NetApp SnapMirror Reviews

I use the on-prem deployment model for this solution. 

The most valuable feature is the data replication tool. There is also a lot of ability for data migration. 

In the next release, I would like to get an active IP number solution. 

The stability is good. It's stable. 

Scalability is good. You can expand your usage on the go. 

Their technical support is good. It's not hard getting in touch with them. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It's a good solution that will give you what you need. I would rate it an eight out ten. 

We primarily use the solution for replicating data in the storage system.

Overall, the product is very good. It's an easy to use tool.

The user interface could be simplified. They might want to have fewer options on it, to make it less complicated. There are a lot of options we never use ourselves. They're often very specialized and don't apply to us.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. We have about 700 users on it currently.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is complex.

We had a local partner that helped us with the initial implementation.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

Overall, we've been very happy with this solution. We'd recommend it to others to use.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The main reason we use NetApp SnapMirror is to try to have a disaster recovery site. We want to have the possibility to do disaster recovery to failover to another site when there is a problem, but also to failover to another site during maintenance, for instance. So if the customers are going to do some maintenance, they can failover to the other site and keep on running. 

The product itself doesn't have any big issues. What is lacking and what we need to use other products for, is to have active data centers. You need to implement another solution for it, but that is also available from NetApp. So I don't think there is an option to put that into SnapMirror either. It's lacking that functionality but it's available with other solutions from the same vendor.

The solution is very stable.

There are some limitations when it comes to the scalability of the solution, but I don't know where the limitation is. There is often a limitation in the communication line between the sites. Also, a large part of the data is changed because all changes are replicated from one site to the other. So I'll say it's a mathematical issue. The developers should have a communication line that is packed enough to transport all the changes.

My understanding is that the technical support is good, but we don't need much support because it's working fine. Since we have been working with the solution for 20 years, we have very good internal competence. So it's very seldom that we have to call support. 

We've used other vendors from time to time, but it is more because of political issues - nothing technical.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. One has to implement one hardware system on two sites and then implement the functionality to mirror between the two sites. It doesn't take very long. So one has to implement and get the one site up and running first, and then implement the second site and get that up and running too. Then one can do the metering between them.

My advice to others would be to do a test run first, to see is the solution does what you want it to do. On a scale from one to ten, I will rate the solution an eight, because it doesn't solve all our issues. But it is easy to implement, easy to set up, and it works.

NAS Filer with quick recovery features within same site or across DR site. Being a unified storage, it is used as a Block (SAN) storage as well with pretty decent performance.

The most valuable feature is the snap shot.

It is not as efficient as it needs to be. It doesn't compress the data really well when it is forwarded to a secondary site. The download performance could be better.

Our company is Oman, and there is a ticketing problem here. If there are issues, we have to go to the partner who did the implementation. We need to contact the partner, then the partner has to get the log, and then they will raise the ticket on our behalf. After that, the tech support team contacts the partner and then it gets to us. We would like to get support ourselves or the ability to directly log the ticket or even call without having to go through the partner. We want to report the problem to tech support directly and then take it from there.

In terms of improvements for the solution, I think they already have a different product, AFF, where you can get much better performance and more combination as well as data security and data savings, if they have a different protocol already, which they are lacking now.

We didn't have any problems with stability during the installation.

The solution is scalable. The upgrade is really smooth. It doesn't require any content. Once it's done, it's ready to go. We can scale out as little as we want. We have five servers right now and 900 users.

With technical support, there are multiple levels. We are not very happy with Level One and Two support from our region. When it comes to escalation support, when there is a huge problem, it goes through the US or Canada. Those support techs are really good.

We did not previously use a different solution. It was entirely a different use case. Previously, we were using a Windows-based file server. We didn't have the high availability and replication to secondary site, also snap shot's capability, which is what we were looking for. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was pretty easy. Most of the items were available from the GUI end.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

I would say that if people are using this product they should make use of the snap shortcut. It would be very useful to them. If they can afford it, they should get the second box to put at a different site and replicate it for maximum protection of their data.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

It's a simple and efficient tool to build a disaster recovery solution that involves many applications such as Oracle, SQL, VMware, and Hyper-V.

We have a VMware environment and many NFS exports to Linux servers which are easy to replicate. If we lose the main environment, we can restore all the applications to the recovery site to the appointed LUNs, and then the NFS servers to another server using storage from the DR site.

With VMware, this is very simple because you replicate the identical volume where it is stored in your datastore. I think that recovery for VMware is too simple and you don't need any tool to support this procedure, only directing the LUNs to another ESXi and executing the procedure inside VMware to mount datastore.

In the Oracle environment, the procedure to restore the database on the recovery site is simple as well.

I think that NetApp needs to improve the performance of SnapMirror with controller volume access. This is because when you have many SnapMirror jobs running, the controllers give priority to accessing volumes and transfers remain slow. It is very difficult to understand how to change this in 7-Mode.

I have used this solution by more than 8 years.

If you have to replicate a database environment, you have to put your database into backup mode before starting the replication. If you don't do this step the data will stay corrupted when you need to use replica on site the DR.

No issue if you follow best practices and understant your replicated application/solution...

10

10

Yes i have used solution from HDS and Fujitsu and the company accquire Netapp and so their dont back more .

The initial setup is too simple because Netapp integrated the configuration snapmirror on the oncommand system manager.

I have implemented this solution since i started my working with Netapp solutions

You must understand your environment to implement any replicated solution, talk to business area before implemented and design your Disastery Recovery .

It provides block-based replication of data from the primary system to the disaster recovery systems. It’s fast and doesn’t take a lot of bandwidth, and it transfers everything including data and snapshots. Also, the clustered Data ONTAP is valuable.

It's very robust, very fast, and very easy to set up.

On very large data sets with a lot of changes, the interval between mirrors can be rather long.

I've used it for 10 years.

It has been 100% stable.

I can’t say how far it goes, but I haven’t run into problems yet. It’s very scalable, although on very large data sets with a lot of changes, the interval between mirrors can be rather long.

Technical support is very good.

No previous solution was used.

Initial setup was very easy as it’s part of our Data ONTAP system, so we just select our source and destination volumes, click initialize, and that’s it.

Keep in mind that is an asynchronous replication solution, so the destination will always lag behind compared to the source. If you can live with that, then it’s a perfect solution.

Its ability to transfer data retaining its complete integrity, access, permission etc.

We have migrated data from old and expiring Netapp hardware using Snapmirror - thereby allowing us to decomm the old hardware and save power, maintainence, cost etc.

None for now.

8 years.

None.

None.

Excellent. None of the users whose data has been migrated using Snapmirrot have ever complained back to us.

10/10, just like any Netapp support.

No - this is the best tool from Netapp and we never thought of any other tool. In fact, all additional features like Netapp Datamotion for vfilers use SnapMirror as their backend.

Straight forward - infact just 3-4 commands can effectively deliver the power of Snapmirror.

Obviously in-house.

100%.

No idea. I am a technical guy and dont get into finances.

None. This technology has been in place for last 10 years as I know and I have personally worked 8+ years on it.

Administration of Netapp Snapmirror and Netapp Storage through CLI or Oncommand manager is the best.

Creation of any size of storage LUN and replication of the same with Snapmirror environment is most valuable.

I can not say much, but obviously Netapp came out with different types of GUI based management tools for Performance management and Replication Management which has made acceptability of Netapp environment better than earlier.

I must say that Netapp will have to come out with Better performance and Faster Data replication technologies.

We have been using Netapp Storage and Snapmirror for 4 Years for Banking Domain applications, I have also seen that many clients using Netapp Snapmirror for Messaging as well.

About about a year now we have faced random issues related power supply or auto failover failback issue which was related to bugs in Firmware.

No, it's very good.

I would rate is with 3 as India Support which I am experiencing is not that good when compared to EMC.

I would also rate is with 3.

It is straightforward in terms of LUNs,NFS and CIFS with Snapmirror at DR.

Vendor Team - Yes Experience was good

I am not aware of it as I am the administrator, Client used to manage costs.

Of course. We checked for EMC's VNX and Hitachi's HNAS.