Put an IP on it, give it some passwords, and we configured from there with strips and other stuff.

We deployed with an in-house. The experience was great. We had enough experience in-house that it worked.

This solution has helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. We're part of the NetApp OnDemand, where we lease it. Also, it doesn't take as many people to administer the solution as some other products.

Because of its manageability, we have fewer people managing it.

Our short list was Dell EMC and NetApp. NetApp was more familiar to our people, and they came in cheaper per gigabyte.

It has been amazingly easy for us to use.

We hope will be using this solution for machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics in the future.

We are not using NVMe yet.

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 pretty much every part of the product in our company. The core of our company is in the United States and Germany and we are using MetroClusters usually for that kind of workload.

The product helped improve the way our organization functions because we are able to centralize mission-critical applications on the MetroClusters. Previously they were spread out in our environment and now it is easier to use and administer them.

The high availability is one of the most valuable features. But it is also nice that it is easy to do snapshots and to recover things using SnapVault. Those are great features.

I think everything can be improved, really. The IT world is evolving all the time, so there's always a new challenge and always a new thing to improve. It is harder to say what that could be. In a perfect world, there should exist some kind of guide as to what kind of workloads you would be able to mix within the same cluster or aggregate. That would be something really good and useful for us because we have centralized everything in just one MetroCluster. Now we are not sure if that architecture is actually giving us a few headaches or if it is something different. We have more than 15 petabytes of space use and we have a really low percentage of failures. In the boxes that are not really I/O (Input / Output) intensive, they are working very well.

The standard allowance for HA (High Availability) is really good. We do not have many usage problems with that. For the MetroClusters, we have had some problems with latency related to some calls on the backend. But besides that, it usually is a very stable environment in the MetroClusters.

The scalability is good. We started with a two-node MetroCluster, then a four-node MetroCluster and then an eight-node MetroCluster. The eight-node MetroCluster is giving us a lot of headaches. The four-node MetroCluster — if it's correctly sized and configured — it is really good.

Usually, technical support is really good. Most of the time they have a really good response. I really like the Zoom sessions because we can solve everything right away. That has been a great improvement from their support services.

We do feel that they have been supportive with the bigger issue that we had. In this case, we understand that a lot of people are involved. The thing is that I think there are some technical challenges for support and other cases being driven by the engineering level. So I know it is a difficult case and eventually, they will resolve it.

We never needed to invest in a new solution because we were always using NetApp. We were using Windows Servers before for NAS (Network-attached Storage) environments.

The initial setup was very simple. It is just making the purchase and getting up and running with a technician. We already have WFA (Workflow Automation) workflows for that and to deploy our standards, so it is quite easy. In just two or three days it was done.

We have to run proper procedures for discovery, so we invited every vendor in the market and then we continued working with them until we narrowed down the solution to only NetApp. The reason we ended up choosing NetApp is that it has great features other products don't have all of together. Features like Snapshot. 

The support is really good also. Usually, the releases of firmware are not that good because we usually get a lot of bugs that we need to address. We like the hybrid models and the all-flash modes. We have all kinds of sizes and flavors, but those are the ones that really work. We haven't implemented anything for block-level yet, but maybe in the future, that may be on our roadmap.

The solution's Snapshot copies and VIN clones work very well and they are easy to use for recovery. We have a huge environment. We are running around 15 petabytes of data, so doing backups and restores is a daily job and these features have done marvelously for our environment. It speeds things up and it is really easy for us to manage, especially in that size environment.

Snapshot copies and VIN clones also affected our application development speed and made it way easier. We are not using containers so that has sped things up a lot. We love that feature, really.

Consistency of storage management affected our storage operations by helping to reduce our organization's data footprint. All the space savings — on-prem, of course, because we do not use the cloud — is honestly really good. Overall, we experienced around 30% savings.

Apparently we have a lot of latency but it is not related to the protocol. It is something within the operating system of data on top. It is still a question we have open with support and we have no answer so we do not know what the problem is yet.

On a scale of one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight. The eight is only because of the problems that we already had. We would expect that a MetroCluster would be able to provide huge performance and we had so far three outages during this year. That is quite a lot really. Overall I think it is still a really good environment and using NetApp has been a really good solution for us. But outages hurt our experience overall. It would be a ten for us if we had 100% uptime.

The advice I would give to people considering this solution is to be very careful about the kind of workloads they are running. Keep a really close eye on things. It is best to use all the features of NetApp rather than just buying isolated boxes.

Our primary use case for ONTAP is that our whole platform is running on ONTAP. We have all the client data that we're using on the files, in our data center.

It's hard to say how this solution has improved our organization because we've been using it for 18 years now. It works great, it really does what it should and we've been really, satisfied customers. 

Our whole platform is so big that this solution is mission critical for our company. We also have a metro cluster internally where our virtualization stuff runs on.

ONTAP has really reduced our costs because we learned that we could use our storage with fewer machines and drive down data center costs.

The most valuable features are stability and performance, and that with the cDot feature we can move data around without any interruption. Also, the hardware maintenance is really, really, easy and fast. 

We are discussing ONTAP for AI. We are having a look at it, but we haven't used it yet.

We have been using deduplication on our web volumes and have seen about 25 to 28% data reduction. That's not that much because mail storage is pre-compressed by the clients, and we do not save anything there.

Synchronous NetMirror and FlexCache features will be back again. This is really great. It will help us be more efficient but it will take some time until it really comes down and we can use it.

We hope that SSD's will be cheap enough so that we can consolidate and save reg space in the future.

Stability is really great. It's awesome. Of course, we have hardware failures, but they really work great. The failover mechanisms do what they should do and, we are very satisfied with that.

cDot only scales to 24 notes so scalability should be better, bigger, but we are one of the only customers that are facing this problem.

Their technical support is mostly very fast. Our system account manager takes really great care of that. Sometimes, parts are shipped in the middle of the night, when nobody is on site which could be improved.

Our FAS9000's do, 150,000 IOPS per head which is less than around one dollar per IOP.

I would rate this solution a ten, especially the cDot version because it really helps focus on our real problems, and storage is, not the greatest problem anymore and really works great.

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.

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.

We use NetApp ONTAP for everything. Because it is hybrid, we use it in a private cloud environment and in our shared environment with a very broad range of IOPS requirements, which means we use it as the basis for our VMware environments and as a storage for databases. In the backup area, we use it with HDDs—with the cheaper ones—and for backup target as well. So, we use it basically for everything. 

Unifyed the management, the automation, the monitoring and accounting in the storage landscape. Less administrators in the operation and internal development are able to take care of most issues.

The most valuable feature is the very high IOPS rating which you can achieve with it and the customization capabilities of the storage are very feature rich. 

I cannot think of any technical improvements or features we're missing right now. The encryption on transport was a feature we wanted, which is supported by ONTAP, starting with ONTAP 9.8. Being conservativ and carefull, until now we use mainly 9.7. Until version 9.7 only encryption on rest, meaning the storage volumes itself could be encrypted. Starting to upgrade to 9.8  we will be able to encrypt the traffic as well between the storage and the client OS. 

I have been working with NetApp ONTAP for a decade. 

I would say it's really stable. We have almost no downtime because of storage outage. Sometimes the network interface fails, but I have almost nothing negative to mention about the storage itself, with the controller. 

This solution is scalable. We are satisfied with this because, recently, NetApp introduced smaller devices: for example, the C190. One of the complaints we had earlier, within the company, was that small pieces were not available. There weren't really any entry options for private cloud environments, which are isolated from each other and don't require very big machines, but less storage amount (TBs). In the past year or two, there have been small machines as well. This means that in the lower side, the entry side, we have a lot of new possibilities within NetApp. And on the other side, when we have already implemented something, we can just add to our cluster to expand the capacity, which we are satisfied with. 

Our relationship with NetApp has been alive for more than a decade, and it's a very good relationship. We have great support and I can't complain about it at all. We also regularly take advantage of the NetApp learning offerings, workshops and trainings.

Positive

The initial setup is easy for us because we have already been doing it for many years. We have a lot of automated stuff around it—using Ansible, for example—and we use templates and skilled professionals when we implement something. These make this solution easy for us to implement. 

Also, the upgrades are very well planned and straightforward. 

We mostly purchase professional services with the products. They are well trained and professional. It minimizes the risk and the time we would need to invest when implementing new storages ourself.

We don't use the latest update. We are always at least one release back because we are very conservative and don't want to be the testers for new updates, but this means that we aren't using the latest features. Version 9.9 or 9.10 has already been introduced, but we are starting to use 9.8. 

To those considering working with ONTAP, I would advise starting with at least Version 9.8 (not an old operating system) because there are some really good features. For example, support for transport encryption: encrypting the traffic between the storage and the clients. Support for this starts with the 9.8 operating system and this feature is very important to have, not only to encrypt the storage itself—the so-called encryption at rest—but also to encrypt the traffic. 

I rate NetApp ONTAP a nine out of ten.