NetApp FAS Series Reviews

You can use different protocols at the same time. Monitoring is also very easy in NetApp FAS Series. There is a free tool for monitoring. 

Its licensing cost can be improved.

It is very stable. We have a lot of customers in Turkey, and we haven't got any major issues or complaints from our customers.

It is easily scalable. You can easily scale up and use old and new products together. NetApp products are very scalable.

Their technical support is very good. They work very tightly with us.

The initial setup is very easy. It can be set up in five to ten minutes. We have a lot of technical knowledge of this product.

It is expensive.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate NetApp FAS Series a ten out of ten.

We use this solution as general unified SAN storage for different workloads.

This solution provides us with easy management and great vendor support.

The most valuable feature is that this acts as unified storage, both SAN and NAS, for all types of workloads.

Dedicated storage efficiency accelerators could improve the overall performance of the system.

Used SnapMirror for replication and DR. It's a good case for a storage-based DR. Good results on RPO and RTO.

• Efficient usage
• Good pricing
• Good solution architects and deployment guys are available
• Licensing is easy.

• Lesser resources needed for snapshot and recovery
• Easy to manage
• Recovery process is easy
• Integration with other tools is available.

• Integration with most of the third-party BR tools
• A clear roadmap for next releases should be available.

The product has been pretty stable. Though we have had a few issues, not on the ones that we are going to replace, but on a couple of other ones. On the ones that we are going to replace, we usually use them for file storage and Exchange. The others are mainly used for interface and iSCSI.

It has been a pretty stable environment, but over time our requirements have changed. Therefore, I don't think it's an issue with the system. We have put a lot of load on a lot more than what it can handle. So, it has taken a performance hit. I wouldn't put it down to there being an issue with NetApp. It's simply because it has more load on it than it can handle, so it has taken a performance hit. 

The only downside is in ease in management; it is not easy to use.

It is good to have a unified storage where you can have block and file level protocols. It has been pretty stable, but the capacity requirements have changed overtime. Our utilization has been very high, so the performance has taken a hit, which is why we are replacing it.

• Ease of management needs to be improved.
• The power consumption for the FAS is a lot more compared to the new SSD arrays.

Going forward, I don't want to be using the FAS again. I want to be using AFFs more.

It has been pretty stable. It has been pretty good, and when we have issues, the support has been great as well. 

I am pretty happy with the system, and the performance issues that we are experiencing have nothing to do with the NetApp system. It's simply because it has more load than it can handle.

The scalability is pretty good, but it's too expensive.

Technical support is cooperative and good.

We were previously using an old IBM SAN. We switched because we wanted to moved to a unified system.

We had a reseller set it up for us, simply because it was a little too complicated.

It's not a cheap system. It is very expensive. The pricing has been ridiculous every time that we had to renew the support. Initially, we have a three-year support contract when we bought the system, but the subsequent renewal of maintenance was ridiculous. This is why we have not been too keen on NetApp.

I wouldn't recommend NetApp FAS. I don't understand why anyone would go for NetApp FAS when you can get the NetApp AFF, which is an SSD array, for almost a similar price or probably even cheaper.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Cost effective solution
• Performance
• Reliability
• A good roadmap.

The most valuable feature for us is the ability to perform LIF migrations with clustered Data ONTAP.

It made the workload we needed possible because of its flash cache.

It would be nice to be able to mix flash cache with other technologies.

We've been using it for one month.

It's very stable.

It scales for the kind of customers that we have.

We'd like to get more access to level-two engineers. Sometimes its been a difficult time explaining the problem to level-one people. This process is a little bit time consuming.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We did implemented it ourselves.

When we deployed flash cache, there was no alternative for it. It was the only available cacheing solution.

Flash cache is a great product. If it matches with the workloads, you should consider it.

• Uptime
• Performance
• High Availability
• Disaster Recovery
• NetApp as a company is doing well

• We can failover when needed.
• In my organization, a law firm, brand recognition is important, and NetApp provides that.
• It gives us continuous uptime.

Sometimes there are bugs with firmware upgrades.

Not with deployment, but, again, there are sometimes bugs when we perform upgrades.

It just works, and when some drives go into failure status, it’s just a prediction of drive failure, letting us know when to get the drives replaced.

It scales pretty well, and the limit is how much you want to spend on blades, shelves, controllers, etc.

It's pretty good, they're very knowledgable. With other vendors who outsource support, there's difficulty getting knowledgable first-tier support, but with NetApp, that’s different.

We had help in the installation, which made it straightforward. It was also complex because lots of planning was involved.

It loses points in upgrades from one version to another is not as smooth as it should be. Also, understand your requirements and see how it fits in.

• High Availability
• Reliability

• Reliability
• Performance level
• Great history with it, and over the last two and a half years, it's been etter than others

Depending on the use case, it needs a service catalogue you can walk through without having to use SE.

It's been great, and there's been no issues.

With cDOT, it's very easy to scale out, and that's the reason we went with it in the first place.

It's been great, and any issues have been taken care of right away.

It was very straightforward and easy.

Pick your partner wisely, as they have a lot in your success. Go with someone with a history in FAS. Also, go with vendor that buys reference architecture and follows the methodology.

The primary use case is for standard CIFS/SMB file storage for Windows Clients in an ADS environment.

Samba on Solaris was a nightmare. Our situation improved with no Windows file servers, but at about 30 million files/folders, snapshot and backup functionality started to make trouble.

• Snapshots for user self-service restore
• Ability to use mirroring and SnapVault have made backup no longer necessary.

• The WAFL is slow.
• The adoption of flash by NetApp has also been lagging behind the trendsetters, like TMS, Nimble, and others.