NetApp ONTAP Reviews

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.

We are using it for the cloud and storage: NAS and SAN.

• SnapVault
  
• Snapshot
• Deduplication
• The replication progress
• It is easy to migrate data from one storage array to another storage array using SnapMirror technologies.
  

If they could come up with some more automation, this would be helpful.

I have never had an outage.

Scalability is good. You can expand the storage with disks, which is good.

I haven't had to contact technical support, but their support is 24/7 if I needed it.

We were previously using NetApp MetroClusters. We have tested in the lab, NetApp MetroClusters, and have run into issues. I have come up with tie breakers, which are like witnesses our virtual storage arrays. One storage fails and another storage array will be active all the time. In this case, if a tie breaker is down, NetApp doesn't know how to deal with the data. It gets confused. NetApp should come up with a solution for this, such as a physical witness.

It's very easy. It's not complex.

We used NetApp for the deployment. They know how to deal with issues and follow best practices. It's always better to have them install the storage.

With other vendors, we need to buy a separate license for a third-party storage, but with NetApp, you don't need to buy a license, as it will come up with the storage. 

I can recommend NetApp. If you need a solution, use NetApp.

We're using it for all of our enterprise architecture. So, we use everything from CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel LUNs, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and iSCSI. Therefore, we're pretty much using the gamut. We have a little bit of SAS storage tier, SATA storage tier, and SSD as well.

It makes our organization more efficient with more scale. We have the ability to tier off the storage and ensure storage is efficiently utilized so we can get rid of idle data and data that is not required. Then, we can show and prove what needs and should be used.

We do use this solution for mission-critical applications.

Its flexibility is its most valuable feature. It has the ability to mix with the different requirements that we have to provide, such as some I/O intensive services and a lot of archive services. It has the ability to tailor tiers according to what we need and put the right services in the right place.

One of the things that we were looking at being able to do a FlexGroup NFSv4. Right now, 9.4 goes up to NFSv3, but if we could get the NFSv4 solution on a 9.4, or a future release, that would be awesome.

Stability is great. We have a six-node cluster. We've done head swaps. We've had failures and the cluster has always stayed up and the data has always been available. We haven't lost any data either.

It is very easy to scale, so we started with a four-node cluster and added it to a six-node cluster. We've also done some other modifications in between.

This solution helped our organization reduce our overall cost of storage. Because idle data which was residing on high cost tiers, once we sifted the ONTAP, we were able to scale and place it where it should be, then offload the data which was unnecessary to different locations.

Technical support is awesome. We call them up, and they're there. We receive answers and get what we need right away. We have four hour delivery, as it's based on our contracts, but we do receive outstanding support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There was a guide of how everything goes together. Therefore, use the guide, put it together, and you're up and running.

During the initial install, we had a reseller who came in, helped us build it out, etc. They were awesome getting us up and running. Now, that it's up and running, even though they don't have access to our systems, but we can still call them and get assistance, look into different changes, opportunities to scale in or our, and upgrade as we need to.

We have been able to save space by using the solution.

Look into the product's reliability. You will definitely see an increase in your business performance if you use it.

We don't current employ any NVMe. We have SSD. We're looking at NVMe potentially on some of our higher IOP operations, but we don't deploy it right now.

We use SaaS and also have a Hadoop cluster which are backed up by ONTAP storage. These are for doing a lot of data analytics and analyzing different data streams. AI is soon to come.

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.

Our client's primary use case is for the storage aspect of the solution, mainly for the block size.

The reliability of the storage is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The hardware of the solution is very reliable and there are hardly any issues at all. There rarely are failures, especially when you compare it to other vendors, which have a higher failure rate.

For example, HPE tends to be more prone to disc failures. In the case of ONTAP, this is extremely rare.

The OS is very user-friendly. Due to the fact that the architecture of the system is the same, once we learn ONTAP, we don't have to worry about drastic changes. Other vendors tend to change their products, and then we have to re-learn everything again, including the complete UI and configuration. With NetApp ONTAP, once you learn it, only a little bit of updating is required.

The solution is very easy to configure.

The solution is more for mid-range companies. 

The integration could be improved. There used to be an integration product called Snapper Tech, however, it's not available anymore. The vendor-partner relationships need to be improved across the board.

The back-up side of the solution could be improved, as could the archive. We still have to rely on third-party backup programs and other archiving solutions. If it was offered by NetApp itself, it would be much better.

The solution seems to be changing and moving towards the cloud and it will require many changes in order to be able to adapt to this shift.

I've been dealing with the solution for almost ten years at this point. It's been a long while.

The solution is easily scalable. It can, due to the features itself and the Cluster ONTAP features it supports. There are additions that need to be purchased so that the customer can scale, however. Other than that, yes, you can scale it well.

The solution best suits medium and enterprise customers. The price is small compared to other companies. 

So far, we've been very satisfied with technical support. They are quite knowledgeable and responsive.

The initial setup is not complex at all. In fact, if you compare any other storage, ONTAP is easier to install, implement, and manage than other options. 

We deploy it for our customers.

In order to scale, you do need to purchase add-ons.

I'm on the partner side, and therefore not an end-user.

I would recommend the solution. Its cluster and storage are quite good.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. We enjoy working with it.

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.

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.

It's our enterprise storage solution where we keep 95 percent of our data.

We use it for our mission-critical applications: All our SQL, Exchange, data warehousing, and anything with heaving I/O processing.

Our company has grown so fast, we spend more in the process. At the same time, we have been able to shrink due to technologies, such as deduplication and compression.

We've been able to keep up with the demands of our business in terms of both performance and storage. Whenever the business needs something, we add it right away. Whenever they say, "Hey, we're gonna throw some big load at you guys. Can you this handle it?" We say, "Yeah, the system can handle it."

It's more intuitive to use as they are moving away from command line into more graphical interfaces, which are somewhat easier to use.

There is room for improvement in the stability. They have been trying to become simpler, and as a result, there have been road bumps along the way. I have personally experienced this.

We have experience a number of bugs recently. The company has also gone through recent changes which has affected stability.

It scales pretty well. It has a cluster interface connection with multiple systems clustering across the board. 

They are pretty good when it comes to critical support. Technical support is something they're still working on, but the critical support is good. The critical support will get back to you quickly and stay with you, so you always know who you are dealing with.

The performance was really bad on our previous solution. When we did an analysis with our tools, we saw how bad the storage performance was. It was a ten-year-old system. It was meant to run for a small company. It was never meant for where we were at the time.

Compared to what we had in the past, ONTAP has given us both visibility into performance, as well as, adapted to different changes. Where as before, we had a system that we couldn't do much with.

The initial setup was complex compared to what we had, since it does more. When we bought it a couple of years ago, it was more complex. Now, they are trying to become simpler at the setup.

The initial setup took a lot of steps. You had to know a lot of what had happened throughout the process. There were a lot of steps involved, where as now, they're condensing the amount of steps involved. Plus, its more graphically-driven now rather than being mostly command line.

We used two different consultants: 

1. We had one vendor for the architecture of the high-level stuff.
2. The other consultant was more to come in and fix it up or do the hardware physical stuff. 

We picked the best out of both.

With the duplication and compression, we have been about a one and half to two times savings since we are not running all-flash.

It pays to get the Cadillac. That's what we call ours.

Don't undersize it. We undersized our first one and ended up having to get rid of it, then buying a new one. We lost money in the process. We should have paid for more than what we needed at the beginning.

NVMe over Fabric is considered the next generation of storage in terms of how fast things move.

Our company chose this solution because they've known it from the past.

We are still looking into machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics.