NetApp SnapCenter Reviews

We're using it for Oracle and SQL, and we use it for backups and cloning.

The backup features are the most valuable because they allow the DBAs to replace SnapManager for Oracle (SMO), which is going away, and to do cloning as well.

We can also clone to different servers and have the actual backup clone mounted on different servers. And we can split easily too.

It hasn't improved our organization because we're going through some kinks with the product as of right now. We've had several tickets open, but because it's replacing SMO we have to get used to using it now.

As far as ease of use, the DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has.

My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60. I have to touch all of them. They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times. That's my biggest headache, having to touch each client to upgrade this product, via GUI or manually.

It's a good product. There should have been more thought put into it before it went live, because when the DBAs are so used to using SMO, it's obvious they're going to compare the two. If they're used to a function that SnapCenter doesn't have, that's an issue. Slowly but surely, it's getting the functions, but when it was presented to us we understood that it would just replace SMO as is, that we'd be able to do everything we needed to do. But we couldn't.

So far, technical support has been decent, it's been good.

Every time we bring up an issue that we're having, they say we have to upgrade to another version, but the version's not quite out. I think they're writing solutions to some of our kinks into the product, which is good, but I wish that they would just tell us that.

We switched from SMO because it was going to be discontinued. Going forward, we can't install it on our production servers anymore. That's why we went to SnapCenter. SMO is not going to be supported as of spring 2019.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just plug-and-play on the Windows Server, get the firewall ports open that are needed, and push to the clients. It is still a manual process, but that piece, the initial install, is easy. The upgrades are not.

The deployment took no more than an hour, but I did it on my own. If I had had initial support it probably would have been less. The reason it took so long is that I didn't have the right firewall ports open. It was clearly there for me but I missed something. So it took about an hour to get the ports opened.

I had everything that I needed. I just took it on by myself, and it was the first time doing it, and it was the first release of SnapCenter. It was 3.0. We don't have direct NetApp support. We have Datalink support. Datalink is our VAR but they didn't know too much about SnapCenter. They had to promote my ticket to NetApp and go from there. Once my question was answered - "Oh, you left out this firewall port" - then it was all good.

Our implementation strategy was to get all of our Prod servers into SnapCenter and that was accomplished in six months.

It's a site license, so it comes with what we have. We have over 400 terabytes of NetApp disk, and it comes with it. So the return on investment is null and void. Since we have it, we're using it.

It does the cloning piece, which it's supposed to do. But we figured that out when 4.0 came out. When we first went to it, it would not do that in 3.0. We're getting a return on investment because it basically comes with what we have.

We have a site license, so it comes with the product.

We didn't evaluate other vendors. All our databases are on NetApp storage, so we wanted to stick with NetApp.

Test out every function that you think you'll need before you implement it in your
production environment.

My role is just to do the configurations. The DBAs actually use the product because it's more of a set it and forget it. I configure it on the server then they get to use it. We have only SQL DBAs and Oracle DBAs using it, a total of about eight people. For deployment we just need the storage team which consists of two people.

If it botches, we will move more into Commvault, because we do have Commvault for backups. But with Commvault backups, it would be the storage team in control of their clones and restores, and we don't want that. So we're going to push forward with SnapCenter because, for the most part, it does what it's supposed to do.

I would rate SnapCenter a seven out of ten, only because of the kinks that we have to keep going through to get what we need. They end up fixing it in a different version, but I wish it was just ready for us on implementation, and then the DBAs would be off my back.

We have a handful of customers constantly using it, mostly for SQL databases, while one of them uses it for VMware.

From the feedback I've heard from clients, they do experience time savings with this solution. It's more efficient than before. SQL backup is just a pain, but with this solution, it seems to be much better. And the consolidated view is a good tool for them on a daily basis.

The backup feature is the most valuable, of course.

Moreover, what is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues.

What I did witness lately are issues with some Microsoft KBs, the updates. But it happened only once, and not on a major platform, it was on a small one. We're doing a major one for a customer in Paris with many SQL servers and, to date, everything is going well.

I have not yet had experience with version 4.0 - that is the latest one - but I have gone through the release notes and it seems to have some improvements.

It's quite stable, but sometimes the stability seems to be endangered by the ecosystem itself and especially the OS updates. This is what we did experience from our side. But the demand for this piece of software is pretty slim among our customers. We have five or six customers using it. Since we support more than 400 customers, this is a pretty rare solution in our scope. But still, the stability seems to be fair.

We've got customers with just one or two servers, and we've got customers with a lot of servers. But NetApp is something that is quite monolithic. You need the same base installed for or one server or ten, 20, or 50 servers. The prerequisites are really even, because you cannot tune the deployment for a small environment or a big one. There is only one flavor.

I use their tech support on a daily basis. Lately, we have experienced many changes. In the past, we were able to directly access level two but that's over. Nowadays, we always need to go through level one. For us, it's a pain and a waste of time because NetApp wants us to be highly certified. We've got here a big team that is very knowledgeable about NetApp solutions, meaning the whole portfolio. At the end of the day, it's somewhat frustrating for us because when we do engage NetApp, it is because we cannot be completely autonomous. But by that point, we have already taken many troubleshooting steps. Especially for the end customers, when we don't have a solution and we have to open a case with NetApp support, often they get the feeling it's something of a "rerun," because most of the time they need to do the same steps that we already did ourselves.

We are trying to hide that process and make it seamless, but sometimes it does end up with a big waste of time and it's a bit frustrating. I have spoken about these kinds of concerns many times already with the department managers.

They moved all the service providers to this new scheme. It was a corporate decision and we just have to comply. Every authorized service partner, nowadays, is forced to go through level one.

I'm not involved in the initial installation but I do support the solution and sometimes do upgrades. In my opinion, the upgrade I did went well, but it's been a while. It was from version 2.0 to 3.0. At that time, it ran fine and was better than expected. It was seamless.

The upgrade took a little more than an hour. We did a first station, just to ensure that all the prerequisites were met up front, to set it up in the best way. The customers always want the sensitive stuff to be done outside of business hours.

My advice is the same for all of the offsite products made by NetApp. You need to look carefully at the prerequisites to avoid any bad surprises afterward. But if you follow the rules, it should go easily.

The solution is mostly is used by backup administrators and sometimes DBAs. From my side it's really hard to tell who is using it because I am always in touch with the same one or two people at every company, because these are the people who are opening the tickets.

I would rate this solution at seven out of ten. It's more than "fair," but it's not perfect. But I will be pleased to have a look at version 4.0 to see what the improvements are.

Our clients use it for backup and restore.

It needs to support vSphere 6.7.

The stability seems good.

I have not had to use NetApp support. As far as our customers are concerned, we are the NetApp representative.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. There is a little bit of work in getting it to work, but it's not too bad. It's not complex. The one time I installed it myself, it was for a somewhat complex customer, so it took some days.

My advice to someone who is looking into implementing this product depends on their environment, whether they're using several SnapManager products, whether they've been using SnapManager before, or if it's a new install. It would also depend on the versions of the products being protected.

The solution needs one primary administrator for 400 or 500 users.

We use it for backup and for restore, primarily. It's really just for VMs. You can use it for other things, but we don't have other things to work with.

Earlier this week, we had a server that was having some issues. One of the database guys came in and said, "Do we have a Snapshot, do we have a backup?" I had looked at all my reports and I said, "Yeah, it looks like the backups worked fine this morning. We've got one as of 1 AM last night or earlier than that." I had saved a bunch of them.

If we didn't have SnapCenter for backups, that situation would have played out a whole lot slower. Without the ability to interact with VMware and have VMware perform the restore using the Snapshot taken by SnapCenter, we would have had to make a clone of the Snapshot and, a lot of times, if you're dealing with RDM drives, you've got to re-present clones of drives. It would all be done within vCenter and we would have to link back to either a vCenter-owned Snapshot or to link back to local Snapshots which might have been taken on the NetApp. The primary storage going to vCenter was through NFS on the NetApp. It would have become a number of more steps and have taken significantly longer to perform a restore than what I've found with using SnapCenter.

Since we have never really done regular backups with vCenter, it would have meant reverting an entire host. It's not convenient to try to do an entire host and then figure out what's changed on all the other VMs on that host. That's basically what it would require. You present the storage for the host to vCenter and it's taken in one shot. You can't just take a little piece of it and restore that, you restore the entire Snapshot. It may only take minutes to restore everything that way, but you're restoring all VMs to the exact same state as the VM you wanted to rescue.

The way that it interconnects with VMware is really handy, because you can go right into your vSphere Client, where you spend a lot of the day anyway, right-click on one of the VMs where you have backups running for however long, and you can restore either some files or restore the entire thing. You pick the Snapshot. I've timed it and it's under two minutes for it to completely rebuild the VM and restore it completely. I really like that feature. It's fast. If people have a problem I can get them back up online in less than five minutes.

I also use the monitoring feature every day. It can send an email every day and tell you, "These worked, these failed," for whatever reason. Typically you have to do some other kind of backup or run it again. That feature is really nice. You can automate it so it tells you afterward what worked, via email.

Finally, it's pretty simple to operate. The interface isn't complicated.

There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there. That's been a drawback and we're trying to figure out some kind of workaround. Obviously, you don't want to have an SMTP server using "anonymous." You want it to be locked down to some kind of authentication domain level. I would like to see that changed.

The SMTP thing is a concern for me. At the moment, we're just using it anyway, until we can figure out something else. In the worst-case scenario, I can set up my own PowerShell script to send an email and use "secure" that way, based on the reports that it's generating. But I can still log in to the website because it's got a web portal. I can go into my web portal and see, "Okay, the backups finished last night." That's not as simple as getting an email, but at the same time I can just open up a website and see the results anyway.

I've had no problems with its stability. I haven't had to restart the server for any reason. Any failed backup that I've seen so far has not been related to SnapCenter. From what I've seen in the last year, it is pretty near bulletproof, as far as being able to run, once you set it up.

I don't think scalability is bad at all. Like I mentioned with the vCenter thing, as long as you understand that if you've got different sites or different vCenter stacks, you're going to have to have a SnapCenter for each one of those. But in terms of scalability, if you actually have a network that is significantly bigger or suddenly grows really big, it would be as simple as going into your hardware, whether it's physical or a VM, and just increasing your resources a little bit. By default, they said you should use 8 gig of RAM and two processors. It doesn't take much up many resources, so scalability doesn't seem like an issue at all, particularly if you end up having SnapCenter for each site.

I talked to technical support when we had the SMTP issue, to try and figure out a way to use domain-level authentication to send an SMTP message rather than just anonymously. And there was the time when I placed a ticket for the vCenter plug-ins, when I was trying to figure out why it wasn't working quite the way I expected between two different sites.

NetApp has always had fantastic response. I get someone on the phone, we do a little preliminary work, and if we need something later, it's usually a matter of single-digit hours to get the higher-level support online. They can do WebEx and get right in there with you and take a look at it. They've got people who are cleared to work on classified networks and that type of environment as well. They've probably been the easiest company, of any of our vendors, that I've had to deal with.

To understand the broader picture of where we were coming from, we had an existing network that was hodge-podge and built over the years; a combination of three different kinds of SAN storage from EMC to EqualLogic and we had a tape backup solution from Dell. They were all running a little bit here, a little bit there. They were using Commvault for some of the stuff and there was major overhead. It was a lot more than one person was going to be able to handle in my position. What we did was build a parallel network that was going to replace the whole thing, based completely on NetApp and using SnapCenter and VMs. It's far more streamlined.

I came across SnapCenter because I had worked previously with contracts with the Navy and Marine Corps and they had been exclusively using NetApp filers for the last nine to ten years that I'd been working on it. They had used a couple of different solutions before that, but then I heard that SnapCenter was coming, as I came out of this contract. We had a NetApp resident on our previous contract and he kept me updated: "Hey, this is coming out," or "We have this new tool." So I heard about it from him. I said, "Let's look into this and see what it's going to take." I read about it on the internet, I looked at some of the documents from NetApp; how to install it, how it works, how it interacts with VMware or Oracle or other databases.

The initial setup was pretty simple. I created a single VM, which didn't have to have huge resources. I grabbed the all-inclusive image that you can apply in your vSphere client to just create a VM with the right operating system, completely configured and ready. I used that and that was really simple.

I just downloaded the file I needed from NetApp, created the VM using that template, and then I logged in to it through a VMware consul and configured an IP address and whatever else I needed to set up on there. It really didn't take very long, once the image had done the work through VMware. The setup took less than half an hour, and it was functional. It was able to talk to the filers, take Snapshots, and interact with vCenter. Part of the implementation is that it configures vCenter with its own little plug-in. It's really pretty slick and it actually installs it on the vCenter. That's what gives you the option to right-click on one of the VMs and see SnapCenter as one of the options. You go in there and choose the type of backup. That's all installed as part of the configuration.

I can't say how long it's going to take vCenter to get its part done, but from the command-line perspective, it was less than half an hour to configure everything else, after the VM was created.

Regarding an implementation strategy, I looked through the NetApp document on SnapCenter 4.0, and read through it briefly. Then I said, "Okay, we need to do this step, this step, this step..." I got a basic image of it in my head and then went forward with it. It wasn't complicated. There weren't a whole lot of extras and hoops you have to jump through. It was pretty simple.

Let me add another observation - and they may already have something in mind to change this. In our environment we have two different sites. We have a vCenter on both sites, but they're not linked; they're completely independent. One thing I noticed is that the vCenter that I set up on "site one" was able to do backups for both of them, but it had trouble seeing the backups on the second site. They had mentioned this on the documentation: If you're not using linked vCenter sites, then it can have problems communicating with the second site. Apparently, if they're linked, it handles backups for both sites, restores for both sites, monitoring, etc. In our environment, it was simple enough for me to repeat the process in our second site, have a second SnapCenter server, just to do that site. That made everything simpler, rather than trying to figure out if backups weren't working.

Going into initial setup, you have to understand that because you don't want to have it try to take care of two completely unrelated vCenters. It doesn't work well for that. Maybe they have some kind of update plan to change that, but for right now, I couldn't get it to work. I went through a couple different cases with NetApp to try and resolve that. Finally, we just said that it's not really designed for one SnapCenter server to be able to run a vCenter plug-in on both sites. That's what it would really amount to: You would have to install a second vCenter plug-in, and its own rules say it can only have one. When you're trying to use just one to do two different sites, you get weird issues in connectivity and the like.

I did it myself.

The timeliness of the backups and the restore turnarounds are the areas of ROI. A lot of times, it's fairly important servers and, if they go down, you don't have half an hour to fiddle around with stuff while you're losing thousands and thousands of bits of data that are supposed to be coming in. The biggest return that I've seen is that once we find a problem, it's done in 60 seconds to a minute-and-a-half, usually.

There's no licensing involved. That was a question I had when I first set everything up. I didn't have any problems with it at all, but everything I had ever used had licenses. I noticed there was a place that said "License" but when I went in there it said "Standard File License." I thought, "Well what do I need to do, what kind of license do I need?" I came to find out they had upgraded some things and they said, "Actually, there is no more license required. Whatever you've got in there, that standard version, is good for everything. You don't have to buy anything. You never have to upgrade it." It's been simple. I've done one upgrade on the OS, one minor patch that came out. It took no time really. It was simple, automated.

There was no license required because they had a contract with NetApp already.

Because it can interact with more than just NetApp, I'm sure you can use it as a stand-alone. But unless they change the way licensing works, I would suspect that you just purchase a license for that one device and there isn't like an ongoing, "you need more licenses." You have the base license and it's yours. I haven't pursued that so I can't tell you for sure.

They had already chosen NetApp as their storage for their filers. We could have looked at a number of different things and at the time that I came onto the contract, they really didn't have anything yet. But I knew from the experience that I had, that I really didn't want to bring Commvault into that solution. There were one or two other more flakey-type solutions that I'd seen in the past and I knew I didn't want to deal with that. I thought that looking at something that was made and supported by the same people who created our filers would make the support a lot simpler for me if I needed to reach out. I knew who I could get and when I could get them. I knew what to expect. That was really why we chose it. The others weren't really much of an option. It wasn't a matter of cost because, if I remember correctly, there really wasn't any cost to having SnapCenter. There's no license involved.

Make sure that you've got some kind of a server in mind for it. If you're not going to be using just an IP address, if you want to use a domain, make sure that you've got access to your domain controllers so that you can create a DNS record. Just download the installation guide form NetApp. A high-schooler could probably pull it off.

As for the number of users in our organization, I'm really the only one. I do all the SAN storage and I overflow into the VMware and the enterprise networking. I'm the only one that interacts with it, although we've got three different people who could if they actually wanted or needed to. It would be easy enough to set up a user for them. We've got one VMware lead, and he primarily takes care of that. I just back him up when he's not here. We've got a primary network lead, and he does our routing and switching and firewall work. Either one of them could step in, had they the need to do so, but right now, I'm really the only guy with a SAN or NAS-type storage background or certifications. They usually just leave it alone. They get a copy of the backup reports if something fails, so at least they are aware of it, even if they don't have to go do anything.

It has been very low maintenance so far. I'm the only one who maintains it. Running whatever upgrades that come out for the OS is really all I have to do. Even if something broke, it doesn't take that much time out of one person's schedule to find out what's wrong. I honestly haven't found anything wrong, other than those couple of points that I mentioned and that wasn't actually broken, it just doesn't function like that.

There is a possibility that we could add backups for Oracle, if for some reason their native backups don't pan out but, other than that, we just see minor growth in the virtualized area. If we have to add more servers, that's really the only kind of growth we're anticipating.

I'm giving it an eight out of ten because, while I really like the way it works and how bulletproof it has been, I believe they could improve it by adding some kind of authentication to their SMTP. Also, they probably could improve by having a single, central spot that can handle multiple vCenter sites. Those two concerns aside, I'm completely happy with it.

It is used for VMware and Microsoft SQL databases. We use it for ordinary backups. Nothing special.

I like the instant backups and recovery feature that SnapCenter provides within NetApp storage systems. That's mostly why I'm using it.

I would like to see replication support between systems. Right now, it's kind of limited.
We manage them separately from the storage system interface, not from SnapCenter. It would be nice if it was integrated into SnapCenter.

I would rate the stability at four out of five because it's a complicated product. In terms of integrating with systems and software, sometimes you need to watch your software versions and the changing environment. But that is its design, so there is nothing you can do about it.

It's stable. I haven't had any stability issues with it.

SnapCenter handles scaling very well. In my opinion, it's for small or medium businesses but not for enterprise. It has great value because it's cheap and everything is bundled with the NetApp system, so it's best for small customers. Big enterprises usually use complete backup systems. There's no way you can it can propose SnapCenter as the primary backup system in an enterprise, in my experience. There is nothing wrong with the software, it's just that big enterprises have serious backup systems.

We use different backup solutions for systems that SnapCenter doesn't support. We use Commvault. We started using SnapCenter this year. We had a few new NetApp systems and it was cheaper to use SnapCenter than Commvault because it's included and bundled with the system. It's better to use SnapCenter than to pay for Commvault. It's better value.

The initial setup is pretty easy. It's very good. The whole process of implementation is pretty easy and straightforward. There's nothing to improve here.

Usually, it takes less than one hour to deploy it and get it operational. Our implementation strategy is to check the whole compatibility matrix. That makes it go easily. Deployment generally requires one or two storage engineers, as well as a DB or VMware admin. Four people is enough.

It ordinarily works without any maintenance needed, but to monitor all the backup stuff might take half an FTE.

We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive.

NetApp has great licensing models. It has two bundles: You can buy Premium or SnapCenter, and that's a great thing. You have all the replications included but, as I mentioned before, there should be some improvements in the management the replication for SnapCenter.

We have not looked at other systems. We have a primary backup system and SnapCenter for particular systems, and that satisfies our requirements.

Check the compatibility of all components before, although it's pretty common. After you check the compatibility, then deploy SnapCenter and the plug-ins. Don't try to implement and then troubleshoot. It makes things more complex.

Backup and recovery software solutions are very important for every company. SnapCenter is pretty cheap, and that's important as well. Sometimes, customers don't want to pay a lot for backup solutions. That is why SnapCenter is good.

We do implementations from time to time, where customers have no backup solutions at all. It's better to have something that is actually free rather than nothing. Case by case, if we have no backup system, we use SnapCenter, but I don't think the number of our installations will grow significantly.

I would rate SnapCenter at seven out of ten because of the lack of replication management, which is very important.

We use it as a backup solution.

I think there is no improvement for our organization, it's just a new tool.

For us, it's the Exchange plugin because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter.

Plugins should be developed in shorter times. Performance generally could be a little bit faster.

Sometimes it works fine, sometimes not. It depends on the complexity of the customer's environment.

No experience at this time, as it’s relatively new in our environment.

Depends on the technician on the phone. We’ve had both good and bad experiences.

Yes, SnapManager Products. Because of EOA we had to switch to SnapCenter.

Initial setup took one day, but it is complex. You have to deploy servers with high requirements on server power, you have to create users, you must deploy plugins, etc.

As a service provider, we implement the solution by following best practices.

Looks good.

Yes, we were looking at other software products. If a user already has a backup solution, for example Commvault, it's easier to sell and implement an agent for this product.

You should always look at best practices and the interoperability matrix.

It's used for backup and restoring of virtual machines from VMware. I have some experience with SnapCenter but only on the installation. I don't work directly with the end customers.

The simplicity of backup and restore directly with VMware is an advantage and the time to backup and restore is reduced.

The easy installation of the plug-ins to the host is the most valuable feature.

The compatibility with other manufacturers, like Oracle and Hyper-V, could be improved. I would like to see it be more compatible with other software.

So far, it's very stable, although I don't know what it's like for the end customer. From my side, it seems to be very stable.

I had a customer with two sites, and the scalability was great. I had to install SnapCenter on both sites and it was very straightforward. The two sites communicate with each other.

I have used NetApp's technical support for this solution and it went very well. They asked me for some logs, identified the problem - we easily got to the point, where the issue was - and the problem was resolved. 

Some of our customers were using Veeam and Commvault before using SnapCenter. They did not replace the other tools, they are doing some backups with them as well. The solutions are complementing each other.

The initial setup is straightforward. Other than one issue, a networking problem on the customer's side, I have had no issues. Installation is very fast, very straightforward. Deployment, with all the features installed and configured, takes about one day.

I am using the Standard license, the free version. There is an Advanced license but I don't know its price.

Try it and buy it. Try the product to see the features, the easy installation, and how easy it is to implement and to work with.

We have five or six end customers, users, who are system admins. For deployment and maintenance, it requires two people.

I would rate SnapCenter at seven out of ten. The tool could be faster.

We use it for Oracle, on the client side.

In our company, we are mostly using SnapCenter software in our test environment. There are many customers using NetApp products, but most of them don't use SnapCenter software in their production environment. So we do not have a lot of experience with it in production systems. We are testing it in our data core environment and our test environment. We check the software's features and new features, and sometimes we do troubleshooting as well.

We test VMware Snapshot, Hyper-V Snapshot, database Snapshots, for example, MS SQL and Oracle.

It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools.

We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter.

We can back up according to application types and not bind. All the features are good for NetApp storage. SnapCenter is the top application. It makes it very easy to work with backup tools.

The replication feature needs improvement in future releases.

SnapCenter is stable.

We haven't had to use technical support for SnapCenter yet.

We were using NetApp's previous software, SnapManager: SnapManager Exchange, SnapManager SQL, SnapManager for Hyper-V, and SnapManager for VMware, etc. SnapCenter is the software which collected all the different kinds of SnapManagers into one bundle. That's why we started using it.

The initial setup is not complex. It's easy, but we have to know which version is used on the customer's side. For example, we have to know which version of ESX they are using and whether the Oracle or SAP machine is a virtual or physical machine. If we make a mistake at setup time it will be a problem for an application or Snapshot.

Deployment takes one hour. We set up step-by-step.

There are two kinds of licenses: a controller license, which is the SnapCenter Standard Capacity license, as well as the SnapCenter Advanced Capacity license.

We are using Commvault Backup software in our environment. Commvault can also manage Snapshots of NetApp, but SnapCenter is very easy for us.

It's really useful if you are using NetApp storage. If you have NetApp storage in your environment and want to take a Snapshot, I recommend purchasing this software.

We have five users of it in our organization. In most environments, one person is enough to manage the software.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. It's useful. If you don't have a backup application, you can use SnapCenter.