What is our primary use case?
We've invented a brand new internet protocol for privacy at our company, so it's a privacy-preserving internet protocol. We do end-to-end encryption but if your phone's offline, then we need someone to install that encrypted stuff that you might be sharing with somebody else. We have a technology called Docker Swarm running across multiple data centers. Files need to be put somewhere that can be accessible across multiple Google data centers. So we actually ran our system, something called GlusterFS for a while and hit a whole bunch of problems. That meant that we had to have somebody, me because we're a startup, looking after it all the time and that just became pretty boring. That's a boring job.
I was looking for a vendor to come up with technology that I didn't have to look at every single day and that's where we came across NetApp. I set it up, deployed it, and haven't had to touch it. Our use case is really having a network file system across multiple data centers that is highly resilient.
How has it helped my organization?
NetApp has helped our customers to quickly move large numbers of files to the cloud. The offering that we have allows people to share encrypted data between themselves, like large files. If you have a file on your phone and a picture and you want to share it with somebody else, you can use our applications to move that data across so only the person that you're sending it to will be able to open it and look at it. We allow people to do that and NetApp is underlying that. The NetApp machine only ever sees encrypted data because it's end-to-end encrypted, but it's enabling people to have to send files and enable them to use their mobile devices for that. Nobody will be able to snoop them while they're up there.
Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better.
The service allows us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time. That was one of the things that I was firstly concerned with was if we need more storage, how easy is it? With the NetApp solution, it's as easy as logging into a browser and saying, "I want more storage." It's that easy and completely pain-free.
Our compute and storage costs went up frankly, but I was okay with that because I got more time back. So it's fine. We have a data store that's shared across all of our compute nodes, it's pretty reasonable economy-wise. It's a little bit more expensive, but I think that the value is there. We don't have to pay that cost in having humans watching things, so it's a fairly reasonable trade. The service has increased our cloud infrastructure spend by a reasonable amount, but I'm perfectly comfortable with it.
What is most valuable?
NetApp delivers High Availability. It's critical to our work. That was the main driver for using NetApp. We have a highly resilient service and if you have a highly resilient service, you are only as resilient as the least resilient part of your infrastructure. That's what we were having trouble with our file system before. It was becoming troublesome, so we needed to find something that was much more highly resilient so that's why we moved to NetApp.
The complexity of moving large numbers of files to the cloud depends on what you're trying to do. But for us, it was really simple. I imagine for large enterprise customers it is probably pretty tricky. They're probably on all different technologies inside a large corporation and they may or may not have very large pipes going to them. So if you're in a data center to the cloud then it's going to be easy, but if you have hundreds of branches like if you're a bank and have lots of branch banks, they might have very small pipes out to the internet. It might take forever. In our use case everything's brand new files, so it was pretty trivial. We didn't migrate to the cloud, we were already on the cloud, so it was a nonissue for us.
NetApp enables us to share data across VMs. It actually reduced the amount of data storage we need. We were having to have storage attached to each VM. And now we can aggregate that storage across multiple VMs, so that actually gave us a net reduction, which was a good thing.
We switched from using block storage to file storage to share data between our VMs. It made it easier, frankly but I worry about the scalability in the future. For the moment it made life easier. We were using block and then we moved back to file with NetApp.
What needs improvement?
I would like for the sales team to get in contact more often and let me know what I should be doing next, what we should be doing about new features. So it would be nice if I heard a little bit more from him. From a technology perspective, I have no complaints.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for just over a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far I've had no stability problems. It's been rock solid.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We're tiny so I don't think we're going to hit any scalability problems.
Our clients don't even know that they're using NetApp. We have about 2,500 people using the platform that we provide. They wouldn't know that they're using NetApp, but all of them are.
We do not require any staff for deployment and maintenance.
We've certainly got plans to increase usage as we get more and more clients and we'll have more and more need for more and more storage. As we scale up, the NetApp implementation will get bigger and bigger.
How are customer service and technical support?
I would rate NetApp support a ten out of ten. They're spectacularly good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was pretty straightforward, although I did get a hold of the technical team at NetApp just to make sure I was doing it right. They were extremely responsive, surprisingly good, and helped me through it. No complaints.
It's essentially an extension of the Google GCP UI. Once I activated the application in Google then it was just click and point to the web browser. As long as you knew roughly what it was supposed to be doing, it was pretty easy and simple to set up. What wasn't clear to me at the time was whether I'd set it up properly or not. I'd set it up and it was working but had I done it right was my big question. That's when I reached out just to have somebody check over what I had done and make sure that it was set up right. It turned out it was set up right but it was nice to have somebody look over. Sometimes you can get things working, but you might have made some errors that might bite you in the future. I just wanted to have somebody take a second look at it. It was pretty easy.
The implementation took around a week. My strategy was to get it done as soon as possible.
What about the implementation team?
I raised a ticket on the NetApp website and was expecting nobody to get back to me, but I had an engineer on the call within an hour or two. It was pretty impressive. They actually knew what they're doing, which is highly unusual. It was great.
What was our ROI?
The ROI is my time. I was having to spend time managing it before and now I don't, so the ROI is pretty easy for me. I got time back, so that was a good thing. It wasn't really so much spend as it was time in our case.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We pay for the minimum we need, and what was good about this was as we need more, we just pay some more. That matched quite nicely with what we're doing as a startup, trying to start small. And as we scale, we will have to pay more money if we need more storage.
We pay monthly.
I don't get to see the whole thing anymore. It's put into a Google bill, a GCP bill, so it's sort of mixed in there. We actually work with a Google reseller who gets us better pricing. Our total for all of our infrastructure every month is $3,500. NetApp is a part of that $3,500, I couldn't tell you how much it is. It's a part of that. We're pretty small, we're very economical with our infrastructure.
In terms of additional costs, we have to pay for some virtual machines that run the infrastructure, which is absolutely fine. I have no issue with that. There are a few sides that you have to pay for, but that's okay.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at running our own NFS server and we looked at something called GlusterFS. We decided on using GlusterFS and it worked fine for our test environment and continued to do very well for the test. But we knew it wasn't production-ready so as we moved to production, we looked for the best we could find and that was NetApp.
What other advice do I have?
I never have to deal with anything. More importantly for me, is that I don't have to buy an admin. We're a small startup and definitely, our most expensive resource is people. I was looking for something that I could just set up and not have to pay for an expert. Let the guys at NetApp worry about all that jiggery-pokery and I just say, "Yes, this is what I want. I want a file system that's shareable across six data centers." So that's what we needed, I just didn't want to pay for somebody to be looking after it. It seemed like a pretty good solution. We gave it a go, had a couple of problems setting everything up, and they helped us out. I don't think anybody's touched it ever since, it's been off and running without any problems.
My advice to anybody considering this solution is to try it. Try it and experiment with it before you put it into production, just to make sure that it scales to the needs you have. In our case, we don't have very difficult needs, so it was pretty easy for us to test that.
You can implement things on the cloud with GCP as a service and have a well-known brand behind it and have a good experience. I was sort of surprised that Google actually didn't provide their own solution, but after using NetApp now I see why. They just didn't have the technology so their partnership with Google was perfect in that case. It worked out pretty well for us.
I would rate NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud a ten out of ten. I've had zero problems, so I can't complain about anything. My only issue is not with the technology, but the salespeople getting in contact with me to make sure I'm up to date. We're a very small fish, so I understand why we get ignored. But we're obviously big fans, so that's good.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
