NetApp StorageGRID Reviews

I am a system administrator for storage and backup, and we only work with NetApp systems.

At the moment, we are only using the StorageGRID for file archiving. In a few months, we will be using it for production data.

This product is connected using fiber and iSCSI technologies.

The most valuable features are deduplication and security.

The performance is very good.

Beyond the initial setup, this product is a little bit difficult to configure. This is something that could be easier to do.

We have been using NetApp StorageGRID for approximately six months and are currently in the installation phase.

We use StorageGRID on a daily basis and the stability is very good at the moment.

We have not scaled the solution, although we have done the training and learned how to scale it. The process is not hard.

There are two of us in charge of administration.

The technical support is good.

We have not had any issues that required escalation.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to deploy and it took approximately a week to complete. However, configuring it after the initial setup is something that could be easier to do.

The vendor assisted us with the deployment. NetApp also handles the maintenance that is required. For example, it was updated yesterday.

With respect to pricing, it is okay. This product is mid-range. We buy our licensing according to our needs.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it. It has all of the features that we need at the moment. We expect to maintain it for the next five years.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use NetApp as a service provider for IT structures, and are using it in three areas: for archiving, for backups, and for replacing some of the SES architectures, which are basically build machines. We are starting to replace some of them with these StorageGRID appliances. We have a couple of customers in private cloud areas who are using this type of storage from NetApp. 

The backup features are valuable. I've heard from our backup and data protection people that our clients are very satisfied with the performance in junction with the backup, which they archive on this type of object storage. 

The price is something that NetApp could improve, as with most companies. NetApp is known for not being the cheapest storage option, which is also valid for StorageGRID. There are other storage options on the market which we are aware of and have done proofs of concept for, but you cannot really compare the list prices because, as a big user of NetApp storages, we have totally different prices than some list prices. Still, the price information we got for other options are almost always less expensive than StorageGRID. 

We have been using NetApp StorageGRID for a little less than a year. We are just at the beginning of implementing them. 

I haven't heard anything negative about the stability. 

This solution is scalable—the scalability is always okay. 

Not exclusively for StorageGRID, but NetApp's technical support is very good. Maybe we have weight already because we use so many NetApp storage solutions, but we always have their attention when we make a service call. 

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. The certification, or the trainings directly from NetApp, are usually one-week trainings for installing, maintaining, and administering the StorageGRID solutions. I can see we're prepared to use some other ones. This is also one of the main reasons why we want to push this and use more StorageGRID, even if we could probably find storage solutions that have more features, are more sophisticated, or are cheaper—we have the expertise within NetApp storage. 

When you implement something, it must fit into the environments which you already have. Because we are using maybe 90% NetApp storage, everything around it is organized, beginning with the APIs (how to do automation, for example), and is fitted to NetApp. This is why it's important, for operation and implementation, to use this kind of storage. 

We implement this solution through an in-house team. 

NetApp is not known for being the cheapest storage option on the market. Almost all of the other storage options we looked at were less expensive than StorageGRID. The price is one thing to criticize, which is what we hear internally and from customers as well. They find the cost of the terabytes in this class of storage a little bit higher than expected.

I rate NetApp StorageGRID a nine out of ten. 

The main reason why we exclusively use NetApp is because of the unified way that we can monitor it, manage it, and organize all the accounting around it. I'm sure there are other storage options that are cheaper or with better performance, but with relatively limited resources, we cannot spread all our knowledge to do every kind of storage. 

There are specific use cases for StorageGRID. The target customer market is the oil and gas sector, and media and entertainment, where they have large files including videos and archived news information. I am head of IT support and services and we are customers of NetApp StorageGRID.

The solution is very easy to deploy for any IT personnel. It's also cost-effective. It addresses all the challenges customers have with regard to object storage.

Marketing is a very weak area of NetApp in Pakistan. They are not investing in the Pakistan market. Improvements need to be made in the customer support area.

The solution is stable. 

It's more scalable than Hitachi Content Platform offering near to unlimited space. No company can reach the limits of NetApp StorageGrid, because of the petabytes.

The company still has no footprint in Pakistan. We are lucky that the solution is simple to maintain. In that respect, Hitachi provides better support for their product. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.

Our primary use case for this product is to replicate our backups to cloud on StorageGRID. We are integrators and don't use the solution ourselves, we install it for our clients. I'm an IT Service Consultant.

For StorageGRID, the duplication and interface are good and the manageability of StorageGRID is pretty good. So it's very simple to manage. I like the user interface. If you want to play with data on the grid you can do it very simply. You don't have to use any other tool. You can just carry out any direct operations without dependency on any other third-party tool or any associated tools. The speed is good too.

We had issues in a few areas because we couldn't do it from GUI. There is a separate tool for accessing the object and removing it and this created quite a challenge while exiting the data on StorageGRID and removing it. Aside from that it's quite a manageable solution. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

Yes, it's a stable solution. 

This solution is scalable.

I've used the technical support many times and they are very good. 

The initial setup is quite complex but that has something to do with the way we have our infrastructure which is complicated. This is not the physical implementation, we were able to do that ourselves and it took about a day or so and was straightforward. 

This is a good storage box and I would recommend it. It depends on how it matches with your IT infrastructure and the other components.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use StorageGRID at our DR site for backup solutions. We have it as an S3 bucket where we have an AltaVault in place which communications with our StorageGRID, replicates our backup data, and whatever we place on our AltaVault sends it over to our StorageGRID. We also have another AltaVault virtual appliance in DR, which helps us do the backup in case of a disaster. 

We use the solution purely for backup. 

This solution helps us automate our storage infrastructure. We now have backups where everything is automated from A to Z. All we have to do is monitor it and make sure the jobs do not fail. If the jobs are failing, we resolve the issue. StorageGRID is our backup data store.

The S3 bucket.

The ability to get to the StorageGRID from anywhere on my network. The solution is remote. You don't have to be at a physical location.

Backup and recovery as fast as you can using AltaVault.

Deduplication and compression: You save up to 70 to 80 percent of your data size, if not more. This is for nonencrypted data. 

You can save up on your own storage using StorageGRID.

The GUI should work a bit better. ONTAP is great. They should take the lead of ONTAP and apply that to StorageGRID. 

There was a small amount of confusion when working with StorageGRID and Active Directory for access. We had to do things three to four times resulting in our engineer troubleshooting a couple of things. The location of the menu, along with what is inside the menu: configurations, settings, etc., is not straightforward to users. Most users are Windows-based. So, when make logical changes to the menu which are not similar to Windows, users and administrators get confused. 

The redundancy and reliability are great, but I also see room for improvement there. I would like to see more efficiency in the storage and dedupe/compression solutions.

It is stable. It is a hardware appliance which comes with redundancies. Hardware can always fail at any given time. However, we have known all the NetApp solutions to be "on". 

It is not a single unit, so you always have to have redundancy in place. The reaction time for NetApp support to bring the appliance back online if one of them goes down is pretty high, so we are comfortable.

We have not experienced any failures yet.

Scalability is known throughout NetApp appliances. You can add more nodes to the cluster, and it is seamless and nondisruptive. As long as you have the first two nodes, you are in HA. Then, everything else you add to it is seamless and nondisruptive.

I am thrilled with the support.

We implemented the solution three to four months ago, so we have not yet experience the toughest support cases.

We used to use tapes as backups. We have heaps of tapes lying around. Now, we don't need to use tapes. We have our own backup solution and it integrates well with the tool that we use. It is compatible with most of the tools out there, especially the leading tools for backup. StorageGRID is easier to use and has saved us a lot of time, storage place, logistics, moving tapes around and placing them in a third location, shipping tapes to our DR site, etc. It creates our own private cloud.

We also had a local storage solution, which we still have, as a backup (just in case).

We moved to this solution because we wanted a hybrid cloud solution where we owned our data, not having to request it from third-parties.

The implementation with NetApp went smoothly. It is a 'setup and forget' type of appliance. 

The initial setup was as straightforward as it gets. It took us two days to do the racking and stacking, the physical parts. Configuring and running it is plug and play. It came out-of-the-box. All we had to do was set up the network and access configurations along with our S3 bucket, then we were good to go. 

We used a reseller, but NetApp implemented the technology for us. The reseller just connected us to NetApp, and we bought the appliances. The total implementation A to Z was with a NetApp engineer.

Our experience with the reseller was great.

It has enabled us to save money on storage costs. We removed our tape library.

The capabilities of the appliance will save us a lot more in the long run.

It has improved our operational efficiency through time consumption and logistics by 40 to 50 percent. Everything that had to do with our legacy tape solution has been improved and is now more efficient. 

We are planning to go to the cloud. Due to the expenses of the cloud, especially when you are downloading your data off the cloud from AWS or Microsoft Azure, that is where they get you. Creating your own data stores, backups, or storage grids, helps eliminate all these costs of downloading all the data back after you upload to the cloud.

Buying the solution is expensive, but it saves you money down the line when you factor in the logistics of not having to buy tapes.

We are a NetApp shop. We have FlexPod in place. We are just comfortable dealing with NetApp.

The consideration of other vendors was not in the picture at the time of evaluation.

Make sure you explore all solutions and use cases for StorageGRID. If you are using it for backup, ensure you understand both the backup and the restore site. At the time of implementation, we used AltaVault. However, we never talked about restoring the data on the DR site. Apparently, if you want to restore data, you need to open the S3 bucket but you also have to use the same AltaVault appliance to restore the data.

We have set up an Internet-facing S3 service. We use and sell that to customers in that format.

We also use it internally, though not that much. I set up the networking for the internal use case.

It is mostly used for backup and archival workloads at this point.

We can provide something that customers can consume. Also, the licensing that the S3 service provides them from a FabricPool standpoint is more attractive than the licensing from AWS or Azure.

It helps us automate our storage infrastructure by allowing us to consume storage appliances as we need them.

Gives us that object storage presence in the Canadian marketplace. We are the only service provider providing it today, outside of the big players: AWS and Azure.

It has excellent usability.

I would like to see them integrate more with the monitoring platforms. It is a bit difficult to get automated monitoring of the system.

The processes around installation and upgrade need improvement.

The stability is good.

It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more.

The technical support is good. It is easy to escalate issues. I haven't taken advantage of it too many times though.

We were using something else (EMC Atmos), but it got antiquated and we decided to switch. There were a number of factors for switching: 

• The experience wasn't that good on the platform. 
• We had some bad vibes with it. 
• We saw this as an opportunity to integrate a bit more with some of our other NetApp systems. 
• The market was going in a different direction for services.

We had to get out there with a product as well.

It was pretty complex at the time to initially set up. It was an older version when we initially put it in place, so there were some hiccups. However, this last go around with our test system, the install was smoother and easier to get up and running.

We had NetApp Professional Services help us out with the initial deployment. They were good.

We have seen ROI.

We save money on storage costs from this solution since it allows us to have a source of revenue from customers consuming the service.

While we did evaluate other vendors, our partnership with NetApp swayed us towards them.

Look at StorageGRID product because it hits that sweet spot of what you are trying to do as a service provider from an S3 perspective.

There are a couple of opportunities that we're looking at for IoT analytics or machine learning in the near future.

For the amount of data storage that our engineers use, I need a big data storage grid.

We use IoT, but I am unable to provide examples because of our classified environment.

Our NetApp system administrators say that it runs well. It does have its quirks here and there, but it is an older NetApp system.

It helps automate our storage infrastructure and improve our operational efficiency.

With the amount of data storage that we use, it is helpful.

We want to move towards Azure in the cloud. Right now, the system is all physical.

It is stable.

Right now, we have an older StorageGRID. I like that we can grow it.

We are looking to go to Microsoft Azure on the cloud because we want to grow and expand the amount of storage data that we have. We have a good amount, but with the number of projects that we have going on, we could use more.

The technical support is good. 

We had to go with something bigger because of the amount of projects that we had going on and the increase in storage data.

The initial setup was straightforward.

While we have been able to save money on storage costs, it could be better.

It is definitely a great investment for larger companies.

Our only use case at this point is for security video for our campers' security cameras. We used to have it on individual servers, then we consolidated that into E-Series storage arrays to increase the performance of the disks behind the video. 

Before, it was a bottleneck to have our storage on the local disks. Now, there is no bottleneck at all with this work. It's fantastic.

At the moment, we only do video. We may expand out the solution in the future.

Well, we are not going to go to jail now because we are actually in compliance with the law. So, that's good.

With the speed of it, we experience no bottlenecks and the performance is there, so we no longer have to worry about keeping up with jittery videos.

It has improved our operational efficiency because we do not having to keep track of 20 servers. Instead, we have to keep track of two arrays.

The speed of the disks is the most valuable features. Before our storage was a bottleneck, and now, it is no longer a bottleneck. We are able to have all of the storage that we need for our security videos. 

The only real issue that we have run into is, when we are cloning, we cannot do a thin provision clone, it has to be a full clone. If we could have this added in the future, it would save us a little bit of space. Other than that, everything has been as advertised.

The stability is fantasic. We have had no issues at all since we put the solution in place. We receive little messages (emails) every once in a while, saying, "A path is down." However, it has multiple paths, so there has been no issues with the stability.

It's extremely scalable. This was one of the reasons we chose it. Eventually, we will have to get up to two petabytes on the solution. We started off with one, and we will keep on growing it as more cameras come online.

We haven't had to call the technical support for anything. That is a good thing.

The previous solution didn't have enough storage space to keep 30 days. Therefore, we had no choice but to go with a different solution.

There was new legislation put in place in North Carolina where we have to keep a certain amount of days of security videos. In the past, it was just a recommendation that we kept 30 days. Then, they legislated it, and it has to be 30 days. We were only keeping about ten days, so we had to get a much larger storage infrastructure with more speed on it to be able to keep up with all videos.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was three next and a finish; next, next, next, and finish, that was it.

We used a reseller for the deployment. The experience was good. They knew exactly what they were talking about. They came in and implemented the solution for us, which was turnkey. 

It probably is saving us 50 percent of what we would have had to pay to replace the video servers. Those were all going out of warranty. We looked at how much would it cost to do it with what we were doing currently versus how much would it cost us to consolidate, and it was about a 50 percent savings.

We looked at some solutions from Dell EMC besides NetApp. We chose NetApp because of price and performance.

I would highly recommend this solution for video storage because of all the benefits it has given us. It gives us all the storage that we need while the performance is there. We have no bottlenecks and the price is attractive.

I went to a session here where we could start doing automation with Perl scripting. It just hasn't been implemented yet. Now that we know that it is available, we might start doing that.