NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews

Desktop-as-a-service is a PoC that I'm doing for our customers to allow them to use NetApp for their personal, departmental, and profile shares. This connects their desktop-as-a-service that we're building for them.

This is for training. The customer has classrooms that they have set up. They have about 150,000 users coming through. They want to have a way to do a secure, efficient solution that can be repeated after they finish this class, before the next class comes in, and use a NetApp CVO as well as some desktop services off of the AWS. 

It is hosted by AWS. Then, it hosted by CVO who sets out some filers, as well Cloud Volumes Manager as well. We were looking at it with Azure as well, because it doesn't matter. We want to do a multicloud with it.

We haven't put it into production yet. However, in the proof of concept, we show the use of it and the how you can take it in Snapshot daily coverage, because we're doing it for a training area. This allows them to return back to where they were. The bigger thing is if they need to reset up for a class, then we can have a goal copied or flip back where they need to be.

It gives a solution for storage one place to go across everything. So, the customer is very familiar with NetApp on-prem. It allows them to gain access to the file piece. It helps them with the training aspect of it, so they don't have to relearn something new. They already know this product. They just have to learn some widgets or what it's like in the cloud to operate and deploy it in different ways.

The customer knows the product. They don't have to train their administrators on how to do things. They are very familiar with that piece of it. Then, the deduplication, compression, and compaction are all things that you would get from moving to a CVO and the cloud itself. That is something that they really enjoy because now they're getting a lot of cost savings off of it. We anticipate cloud cost savings, but it is not in production yet. It should be about a 30 percent savings. If it is a 30 percent or better savings, then it is a big win for the customer and for us.

• Dedupe
• Compression
• Compaction
• Taking 30 gig of data and reducing it down to five to 10 gig on the AWS blocks.

I would some wizards or best practices following how to secure CVO, inherit to the Cloud Manager. I thought that was a good place to be able to put stuff like that in there. 

I would like some more performance matrices to know what it is doing. It has some matrices inherent to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. But inside Cloud Manager, it would also be nice to see. You can have a little Snapshot, then drill down if you go a little deeper. 

This is where I would like to see changes, primarily around security and performance matrices.

It is a good system. It is very stable as far as what I've been using with it. I find that support from it is really good as well. It is something that I would offer to all of my customers.

It is easy to scale. It is inherent to the actual product. It will move to another cloud solution or it can be managed from another cloud solution. So, it's taken down barriers which are sometimes put out by vendors in different ways.

We use NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Its configuration wizards and ability to automate the process are easy, simple, and straightforward. If you have any knowledge of storage, even to a very small amount, the wizards will click through and help to guide you through the right things. They make sure you put the right things in. They give some good examples to make sure you follow those examples, which makes it a bit more manageable in the long run.

They use some native things that are inherent to the AWS. They have looked at those things. 

NetApp has been one of the first ones that they looked at, and it is the one that they are very happy with today.

Work with your resources in different ways, as far as in NetApp in the partner community. But bigger than that, just ask questions. Everybody seems willing to help move the solution forward. The biggest advice is just ask when you don't know, because there is so much to know.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).

We're not using inline encryption right now.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is used for disaster recovery right now, and the primary use case for our current clients and environments is CIFS. Most clients use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a replication destination for CIFS. It's a way to back up their documents and files offsite for disaster recovery. They have VMs that they spin up and connect to. 

In most cases, we have not deployed anything that uses the service protocol, like iSCSI or NFS. It's strictly CIFS. We haven't used one solution—matching DR for CIFS volumes—which is a destination that replicates from on-prem to the cloud, but we've done DR tests with that. 

The other two instances we're currently running will be the same scenario, but we're not there yet. Right now, they are being used for SnapMirror destinations of CIFS volumes only, and that's all three. We've been running Cloud Volumes ONTAP in Azure as a VM along with a connector. They had one deployed before I took it over, but it's typically done within the NetApp Cloud Manager system. Once we connect to the Azure portal or subscription, we push out the CVO from there.

Our clients see most of the benefits. Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides offsite backups. We used to host our backups on physical infrastructure in a data center or on remote sites. There were a lot of storage costs for replication. By implementing Cloud Volumes ONTAP in the Azure portal, we eliminated the cost of additional hardware and everything you have to maintain on-prem in a physical environment and put it up to the cloud. That was a considerable cost savings for the customer.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a massive improvement in terms of manageability. It's easier for customers to perform certain functions from that interface, knowing it sits on a high availability platform. We don't worry about paying all these separate vendors for replication solutions. Other costs are associated with maintaining physical infrastructure in a data center, like electricity or storage space, RAM, and other hardware. It has improved our clients' bottom line because they spend less on disaster recovery.

The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive. 

I haven't been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for too long. It has been a little under three years since we started working with it. We were mostly doing a lot with data centers, so we only really started getting into cloud systems about three years ago.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP seems to be fairly stable so far. The only time we have issues is when there is a circuit interruption, but this product has been pretty stable. We haven't had issues with crashes or data getting corrupted. We've had interruptions due to internet problems or leaks between the sites. 

These are things we have no control over because they're different providers. That's the only issue that I've seen. But once those come through the actual system itself, it's been fine as far as resiliency, performance, and availability.

We can expand on it as needed. In particular, it's easy to add storage, and storage expansion is probably the feature we utilize the most. We don't mess with any other features, like within the protocols or anything like that. Those are fine, but storage scalability is pretty good.

Our clients' storage needs vary. Typically, it's somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 terabytes, but at least 15 to 30 terabytes. Each client is a little different, but the one that uses the most storage has a capacity of about 30 terabytes.

NetApp technical support is pretty good. We sometimes have to wait a bit, but they're good at resolving issues once they find out what the problem is. They come back with solutions, so I would rate them pretty well.

Deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be complex at times, but I think it's a learning curve. You have to put in many different pieces, and it's not always easy to find the documentation you need on the web. Some parts are straightforward, but sometimes you need to do some digging before deploying. 

It really comes down to planning. When implementing, we ensure each case is planned and deployed to the networking part for Azure. We also put together a template. That way, other engineers can follow or use it as a guideline when building it. I make a basic template of the required information, configuration settings, etc. 

These were all deployed as part of a much larger project, which included new hardware that was upgraded. The Azure and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP were part of that upgrade experience. It was in conjunction with the client getting a new on-prem NetApp system and other infrastructure, like switches. Once everything was migrated, we implemented the Azure part in Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

We have a small team for handling deployment. I think they have maybe two people. One person could do it, but there is an alternative if somebody is out on vacation. The managed service division covers all the maintenance for our clients. The managed service team takes over all the backend IT work for our clients. Instead of having a full staff, the client pays us to manage the backend of their servers and other infrastructure. As a managed service, we go in and take care of their switching, patches, upgrading, etc.

We do all of the implementations for our clients in-house who are the end-users. We sell them the solution and deploy it for them.

I believe our clients see a return because they don't need to purchase hardware. It's much easier and quicker for them to get additional storage when needed compared to an on-prem system. 

They save on costs associated with ordering additional storage for a physical on-prem system versus expanding what you have and you pay a little more in Azure. One client saw significant cost savings on their electricity bill. They reduced their bill by almost half just by shutting these things off.

Our management and salespeople deal with pricing. I'm not part of the price negotiations or anything like that. I work on design and implementation.

I rate Cloud Volumes ONTAP nine out of 10. It's an excellent solution that is cloud-based, so you don't have to worry about leasing or purchasing hardware. All costs of purchasing lines and circuits are upfront. Since this product works over the internet, you only need data access, which most of them have. 

Overall, I would say this is better than an on-prem solution that requires physical hardware at remote sites. You don't need to invest in buying or maintaining physical hardware. In this case, you're paying a monthly cost for something. You can decide at any time to stop using it if you don't need it anymore. That's a problem with owning physical infrastructure. You have to dispose of it when you don't need it anymore. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is also easier to manage and upgrade than on-prem systems.

Our primary use case for ONTAP is for DR. 

ONTAP has improved my organization because we no longer need to purchase all that hardware and have that all come up as a big expense. It worked out better for our budgeting purposes.

We use it to move data between hyperscales on our on-premises environment. We're able to do that with SnapMirror and it's pretty simple to set up and move data around. 

The most valuable feature is DR backups. 

ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms.

We use SnapMirror inline encryption for security in the cloud. A lot of people, especially legal, want their data to be protected. That's what we use it for.

Snapshot copies and thin clones have made our recovery time a lot faster. Doing a restore from a snapshot is a lot better than trying to do a restore from a backup.

In terms of time management and managing our infrastructure, we are a lot better because of the consistency of storage management across clouds.

I wouldn't say it has reduced our data footprint in the cloud because whatever we were using was basically a lift and shift as of right now. We are hoping as we go we'll be able to take advantage of all the storage efficiencies like compression and all that. Hopefully, that'll save us quite a lot of space and time.

In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now.

We haven't had issues with stability so far. 

Scalability comes down to what service or what NetApp Cloud solution you're using. There are different solutions for what you're trying to achieve. Based on your requirements, you just need to pick the right solution that works for you.

I haven't had any issues, so technical support is pretty good.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we were told we were closing the data centers so we had to migrate to the cloud. The management told us we are closing data centers and migrating everything into the cloud. That's what kicked us off.

We used NetApp Cloud Manager to get up and running with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. It could be a little challenging if you don't know how the network security groups and how the roles in Azure work. That's where we had the challenges with deploying because we had cloud managers in different regions, one in Azure West and one in Azure East and we were trying to do replications between the two clouds. The Cloud Central Cloud Manager wasn't able to make a connection and that was because of some of the roles that we had to provide. Even the documentation on that was kind of scattered across. It wasn't just one page and it had all the information. So that was kind of challenging and it took me a lot of time to figure that out. I think it should be in one single pane of a page. Not as scattered around different pages.

Once I reached out to the support they helped me out, but I was trying to figure it out on my own reading documentation and it didn't do anything.

The first one I deployed in Azure was very simple. The second one that we deployed and I was trying to make the connection between, that was complex because of how the roles worked.

We used consultants for the implementation. We had a pretty good experience with them.

We have seen ROI. All of our SLASs via some of our SQL databases,  have SLAs of around five minutes. SnapMirror works great for that. We don't have that and if we have a disaster, then we could be in big trouble if we have SLA breaches and stuff like that.

It has not reduced our cloud cost. We're still pretty new and we're still trying to figure things out like how the cost modeling works and which is the best performance and best cost for our workloads. Based on that, it's a lot of tuning. Once you get there, you just need to monitor your workloads and see how it is and just go from there.

For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA.

For the DR we are using NetApp but for the production, a lot of the cloud architects in our company want to go native to Azure or native to AWS. Since we are a NetApp Cloud shop for a while and even our RND on-prem is mostly just all on NetApps. We want to keep that going, going into the cloud because it's a lot simpler to manage our infrastructure, our storage and take advantage of all the efficiencies that NetApp provides. Whereas if you don't use that, all of those savings, and if you have a lot of data as we do, petabytes of data, and Microsoft and AWS, take advantage of all those efficiencies and we don't because we don't have that capability. With the NetApp integration, we can take advantage of all those efficiencies and other performance.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because of the simplicity of the DR is amazing. You just set it up. If there are any issues bringing it back, bringing it online in a DR site just takes a few minutes and then you're back up online again.

The advice that I would give to anybody considering ONTAP is to give it a try. That's how I learned. I didn't know anything about the cloud. Then our company just started telling us that we were moving everything to the cloud and we had to learn about it. That's how we learned and moved everything to the cloud.

In some places, it helps to reduce the amount of our storage, but a lot of our data is very active and in very small files, so the system does not have enough time to keep track of all that. In one instance, we had a job, and we dumped roughly 25 terabytes in a day into the system, so for it to understand and try to reduce it and compress it, it sometimes does not have time because it is just so busy.

It has saved us on costs. I am not on the manager's side, but I have seen that the cost is better. I do not have the exact numbers, but it is probably two or three dollars per terabyte or something in that realm. Some of our competitors cannot beat that, so that does help.

A lot of our customers have their own cases. We create new volumes for each of those cases. One thing I have noticed is that it is very simple to move the data where we need to move it, delete it, or archive it if we need to archive it to StorageGRID.

We have a lot of challenges with ONTAP. We are an eDiscovery company. With ONTAP, sometimes we have issues where we are over the capacity of how many volumes we can have on a cluster. That is one of our biggest issues. The other bigger issue right now is keys. We do not have enough. NetApp itself does not give out as many volumes as keys. I do not understand that, so we have to shift and drive and do things like that to get our new data and make sure it is encrypted.

Their support and development teams can collaborate better to resolve an issue.

We have been using NetApp ONTAP for over five years for sure. We have the second-largest StorageGRID in the world with NetApp.

So far, we have not had any issues. There were only a couple of panics or something like that, but those are normal issues you deal with once in a while. 

Scalability is there. You have to buy ahead shelves and everything else to keep it growing. It is fairly simple.

We had some issues, but the communication was not there in terms of what they were doing and what the status was. It took us a couple of years to fix them. If they had kept us in check with that, it would not be as big of an issue. We have also dealt with PowerScale support. In the 7070 code, we had so many problems, but we worked with what they call the CodeRed team or the recovery team for a year. We worked side by side to fix those issues. Even some of the bigger management and directors tried to help us and keep us informed of what was going on. 

There is a bridge between NetApp's development and support teams. They do not know how to communicate with each other. Why cannot their developers talk with their support and work with them? To me, that is a collaboration. Their development and support teams need to collaborate more. In the case of PowerScale or Isilon, I did have the recovery team, and their recovery team had developers behind them.

Overall, I would rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I have used Isilon and PowerScale. I made the switch because we moved to a different company. One of the pros of the other solutions is how NFS integrates with SMB on Isilon and PowerScale. You could have an NFS mount with an SMB mount, and the permissions would not be stuck. With ONTAP, you cannot put them together. One reason is that a lot of their shares are more CIF shares. That is a Microsoft protocol, and NFS works more with SMB because that is the same language.

I was involved in the initial setup on some new systems, but not on the legacy systems. It is pretty straightforward like any other system when you set it up, but there are a lot more simpler pieces to it.

We have not gotten to the cloud yet because our company is too big for the cloud, and it costs millions of dollars to put it up there.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP integrates with AWS native services. For us, it is not that big a deal, but we are looking at some of our smaller divisions overseas where it is more efficient to back up to AWS and other similar things, but we have not been able to implement it just yet.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use NetApp for our on-premise file shares, and we use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as an offsite backup copy.

Being able to deploy in AWS is a big advantage for us. The company I work for was recently spun off as a smaller company. We sold most of our company to a large company and all of our assets went to that company. Then we started building our first data center and we did not have a second data center for our outside copy. This was a great solution in these circumstances.

In general, NetApp provides unified storage, but we mostly use it only for NAS. It gives us great control over our data. We can define which region or zone we put our data in, in AWS. That way, we can strategically place our offsite copies. Instead of putting everything in one place, we now have more freedom to put data wherever we want.

We are also saving at least $100,000 a year on storage costs.

The most valuable features are 

• tiering to S3 
• being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule.

These are valuable because of the effect on cost. All of the data that is stored in AWS is, obviously, very expensive if stored in EBS volumes or spinning disks, but it's pretty cheap in S3, so that makes good financial sense. 

For the shutdown and startup, it's the same thing. Since it's a backup copy, we don't need that filer running all the time, so we just shut it down. We only turn it on before the replication starts, and then shut it off after the replication is complete.

One area for improvement is monitoring. Since we are using turn-on and turn-off, based on a schedule, it becomes a little bit difficult to monitor the instance and the replications, etc. If NetApp could implement a feature to monitor it more effectively, that would be helpful.

Also, I would like to see more aggressive management of the aggregate space. On the Cloud Volumes ONTAP that we use for offsite backup copies, most of the data sits in S3. There are also the EBS volumes on the Cloud Volumes ONTAP itself. Sometimes what happens is that the aggregate size just stays the same. If it allocates 8 terabytes initially, it just stays at 8 terabytes for a long time, even though we're only using 20 percent of that 8 terabytes. NetApp could undersize that more aggressively.

I have been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about one-and-a-half years.

In all the time we've been running it we have had no issues. It's great.

We are not using it at that big of a scale, so right now we do not have any concerns. It's limited to 360 terabytes. In the past, before we sold 80 percent of our company to that large company, we used to have more than 360 terabytes of data. If we still had all that data we would have to build another instance of Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Or, post-sale, if we were to cross that limit we could have to build another instance of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, but we're not there yet. We are using about 25 percent of that limit right now.

Overall, their support team is great. One of the best features about Cloud Volumes ONTAP is that once you open the OnCommand Cloud Manager, there's a tiny chat button at the bottom. You can just send a message to all the experts related to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. That's a great feature.

We used to use two NetApp filers in two different data centers for offsite backup copies. We decided to go with Cloud Volumes ONTAP because after we sold 80 percent of the company, we were left with only one data center. We did not have a second data center to put the second NetApp in, so we went with this solution. It was the perfect solution for our use case.

The initial setup of the solution, in our case, was a little bit complex because we use Terraform to manage our cloud infrastructure. To configure Cloud Volumes ONTAP in combination with Terraform proved a little bit challenging. That's one of the areas for improvement of the solution: NetApp could provide customers with templates of how to manage this infrastructure as a code. The difficulties we encountered were mostly in terms of what components need to be configured in Terraform, as well as how they could be configured.

Overall, our deployment took about a month. We didn't really have a deployment plan for this solution because this was the first time we were deploying it. We had to make it up as we went along, especially because NetApp did not have any documentation on how to implement this using Terraform. We had to come up with that plan.

We did not hire anyone, but the NetApp support team was great. It is just me working on this, in our company.

This is more of a pay-as-you-go model rather than an investment, but we definitely see benefits. If we had to build another NetApp in our on-premise location, whether we used the storage or not, we would just be spending money. The asset would just depreciate, whereas, in the cloud, we only use what we need and we just pay for what we use.

Licensing seems pretty straightforward and then we just pay for the EC2 costs.

Pricing brings up another point in terms of room for improvement. If they could provide some insights into how we could optimize the cost of Cloud Volumes ONTAP in our cloud, that would be great.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. It's the same as what they showed us in the initial deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we use on-premise NetApp. NetApp works best with NetApp.

We did look at other solutions just to see how they were working, but back then, when we were implementing it, they were nowhere even close to as mature as NetApp. We looked at the Dell EMC Isilon but it was not even close to what NetApp was capable of in the cloud. They were not even close to building something in AWS at that point. It was an easy decision.

Be careful while choosing the instance size, and manage the aggregate size as carefully. Otherwise, you'll just end up paying a lot of money. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this is exactly those two things. I noticed that I need to size the instance carefully, and I need to make sure that the EBS volume sizes that I use are not too underutilized.

Our use case is to have multitenant deployment of shared storage, specifically network-attached storage (NAS). This file share is used by applications that are very heavy with a very high throughput. Also, an application needs to be able to sustain the read/write throughput and persistent volume. Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps us to get the required performance from our applications.

We just got done with our PoC. We are now engaging with NetApp CVO to get this solution rolled out (deployment) and do hosting for our customers on top of that.

Using this solution, the more data that we store, the more money we can save.

• CIFS volume.
• The overall performance that we are getting from CVO.
• The features around things like Snapshots. 
• The performance and capacity monitoring of the storage.

These features help us to have a backup of our volumes using the native technology of NetApp ONTAP. That way, we don't have to invest in other solutions for our backup requirement. Also, it helps us to replicate the data to another geographic location so that helps us to save on the costs of backup products.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP gives us flexible storage.

There are a few bugs in the system that they need to improve on the UI part. Specifically, its integration of NetApp Cloud Manager with CVO, which is something they are already working on. They will probably provide a SaaS offering for Cloud Manager. 

We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full. 

Six months.

I cannot comment on stability right now because we have not been using it in production as of now.

We still have CVO running on a single VM instance. As an improvement area, if CVO can come up with a scale out that will help so we will not be limited by the number of VMs in GCP. Behind one instance, we are adding a number of GCP disks. In some cases, we would like to have the option to scale out by adding more nodes in a cluster environment, like Dell EMC Isilon.

Get NetApp involved from day one if you are thinking of deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP. They have a very good support team who is very helpful. They will help you with every aspect of getting the deployment done.

We previously used OpenZFS Cloud Storage. We switched because we were not getting the performance from them. The performance tuning is a headache. There were a lot of issues, such as, the stability and updates of the OpenZFS. We had it because it was a free, open source solution. 

We switched to NetApp because I trust their performance tool and file system.

We did the PoC. Now, we are going to set up a production environment. 

The initial setup was a bit challenging for someone who has no idea about NetApp. Since I have some background with it, I found the setup straightforward. For a few folks, it was challenging. It is best to get NetApp support involved for novices, as they can give the best option for setting to select during deployment.

The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge.

My team of engineers works on deploying this solution. There are five people on my team.

We have not realized any money or savings yet because we are still in our deployment process.

They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product.

We did consider several options. 

In GCP, we also considered NetApp's Cloud Volumes services as well, but it did not have good performance. 

Another solution that we tried was Qumulo, which was a good solution, but not that good. From a scaling out perspective, it can scale out a file system, whereas NetApp is not like that. NetApp still works with a single VM. That is the difference.  

We also evaluated the native GCP file offering. However, it did not give us the performance for the application that we wanted.

We do use the cloud performance monitoring, but not with a NetApp product. We use Stackdriver. NetApp provides a separate thing for the monitoring of NetApp CVO, which is NetApp Cloud Manager.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

Our primary use case is for shared storage. We use the solution to support our ERP environment, where our teams want to share storage between different servers/apps. We're mostly using it for NAS.

It's meant to do the same thing in the public cloud that we were doing in our private cloud. In the private cloud we can control the infrastructure, whereas in the public cloud we don't have as much control. This gives us a way to optimize resource usage in the public cloud, without overpaying or wasting resources.

It also provides unified storage no matter what data you have. It makes sure we have control of the data and that we know what it's being used for. The main thing for us is that we need to know what applications are consuming it and responsible for it. The solution helps us do that.

In addition, it helps us because we know what it's used for, who owns something, and who's accountable for those storage costs. Ultimately, it helps us reduce our storage needs and that's where we get our savings.

Compared to native cloud storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows us to better manage shared storage.

I don't have a preference for any feature. It's meant to optimize storage and usage within the public cloud.

Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database.

I've been using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for about three years.

As far as I know, everything is stable.

It's very scalable.

We focus on apps or IT services that are using it and currently the total is in the neighborhood of about five.

I haven't used technical support.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

Our challenge is understanding all the different storage that we set up and being able to tie each storage that we create back to an IT service and, ultimately, a cost center. That piece was difficult to set up and we had to do some things manually.

As for the amount of staff required on our side for deployment and maintenance, it's very minimal.

We used NetApp to help with the setup. We focused on just getting things up and running, rather than making sure everything was set up the way we wanted it to be. Part of that was the JCI issue, and part of that was that the vendor might have helped us better plan and better organize.

Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is to make sure you have a proper foundation and design in place to manage everything from A to Z before you start deploying your first storage on NetApp.

The primary use case is for files, VMware storage, and the DR volume on the cloud. They also use this solution to move data between on-premises and the cloud volume ONTAP.

It's difficult to say if it has helped to reduce the company's data in the cloud right now without running it for a while. It's the same for the cloud costs.

We are going through testing right now, and can't tell if it will affect their operations until we validate it.

The most valuable features are the ease of management, the deduplication, storage optimization, SnapMirror, it has flexible in testing for different scenarios, rapid deployment of the test environments, and rapid recovery.

The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens.

The ability to go back in time. It's easy to restore the data that we need and it has good stability with CIFS. When a client is using CIFS to access their files, it is pretty stable without knowing Microsoft issues.

The simplicity and ease of usage for VMware provisioning are also helpful.

Some of the area's that need improvement are:

• Cloud sync
• Cloud Volume ONTAP
• Deployment for the cloud manager

These areas need to be streamlined. They are basic configuration error states to acquire late provisioning.

I would like to see the ability to present CIFS files that have been SnapMirrorroed to the Cloud Volume ONTAP and the ability to serve them similarly to OneDrive or Web interfaces.

We are talking about DR cases, customers who are trying to streamline their environments. In the case of DR, users can easily access that data. Today, without running it as file services fully and presenting it through some third party solution, there is no easy way for an end-user to access the appropriate data. This means that we have to build the whole infrastructure for the end-user to be able to open their work files.

The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure.

As an example, you cannot reuse that administrator name, because that object is created in Azure, and it will not let you create it again. So, when the first deployment fails and we deploy for a second time, we have to use a new administration name. Additionally, it requires connectivity from NetApp to register the products and the customer is notified that Network access is not allowed, which creates a problem.

This issue occurs during the time of deployment, but it isn't clear why your environment is not deploying successfully. For this reason, more documentation is needed in explaining and clarification steps of how it needs to be done.

We are just validating the cloud for a couple of our clients, so we haven't had it affect our client storage operations.

Scalability remains to be seen. At this time the NetApp limits on the levels of premium, standard, and the basic one are unreasonably incorrect.

It is hard to go from ten terabytes to three hundred and sixty-eight terabytes and leave everyone in between there hanging. Nobody is interested in going with the limit of ten terabytes to test this solution.

I am talking specifically about Azure, Cloud Volume ONTAP and the differentiator between three levels of provisioning storage.

I have used technical support and it's mediocre.

They gave their best effort, however, at the point they couldn't figure out the problem, they simply said that we would have to deal with Professional Services. I was not impressed, but I understand that it is a new product.

It can be straightforward if everything is perfect, but if there are any glitches on the customer's side then potentially it could require long-term troubleshooting without knowing where to look for the problem.

We have deployed on-premises, but currently, we are testing it on cloud volumes.

For the initial deployment, I used the NetApp file manager to get it up and running.

When it comes to choosing the right solution for our clients, they trust our judgment in recommending something that they know is going to work for them. 

Most of our clients are looking for availability in disaster recovery data and centralizing it into one cloud location. In some cases, a customer doesn't want to go with multiple clients, they want to have it all in one place. They are also looking for simplification in management of the entire solution, provisioning, managing copywriting from a similar interface and a company that can be responsible for the support.

Our customers evaluate other vendors as well. They have looked at AWS, several from Veeam, and partners from ASR for different replication software.

Customers decide to go with NetApp because of our recommendations.

I have experience with other application services including Commvault, Veeam, and ASR.

If Snapshot copies and FlexClones are licensed they work great. The challenge is that the client will not always get the FlexClone license, then it is more difficult to provide it in the future.

Some of our older clients do not have a license for FlexClone, so the recovery of snapshot data can be problematic.

In some cases, they use inline encryption using SnapMirror, but not often.

Inline encryption addresses concerns of data security, as well as using Snapshot. If it is encrypted and it's not near encrypted traffic, then it has less chance of being accessed by someone.

I don't work with application development, so I can't address whether or not snapshot copies and Flexcone affect their application, but for testing environments where we have to update with batches made for maintenance, yes, it allows you to provision, to test, and it validates the stability of the testing and updates releases.

The clients included me in the decision making.

Each has its pros and cons, but with NetApp, this is a NetApp to NetApp product. With Windows backup solutions, it can be from any storage platform to any cloud also. In different ways, they have different workflows with different approaches, but you know each of them is meeting with its business objective, giving you a good balance.

My advice would be to try it first, figure out all of the kinks that might come up, have the proper resources from NetApp lined up to provide you support, and don't give up because it works in the end.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.