NetApp Private Storage Reviews

The primary use case is to maintain the marketing division's info. 

The storage is rather small. It is holding about 10 terabytes of storage.

It has performed great in the six years that we have had it.

We were having a very hard time managing our data and backing it up for our marketing division. The data was coming in with people making calls, campaigns, and gathering leads, so everything was in chaos. 

We feel that NetApp gave us a platform (base) which could clearly arrange all our files and volumes. We put everything on a virtual shelf, which then made it easy to work with.

From when we were upgrading and gathering information for our new campaign, it took about three hours, then we started to work with the storage. This took approximately another two hours or less.

Mirroring and Snapsnots. Snapshots are very robust. Snapsnots will always work and you can dive into them and receive information. There are a lot of other storage companies that have this feature, but we feel that the NetApp Snapshot feature is the best.

I would like to have the Active-Active feature. Some competitors, like Nutanix, already have it. I would like NetApp to add it to stay competitive.

Their global sales process needs improvement. The flow of the process needs improvement in countries like Israel. They need to be ready to make new partnerships, even swallow other new companies in the storage field that have been in business with software only. Hardware does not matter anymore.

The stability is excellent. 

The scalability is impressive. It is very easy to scale out. I would rate the scalability as a nine out of 10.

The technical support team's response was very effective. We were having issues with volume or a disk due to an error. It was a Saturday and a support representative called me that night and told me, "Listen, this is the error. You need to do this and that." In about three minutes or less, the issue was resolved. Therefore, we feel the support is excellent.

We were using HPE 3PAR. We did not having the feeling that this was a serious solution. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We found ourselves looking at what we wanted to do with cloud and how we would like to build it, then maintain it, etc. We decided on two competitors: EMC and NetApp. We made the decision to go with NetApp, which has proven itself over many years as the right decision.

On our shortlist, we had HPE 3PAR, EMC, NetApp, an IBM storage solution, and another storage by Dell. We chose NetApp because we saw the innovation. We saw they are making it possible to install new features and get better results from those features.

If you are in the process of acquiring a new storage solution, you have to first understand not the technical side of the platform, but the human side. You have to dive in and know many levels of the type of support, sales, management, etc. Then, move on and research the technology.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: innovative.

We've primarily used the solution for private storage. 

It is used as a Cinder backend for an OpenStack cloud and for NFS storage and as block storage.

It's fairly easy to use. You can teach yourself. I'm mostly Googling to find my answers.

Its flexibility and ability to configure volumes is its most valuable aspect. I have no problem configuring the product for different kinds of use cases and configuring throughput or configuring some kind of logical volumes and so on. It's pretty easy to configure flex volumes on the NetApp solutions that I use. 

The scalability is okay. 

Integration with other NetApp solutions and merging them is manageable.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The stability has been very good.

I'm not sure how easy it is to use on the cloud versus on-prem. If they have different user experiences, they should work to make the two as similar as possible to make it easy for a user to understand both even if they only deal mainly with one.

I'm working on part-time contracts for future deployment and therefore I've been using the product for maybe six months. Not just using it, but setting it up and so on.

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable. 

The solution scales quite well. If a company needs to expand its usage, it can.

We do have plans to increase storage usage in the future. However, it's not my decision. 

I've never reached out to technical support. We've never needed assistance at that level. Usually, I can find anything I need online. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The initial setup is not too difficult. It's also easy to set up different scenarios if you need to and use them for various use cases. 

I didn't order NetApp and I didn't make the decision to buy any kind of storage solution. I'm just a developer of a storage solution that uses NetApp. In my current organization, my employment is not limited to NetApp and using NetApp. I can't speak to the exact pricing.

For NetApp, my personal experience is as an integrator, however, can't speak to if we are using NetApp at the moment in our company. There are some other kinds of storage solutions, however, it's not currently NetApp. Personally, I have experience with NetApp, however, not in my current company.

I use it in the cloud solution. It is on-premise, however, it's on-prem in an enterprise cloud solution for enterprise purposes. It's located in some kind of private cloud solution.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I'm mostly been happy with the product so far.

We use it for our company storage and the performance has been outstanding.

We get our data faster and it's very reliable; we don't go down.

• Speed
• Reliability

Stability has been outstanding.

Scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good.

The price could be lower.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• reputation
• reliability
• technology.

My advice would be to take a look at this solution.

Disaster recovery. And I like the security very much. I think they have the needed options for security. Can manage NPS using the same tools and process that we use today.

It's easy to set it up, it's easy to manage because you have a GUI that is very simple to administrate, to do a lot of tasks. I think this is another point that is very important, you have good tools, easy tools to administrate your storage and can change anything and be alerted about some issue in your storage wherever you are.

I think it is too early to think about that because we are just starting to use it from now.

I think that it should work better with Microsoft solutions, more integrated with Microsoft. We also need integrated NAS and block storage.

Very stable. I think that it is very good.

They have the scalability that we need, that we ask for. I think it is a very, very good solution. They have a lot of scalability.

We have a contract for implementation from NetApp. Technical support is so, so good. They have done a lot of support that we need, and it's good.

I think because I have a lot of skill in setup of other solutions, I think that is not easy and not difficult. I don't think it's something that can be improved to be easier.

For us, the primary use case for NetApp Private Storage is backup in the cloud, in the future. For us there hasn't been internal resistance to using the cloud. We are growing and starting to use cloud solutions but slowly. We will grow a little bit for a year, cloud solutions, software on the cloud. We are new to NetApp, we are starting to use the NetApp strategy. We are using cloud solutions from NetApp but I think to use in the future.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because of the pricing. Lower pricing would make it a 10.

Take a look at this solution's performance; also their integration, that this solution can be used for NAS and block into the same box. For me, it's very important because the volume that you have to choose to start out, you can grow to the inside, you cannot have some kind of space to one kind in another.

It's very flexible.

Certainly the cost. It's something that we own. We negotiate whatever deal we can get on the type of storage that it is, but it's totally under our control, as opposed to putting it out in the cloud. We like that.

As opposed to cloud, we have full control over security, use, who uses it. We own a number of different companies, so we can partition however we want. There are no privacy concerns or separation-of-data concerns. Our European subsidiaries sometimes reject putting personal data out in a US cloud. So, this works great, private is great.

We had to write a number of custom tools or scripts ourselves to use it as a staging area between our on-premises datacenter and our cloud installation. If they had a better set of tools to allow us to migrate data through, more easily, rather than writing when to get it to here and when to get it to the next step. More transparent, or as a transfer type capability; might be useful if they have those kind of capabilities.

Fine. So far its been working great.

Like any other NetApp storage, we can add shelves or upgrade the heads or whatever we need to do. It's perfectly scalable.

Most of the time, very good. Certainly, for break-fix type problems they're great. If I have a really in-depth question, sometimes it's a number of layers of phone trees and getting down to the right support people. But in general, it's pretty good.

Getting to the right people for the really intricate questions is a little difficult but you would sort of expect that. It's not like the average guy answering the phones is going to be able to answer some incredibility complicated question.

We phased out IBM storage we used to have. In consultation with our NetApp tech team, they strongly urged us to consider this solution. They very much encouraged, explained the benefits, and we went over the use cases ourselves. But it was a no-brainer in the end.

Initially, we made the switch because of cost. IBM is expensive. We originally split off from another sister company which was all IBM, so we inherited that from them. It wasn't like we truly chose IBM.

Easy, having done it before. I've done other NetApp installs. Very simple.

When it came time to replace, we evaluated EMC, NetApp, IBM again and chose NetApp and have not regretted it. It has been a very good decision.

The evaluation of NPS in our organization included me, my German counterpart and a few others, our DBAs, our VMware guys, the infrastructure team, the datacenter team. Approval for the purchase was all the way up to our CIO. Our particular company purchases, up to that big, have to go up to that high. It was the management chain up to the CIO.

Currently we have it just at our own datacenter but we intend to set up at an edge of cloud, an Equinix datacenter and use private storage there to backup. We will use it as a staging area between us on-prem and the cloud. It will be really useful for being an in-between and also for disaster recovery and other purposes like that.

In our company, not only was there no internal resistance to using the cloud before we deployed the NPS solution, but as a matter of fact it was the other way around. They were very much in favor. Once we explained the use cases they said, "Yeah, that's a good idea." They didn't have too much resistance.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with:

• Are they really a partner with us?
• Can we count on them?

We are a merger-acquisition type company so, if we have a big acquisition, can they help us scale up for that? Can they help us migrate whatever vendor they're using because this is now our standard. We will migrate our new company into NetApp. The ease of being able to do that with NetApp is very good.

The only reason why I wouldn't go any higher than nine out of 10 for NPS is the lack of some of those tools I mentioned earlier, being able to use it in certain ways. Other than using it as your own private NetApp and creating your own tools to make it work the way you want. If they had a software suite that would help with that, it might push it to a 10.

If I were advising a colleague who is looking at this kind of solution, I would just challenge them to compare the support structure, the cost structure, the various options that they have for private storage. NetApp has a very good selection for different size companies. Certainly, they could run it up against any competitors they like, but I think they'll find NetApp is a very good choice.

NetApp Private Storage is used for storing files and replication.

The solution could improve by having better support experts. For example, they do not have clear instructions on configuration.

In the next release, they can improve by having inline deduplication.

I have been using NetApp Private Storage for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

The performance depends on the sizing and configuration.

We have more than 10 customers using this solution.

We have been satisfied with the technical support of NetApp Private Storage.

We have three individuals that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The price of NetApp Private Storage is similar to other solutions.

There is typically an annual license required for this solution.

I would recommend that because technology is changing it would be best to use a software-defined solution. Here in Thailand, software-defined solutions are slow to come to the market making it more difficult for customers. NetApp has to market the solution better to be able to capture more customers.

If your company has the budget for NetApp Private Storage I would recommend it.

I rate NetApp Private Storage an eight out of ten.