NetApp ONTAP Reviews

My primary use case for ONTAP is for VMware. We also use it for exchange and file storage.

ONTAP's improving my organization by allowing us to automate. The ability to automate day to day tasks, when using NetApp storage, frees up more time for forecasting, troubleshooting, and more planning.

The primary features that are most important to me, currently for ONTAP, are stability, first and foremost, and the ability to automate. ONTAP offers me PowerShell cmdlets and I can use Ansible via API to automate our day to day tasks. Previously, it was all the other software like, SnapManager, and Snapshotting, which a lot of other vendors didn't have.

I would like to see them have a continued focus on stability because there's so much software involved that it'd be really nice to just continue to have developers focus on that. It's the most important thing in the end, and other than that, I think they're working on a lot of the stuff that I personally am looking for, as well as more Ansible modules, and PowerShell modules.

Some of their products have been really good for us, on certain versions. We've run into a bunch of verts, though. That's NetApp's word for their bugs. Stability has been the main complaint that I've had with the product. Because it's so feature-rich and has so much software related to it, it does come with a decent amount of bugs so we do a lot of upgrades to patch bugs.

Scalability, for us, has been pretty good with ONTAP, since they went from 7-mode to ONTAP. Now that we can cluster environments, and have multiple nodes in the cluster, we've been able to scale to the point that our organization requires, as far as the capacity and performance.

We don't go directly to NetApp, but when we do interface with NetApp directly, we've had a pretty good support experience. There have been times where it's been difficult, depending on who's on staff at that time, and how long it takes to escalate. Recently, we've worked with our account reps, to nail down how to escalate immediately, and since we did that, we've had a lot better experience.

We knew we needed a new solution because I've always worked with NetApp, although we had another solution with a different company, and it came down to feature set. The solution we had didn't have SnapMirror, Snap plug-ins, and integration with VMware at the time, and  SRM. At that point, it was the feature set that made us switch over to ONTAP. At my current company, it's more of deciding to stay with the technology, and that's because of the existing feature set and ability to automate with it.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. That's where the reseller provides a lot of value. They have access to NetApp tools. NetApp would also have access to that, but we tell them the requirements, and what we're looking for, and what we're using it for. They come up with config, we look over it, maybe make some changes, go back and forth, and then, come up with the final config. We've had a good experience with that.

We used Datalink, and it's been okay. Mixed reviews with that. Delay in escalation is the only complaint there. Otherwise, they do provide additional stuff that NetApp wouldn't provide out of the box such as architecture and design help. In that aspect, it's been really great, but for support, it's kind of been easier just to go direct.

We've seen return on investment for ONTAP specifically on the performance recently. Where we had our file storage solution sitting on a hybrid storage solution and we were having continuous performance issues, as our workloads went up we were able to put in an 8300 all-flash array. Since we've put that in, we've been under one-millisecond latency, and that's allowed us to not have delays in some of our EDI transactions. Our end customer integrates and interfaces with that technology. Fewer outages equal more business, more profit, more revenue, and immediate ROI. We've been really happy with the new All Flash hardware solutions.

I would rate ONTAP as an eight. From 7-mode, they've come a long way, and I really like the features that they include. I'll give it an eight and not a ten because we run into a lot of bugs which have resulted in some issues, like outages, so I have to dock it there. As far as feature set and automation go it's a great product.

We deployed it for storage consolidation, core banking solutions and to host core banking applications. We have also deployed it for disaster recovery replication solutions. We have a combination of on-premises and ONTAP Cloud for data protection, replication, and instances.

We also use this solution for databases on flash and DFF deployed for core database systems to manage call database systems.

It is a unified solution, and you have all the licenses for all the protocols available on the ONTAP. It also has easy management, so if somebody's running ONTAP 8, they can still manage ONTAP 9. It's the same commands, just a few syntax changes. It is very easy to manage in terms of system and GUI management. You can set up the system in under 15 minutes, and it will be up and running. Also, regarding system administration, it is fascinating that we can manage the smaller systems the same way we manage the bigger systems. There is no difference in terms of system administration and creating logs. The simplicity of the OS is a key selling point, and mixed customers appreciate it.

It's a perfect system, we have been using it for many years, and many changes have been made, but the rate of technology could be improved. It takes about 60% of the raw capacity to get a user to capacity. It is a lot, and competing solutions don't take up to that in terms of the rate.

I don't think anything needs to be added in the next release. The ONTAP 9 is perfect, and none of our systems have upgraded to the new updates. The updates usually address significant failures. We don't have any technical issues with NetApp ONTAP's system, and with no updates, it is still perfect. However, it needs to be monitored due to security threats, so most updates ensure that security is well managed and handled.

We have been using this solution for 11 years and are working with the latest updates. It is a hybrid environment and deployed both on cloud and on-premises.

It is stable and reliable.

It is one of the most scalable storage solutions.

The technical support is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

We've worked with Dell and HP products. The scalability in NetApp ONTAP is the best. The technology is almost the same across solutions, and you can create volumes, logs and maps. In addition, the NetApp ONTAP is unified, and you can do all protocols on a single controller. For other solutions like HP, you have to buy system licenses. For NetApp ONTAP, if a customer starts with a very small system and grows, they can buy bigger ones and integrate them with smaller ones with no issue because they are running the same operating system.

The setup is straightforward, and our company provides all the implementation services. If all information is available and there is a power supply, the system is set up in less than 30 minutes. I rate the setup a ten out of ten.

Maintenance is the function of the customer and the kind of application that is deployed on the product. Usually, the system comes with a minimum of three-year support by the OEM, and NetApp ONTAP takes charge of doing that for patch replacements, patch upgrades and access to software updates. In addition, they have the next business day and four-hour support. However, four-hour support is unavailable in our region in West Africa due to resources, so we sell next business day support.

Weekends are challenging to provide support, but partners intervene during the weekend before NetApp ONTAP comes up on the next business day. So, we have various support, but West Africa has limited choices due to the cost and contract business. However, most of our customers enjoy it and don't have issues.

Everybody can work with NetApp ONTAP. I have customers with very low budgets running NetApp ONTAP, which is where the NetApp ONTAP Cloud comes in. It doesn't have to be hardware. NetApp ONTAP is software that is now a commodity like VMware so that you can buy it on Amazon, Azure, and as a commodity. If you're a big company, you have access to bigger platforms, and if you're a small company, there are smaller platforms.

The price is relative. Once the value is appreciated, price is a much simpler issue. In terms of licensing, I feel NetApp ONTAP is a bit pricey compared to other solutions, but it has value, and the total cost of ownership of the NetApp ONTAP system is cheaper than the others. The initial cost might be a bit high, but over a period of time, it's cheaper. I rate the price a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. Regarding advice, if you are looking for a unified environment where you can use all your protocols anytime, you want NetApp ONTAP to be the answer. If you want scalable storage with good OEM support where you can deploy on a hybrid environment across multiple clouds and on-premises, NetApp ONTAP is also the answer.

The primary use case is for storing flat files. The secondary use case is as a conduit for long-term archiving.

The product is reliable. We always want to have access to the files, and the system has to be up 99.9 percent of the time.

It most valuable feature is its stability. A product has to be stable.

It should have the ability to be very agile and release more cloud-centric products as compared to some of its competitors. We would like it to have the ability to run or manage a solution in the cloud. This would allow us to migrate our data on-premise to off-premise in cloud solutions.

Stability has been good so far. We haven't had any major issues, which is what we want.

Our environment is large. We are managing over 10 petabytes of data, in terms of storage.

The support has been very good. Anytime that we have had an issue, they have been able to have a resource available to help walk us through problems.

The integration and configuration were fine.

We also evaluated Dell EMC VNX, as a storage solution. We did not chose them because of cost.

We chose NetApp ONTAP because the price was most attractive and the support team was very good.

Make sure you can to do a PoC onsite (or offsite) to ensure the product works for you.

We are using the on-premise version, though we are looking for off-premise solutions from NetApp.

We use it to store email files, mainly JPEGs.

With ONTAP, we have peace of mind with double-parity protector RAID systems. Therefore, we can sleep well at the night, not thinking about crashing a RAID, because it's secure. We are confident with the technology. 

We use it for company websites using NetApp back-end. These are mission-critical applications.

• The capability to create no overhead Snapshots.
• The capability to restore from Snapshots: file and add volume. 
• FlexClone is a great feature. 
  
• All the features are great with ONTAP.

I would like to see more integration of the features with the CIFS and SMB Protocols. We also want integration with iSCSI. Right now, there are a lot of gap between some bleeding edge technology and the assembly protocols. Therefore, I want to see those areas improved in the future releases.

The data is always available. I haven't had a disaster using NetApp products, at least the NetApp FAS systems. It's very stable and highly protected.

You can add storage capacity on the fly with Clustered ONTAP. You can add nodes and increase the entire horsepower of ONTAP.

Technical support is hit or miss sometimes. Level 1 support is not very good. Level 2 and Level 3 (the escalation support) are very good. They are knowledgeable people, but sometimes you get some hiccup in the Level 1 support. After you pass Level 1, it is smooth sailing. There is a lot of room for improvement.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used an in-house team for the installation, and it went well.

In the past, we have used a reseller. Our experience with them was also good.

It helps us save money using compression and deduplication. No overhead snapshots and FlexClone (with no additional space) help us save space. We have been able to save about 50 percent of our space using ONTAP.

We did not consider anyone else besides NetApp.

If you are looking for something simple to manage, but an advanced storage array, NetApp is the way to go.

We have an SAP HANA migration project going on. We bought NetApp a couple of years back, and our first solution was to migrate the data to the HANA boxes.

In terms of mission-critical applications, the first phase of migrating the legacy systems was to migrate all the mission- and business-critical applications to the new platform. The customer has a lot of legacy applications. Most of the mission-critical applications have been moved. The only mission-critical application that is left is the website application that the customer uses. Once that is done, all of the mission-critical applications will be in NetApp.

The customer we have been working for has a lot of legacy products, a lot of legacy hardware and software. Their current path is towards SAP, and the back-end databases are always HANA. There has been a very big improvement in the performance.

There has also been a big improvement in the user experience. Earlier, it would take something like 14 seconds for a page to load. Now, that has improved to about six seconds or seven seconds. That's a big difference from the user's perspective. The ultimate aim, when all the legacy has been migrated to the new platform, is to have a two or three-second wait time for a page to load. We are gradually moving towards that. So overall, performance has improved a lot.

It also has helped us reduce our overall cost of storage. We migrated all our former SAN environment to NAS storage, and that has reduced the OpEx cost a lot.

The most valuable feature is the throughput. You tend to get to your data very quickly. That's why we decided, eventually, to move into NetApp, because of the speed.

Also, as a support engineer, this solution is easy to use, compared with SAN storage.

We have been talking to them about the monitoring tools and performance improvement tools which would enhance it a bit.

In a session, here at NetApp Insight 2018, I heard that OCI, which is one of the tools that is becoming more robust, will include more things that the host team can understand and make use of. So things that we're looking for are getting added.

We had initial hiccups. Initially, we thought it was because of the way the knowledge was transitioned from the earlier support team to the new support team. We even doubted why we migrated. Later on, we learned it had to do with configuring it in the right way. Once you have everything set up properly, you should see the performance and stability that you hoped for. We are on the right track.

We have not had to scale the product because the procurements are done when we migrate from one application to another. We haven't had to scale much. We will probably experience scaling in the coming days.

NetApp technical support is really good. They help a lot with all our questions. They know that we are new customers. NetApp has always been there. You raise a ticket and they respond right away.

We were having trouble during the initial phases of the project and NetApp was there to help us out with the data migration. The initial phases of data migration had a lot of challenges, especially because we had a lot of legacy data involved. NetApp helped us a lot in getting it done.

It was never straightforward. Even NetApp struggled a bit, because the environment was so complex, because of its legacy nature. We were migrating from a very old architecture to a newer SAP-based system.

The first year was not a great time, between a lot of email exchanges, a lot of escalations, etc. It's helping a lot that we're growing in confidence and the support team now knows our architecture behind the scenes. To an extent, the good thing about it is that the engineers have been the same most of the time. When we raise a ticket, they already know the background and how to work it out.

It's been a journey. I believe in another one or two years, it will be a stable environment. But the initial days were really complex.

We had consultants on the job. It was very good. They helped a lot. It was like a partnership between Tata and NetApp to do the migration from the old SAN environment. Consultants were in-house, onsite, to help, and they are really helpful.

Especially for this customer, NetApp was the only option.

I suggest involving NetApp in your solutioning, so that they better know what to propose and what procurements need to be done in the initial stages. Otherwise, you are looking at wasting a lot of time, the kind where you are in the middle of a project, and you realize, "Oh, this is not what I want, I want to be able to scale up more," or something like that. You have to involve them as consultants at the initial stage so that the right things are bought. Their involvement is very important in terms of the architecting, especially if you are building up a new environment.

We don't use the solution for machine-learning, AI, real-time analytics, or other kinds of ground-breaking applications for storage.

We have the lowest version. We still have to do a couple of upgrades to have the latest OCI at the ONTAP level. I would rate what we have now as a six out of ten but that is probably going to climb in the next year or so; it will probably be a better number.

Our primary use is predominately NFS data stores, iSCSI LUNs for SQL databases, and CIFS file share.

I think the biggest improvement we've had over the years where ONTAP has improved the efficiency of it. Organization is due to storage efficiency. They can do deduplication, which is greatly reduced our on disc storage. More recently compaction and certainly in the past have had compression. So the ability to use those compression techniques and then be able to mirror that to an external site and retain the compression techniques. The storage that it does save has been invaluable because we can then buy less storage, have less storage being transferred across the WAN, particularly where the DR sites, geographically dispersed over literally thousands of kilometers.

We use ONTAP for our ERP. It's a mission-critical application that runs 24/7. It needs to be online and responsive all the time. Our last reboot of one of the applications, the server had been up 1200 days, and it was more of periodic maintenance. Since it had been up over three years we thought we might just reboot it just to be sure, but aside from that, it runs 24/7 on an SSD aggregate. Performance is great and stability has been awesome.

We use ONTAP to clone databases and from those clone databases, we use data mining to pull out data from near real-time data sets. That's where the Snapshot and cloning features have come in.

ONTAP has reduced our overall cost of on-premise storage tenfold. We were looking at upgrades and had to evaluate another vendor. Once we took into account the Snapshot and cloning capabilities that ONTAP gives us, we literally would have bought maybe ten to fifteen times the storage we're currently using in the other vendor's storage. Obviously, that wasn't going to be economically viable. The decision was made to retain the ONTAP code base and just upgrade the existing hardware.

Definitely the most valuable features for ONTAP that we've come across are the Snapshot and cloning technologies. We take regular scheduled snapshots and from that we provision clones to SQL databases, which means that we can run multi-terabyte databases within literally minutes and do data analytics against those databases, pull them all down, and restart that process as many times as we like. It's a great use case because we used to be able to do that process every one to two weeks, but due to the restore procedure it would take twelve to sixteen hours to get any of those databases out back. Now, we can provision that in literally minutes. We can run that process a lot more frequently and get the answers back a lot more often.

We've been able to save a lot of space in our NetApp storage mostly due to the deduplication engine that runs. Particularly in our VM datastores, we're looking up to 70 to 80 percent of space efficiency being achieved through that. Add into that compression and now compaction with the new ONTAP version it's certainly pushing those figures more up to 80 to 90 percent.

The additional features I would like to see in ONTAP, and NetApp would probably be the single pane of glass software. Over the years that's probably the biggest area that we've struggled with. NetApp has had a lot of good products, but a lot of them haven't necessarily seamlessly integrated with each other and you have to go to multiple management consoles to manage their software or their hardware. From a customer point of view, I think that single pane of glass where you could just add modules and enable functionality would be the most beneficial thing that NetApp could add.

The stability of our ONTAP system has been awesome over the last four to five years, particularly with the software. The controls have been excellent as well. We recently went through a view of all of our systems and found a number of them had been up, over three years without any sort of reboots or downtime. We have been very happy with the stability of the systems.

The scalability of the systems has been excellent since the introduction of ONTAP cluster mode. Traditionally we had 7-mode, and once we upgraded to cluster-mode and found that we can scale nodes transparently, moving volumes around without disruption to the core systems have been really good and makes migrations easy as well.

NetApp Tech support has been very good on their ONTAP hardware and their ONTAP OS itself. The biggest area that we found it lacking is being around more of the support for the software the products outside of ONTAP, but the ONTAP support itself has been excellent.

I would rate ONTAP around about eight out of ten. The main reason for that is because I believe nothing can have a ten out of ten. Nothing's perfect. There is always room for improvement. The only reason I don't give it a nine is multi-terabyte databases of regular support. The product itself now is excellent. The stability, and the scalability, and the way it performs has been excellent.

It's our main storage platform for our business applications. We have SQL and we do a lot of video editing. We also have a lot of media and sound data. Radio stations and TV stations keep some of their data on it.

Primarily, I do the data replication, the disaster recovery. Often someone will say, "Hey, I deleted this thing yesterday, can you get this back for me?" It's good that we have all those incremental Snapshots at different points in time that we can refer back to, to get them whatever they need.

Or we'll have someone download a virus, something malicious that corrupts a whole folder-tree of files. We can easily go back to right before they did that and just grab everything back. There are also ransomware attacks where they hold your data hostage by encrypting it. We can easily just go back and grab the data from before the attack. We can look back at the footprint and see when the whole tree was changed and restore the whole folder or the whole subset of folders. We might be down for two hours from it. An attack like that hasn't happened in the last nine months, but it has happened in the last two years.

It has also helped us reduce our overall cost of storage. Through dedupe and compression, we save a lot of capacity. Without that, we'd obviously have to buy more capacity. The last time I checked we were saving about 40 percent over our previous storage.

One of the things I find most valuable is the way they do the Snapshots, taking incrementals at points in time.

We just upgraded to 9.3, which is not the latest version, and it has some adaptive QoS built in. We have been using WFA for that. I'm interested in checking that out. I'm really glad they added it.

They use a lot of PowerShell for managing things and there are still a few things that you can't do through PowerShell cmdlets that you can do in the native CLI. It would be nice if they got more of those added in.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable as well.

The tech support is really good. We go through a support provider, Datalink, and those guys are really good. Anything that they don't have immediate knowledge of will be quickly escalated to NetApp and they're really quick about getting an engineer on it and getting us a solution. If we need a part replaced - of course, it depends what level of support we have for that particular system - everything is usually pretty quick.

In terms of a previous solution, when I joined this team they were already using NetApp. We did upgrade our controllers from 6290s to the 9000 but that was because of the age of the system. It was out-of-support and the support cost to maintain them got higher and higher as the years rolled by. It was cost-effective to invest in a new controller.

I wasn't part of this team when they initially set up all the storage, but we've had some upgrades, and we've gotten new controllers and added them to the cluster, and taken some out. All of those steps have been really straightforward.

Our reseller is Datalink and our experience with them has been really good. We've used them for several years. They negotiate really good prices for us and they give us really good support. If we need someone at a remote site, they'll schedule someone to support us at that site.

I don't handle the numbers, but the biggest ROI, to me, would be the ease with which we have our data protected.

We did look at Pure Storage and they were comparable in performance but they didn't have as many features. The gain in performance, for us, didn't offset the loss of the features, coupled with losing the relationship, or hurting the relationship, that we have with NetApp and Datalink.

The Pure system didn't have a way to do the iSCSIs that we need to use, and the impact to the relationship, to have a one-off system that didn't match the rest of them, didn't seem worth it to us.

In terms of NVMe over Fabrics, we no longer have any Fibre Channel. That was all phased out before I got on the team. In general, NVMe over Fabrics is good, it's quick. We aren't yet using machine-learning, AI, or real-time analytics but that is something we're looking into.

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.