NetApp ONTAP Reviews

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.

My primary purpose for NetApp ONTAP is for the MetroCluster. We have two data centers and we have it housed there for high availability and fault tolerance.

Over the last five years of implementing a MetroCluster ONTAP, we've been able to improve and keep a high availability for our organization. In many cases, we reduced and minimized any downtime that happens given us a power or hardware failure we've been able to still keep our environment up and resilient.

For our ONTAP mission critical we use about 85%. We also have Epic. Epic runs all on NetApp, and so we also have some critical clinical applications that run on NetApp. Those are highly available which allows the doctors to gain access to some very critical clinical applications that reside on our NetApp storage.

If our data centers suddenly go down, we have two data centers, and we can fail over between either data center that is interrupted because of any scenario.

For real-time analytics, we use our NetApp E-series. That houses and manages all of the analytics within our environment.

From a space consumption perspective, because of all of the deduplication and the Snapshots that we're allowed to manage our infrastructure from a storage perspective, it's been really solid. I know we're about 50 to 60 percent deduplication on most of our storage, and it has allowed for storage continues to grow. As many times as I've looked at trying to reduce storage, we continue to consume our storage growth. The deduplication that NetApp provides has allowed that growth to be maintained and managed.

One of the biggest values that ONTAP provides is the ability to fail over between two data centers. Since we are a hospital, it gives us high availability and allows for us not only to failover in situations of a power outage, but also allows for us to do testing to ensure that the product is functioning properly.

My impression of NVME is that it works flawlessly and it allows for us to be able to manage our environment in a more rapid fashion. For NVMe we've only partially just began to really start playing with it and test it. We're working on implementing on MetroCluster over IP. We haven't involved ourselves very heavily on it at this point in time.

Because of the deduplication ONTAP reduces the footprint and makes the footprint much smaller.

There is a lot a lot of functional integration that we look forward to for improvements. I'm learning where they're going and I'm very interested to see those improvements and how they can help us.

Stability is very strong. We had an issue and after FlexPod looked at the solution, FlexPod was running well. What is important is the partnership that we have with NetApp. While we were trying to identify a problem, even though the problem had nothing to do with NetApp storage, NetApp came in and helped us resolve that solution. They had a team come in, evaluate, identify where the problem actually was and gave us a fix for it. That was very critical given the situation of the outage that were occurring at the time.

Scalability has been very, very good. We've had this product not only for Epic but also for our infrastructure for the last five years. The scaleup has been fantastic. One of the solutions that we're looking at to go to the MetroCluster IP is because over the last five years we have finally grown to the point where we're at our max. Either we have to build another cluster solution or revamp, modify, move forward, and so we're looking at the Metro IP Cluster to allow us to do that.

We had a storage solution and during an investigation and a review of the solution, we analyzed the standards for what we were looking for. The fact was that we had virtualization VMWare, and the integration of NetApp gave us a FlexPod clone and the integration in the communication and having a one shop place for all of our troubleshooting and management, and coordination of those three different solutions made the best sense to go with NetApp.

Initially, we had a reseller that we partnered with. They were instrumental in helping us build up the infrastructure. We also had a partner that also came in and helped us implement and build out the Epic environment as well.

There is a lot of reporting which we work with NetApp on OCI and SnapManager. At this point, I'm just trying to really get a feel for what's our next event. I see where NetApp is headed when it comes to the reporting and integration  I'm looking forward to seeing what solutions they will present to us.

ROI is in line with many of the storage industries. We get a great reduction from our cost perspective in partnership. I would say that ROI is suffice.

We also looked at 3PAR, Dell EMC, and IBM to see which would be the best fit for us. 

I would rate this solution a ten because of what NetApp provides us from a quality layout. The partnership that they provide us and their assistance is very important and the work that they communicate with us on a regular basis is outstanding.

I would tell someone considering this solution that there are many similar technologies. What I would recommend is to make sure that you have a great partnership with whomever you select. In my case, I recommend that you understand your business and make sure whoever you're going to select understands your needs and is willing to digest, make a sale but invest their organization and commitment to your organization. I selected NetApp because they have a true partnership with us.

Our primary use case for ONTAP is for all of the protocols we use like CS, NFS, EFC, ISKC.

ONTAP has improved my organization by lowering budget costs. Deduplication, compression, compaction, SnapMirror, SnapWall, the transaction happens from one to the other. 

It's serving our needs just as expected. 

The best features within a database like data application, compression, compaction and SnapMirror, SnapWall, and encryption. 

NVME over Fabrics in a next-generation feature, which gives even faster access to the data than what we have with our agencies. Then we have the SSDs. So, improving ONTAP is taking off. On day one, when NetApp started, the cluster there were not with all the features that were in the seven mode. Then, gradually, keep adding novice 9.3, 9.4. Most of the features are from 7.3. They also have additional features like encryption, compaction, which are not there as well. 

It has super stability, it works perfectly.

Scalability so far is very good until it comes to the twelve node SAN, it only goes to 24 nodes. We have twelve nodes with ONTAP but it gradually has increased since the beginning. It has gone from two nodes to twelve nodes. 

Their technical support is super but the engineers are working on the technology and they themselves cannot address most of the issues. 

If you do the initial setup manually, it is a bit difficult for someone who doesn't know. NetApp has a three-click implementation, it's so simple. 

I wasn't really involved with the initial setup but I used to set up the ONTAP systems using all of the features like 7-mode and cluster mode. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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 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 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.

My primary use case is we have both Windows and Unix and they share file systems for compiling code. The big advantage with NetApp is the ability to file Linux symlinks in the Windows environment. 

When I came on board they had NetApp and ONTAP was old and the system was getting to its end-of-life and corporate wasn't sure which way they were going to go. They couldn't quite make a decision on whether to buy a very large unit or a small unit because we were gonna become a central hub. They decided to scrap, and what to choose landed in my lap. I decided to go with a smaller NetApp that would fit the main requirements that I needed NetApp for and I use other types of storages for VMware. My volumes, that are NFS and SIFS, there's a lot of stuff that's used both on Windows and Unix so I need the ability to maintain the permissions between the two. I get better security with ONTAP and I get better control of users space requirement because I have qtrees and quotas and then I have the masking of user accounts, NIS to AD. The other thing that's a really good bonus is that ONTAP has a deprecated NIS and a lot of other vendors are deprecated NIS.

Critical applications are not as critical as like you'd normally experience because I am R&D and it is a production environment for R&D, but I have time to build a recover. I can recover hourly from snaps, everything else I recover from tape backup because my backup uses MDMP and it'll be just as fast as Snap and storage are cheaper.

Cost of storage hasn't reduced but it's more cost effective because the very specific requirements drop the ball. Especially when it comes to user account translation from Unix to Windows. ONTAP and Dell EMC are the only two real vendors that know how to do that properly.

For me and my users, the most valuable feature is the ability to mask Unix accounts to Linux accounts.

Stability's perfect because I have two nodes, I'm not overloading the nodes because it's just R&D and it's very specific lines, so it's a lot of terabytes but we're not in petabytes. For what I do it's very stable.

Scalability is perfectly fine. Right now I only have the two nodes and one shelf. I'll be able to easily upgrade additional shelves. They gave me plenty of cabling when I got the unit so all I have to do is disconnect and reconnect the cabling and that's it.

Tech support has been pretty awesome. The only thing is that 9.4 has been presenting a couple of challenges and there was one case, for example, where I didn't want Snaps. There's a command to be able to disable the scheduler, but with 9.4 that command doesn't quite work. I ended up using a workaround which tells the scheduler that it has zero snap capability on all snap jobs.

The initial installation could've been quite easy, but there was a lot of miscommunications with professional services and there are a lot of details that they didn't quite provide which caused a very complicated installation.

A lot of Windows builds have been failing simply because when they go through the file system they can't file the symbolic links that are created on the Linux file system. Now they will resolve because ONTAP supports that.

I would rate this solution a ten. It's very easy to use. What I really like about it is it incorporates the same thing as CentOS and RHEL 7 which is the Tap commands. If you have an idea of what commands you want to use, you can tap through and figure out what you need without having to go and look for the full syntax.

I have use this storage appliance, which they have on-premise. It is for taking backup off onsite data. This is a storage and NAS device.

Its typical use case is storing files and getting data, so it does its use case well.

When it accesses regular files, it does so as an NFS workload, which retrieves data quickly.

The initial UI integration could be quite a lot better.

I would like to have deduplication and SSD features in the product.

If you have huge data, you will see stability issues. Since we didn't have that data, our stability has been fine.

We previously haven't had a huge workload, so it scaled fine. Though, with our current use case, we will need something faster. E.g., if you have a huge scale, having SSD-based backup is better. 

We did not contact technical support, as the solution was working fine.

The integration and configuration are not straightforward. We had to read some documentation and receive support. A good UI may be helpful in resolving this.

We looked at various Dell EMC products at the time and considered using VMAX. We also looked at Nimble Storage. For some reason, we did not look at Pure Storage.

We chose NetApp because had some collaboration or a sales representative who approached us, then convinced us of the use case.

Based on the use case, it can be a good product.

We have just one application where we store data, and we haven't had problems with it.