NetApp SnapCenter Review

It's used as a backup and recovery software. Some of our clients are using the solution for private cloud primary backup.

It has very fast backup and can handle a huge amount of data. It also enables fast recovery. 

1. It would be a good idea to add date support and improve on resource management, not the backup itself, but in the manageability. Groups might be helpful for each site or data center so that we know a given data center has these resources while another data center has those resources. It's not always easy to group hosts by type.
2. A host is trying to set up a connection with every SVM configured on SnapCenter Server. This is not good, especially if, like in our environment, each SVM is configured for particular department and is beyond a firewall. As far as I know developers are aware of this issue.
3. It would be nice to have native plugins not only for Oracle and MS SQL. Community plugins can cover your needs, but I'd like to have more functionality.
4. I would like to have more friendly logging. Sometimes this could save time for our team and allow us not to create new case in support.
   

If nothing changes it works fine. But we faced some issues twice after we upgraded to next SnapCenter release. One time Vmware was affected and one time it was Oracle on Linux. Before update procedure, you should test any new release properly in a test environment!

It can cover much more than we have now. Scalability is a strong point. We are able to monitor it through a dashboard and reports.

We have used tech support and it has helped us in every case. It's very good.

We did have a previous solution. We switched to this one because it allows us to have a better RTO/RPO and the solution is included in our bundle.

The install is very simple. I just need to know the requirements and then I can install it. The number of staff required for deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on the organization. 

We evaluated SnapCenter vs NetBackup and SnapCenter vs Veeam.

SnapCenter is really good for VMware, it's really nice. It's also very good for SQL and Oracle. But you need to test it properly each time because there are times you will need to reconfigure your infrastructure.

We have plans to increase usage of this product. It currently covers about half of our infrastructure.

I would rate SnapCenter at seven out of ten. It's very good, allowing us to do fast backup and recovery, but like every product, it has its flaws, limitations and it has a room for improvement. It may not be useful for certain companies. But anyway, when I look at other backup solutions, I have not yet seen a product that is a ten out of ten.