NetApp FAS Series Valuable Features

MC
Directeur Adjoint Des Systèmes d'Informations& Transition at Mairie de Lunel

At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature. 

The unified storage is a good thing for us because it simplifies administration. It offers the ability to manage different protocols on the same device. We can manage everything through the same interface, and we have a good experience with this at the moment.

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Arnaud Salmon - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Engineer at SFR

The new FAS series is a good fit for some customers. We have good performance and capacity, even though it is full flash.

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TW
Senior Storage Administrator at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

The SnapMirror is a good tool because, as long as you're going NetApp to NetApp, it's ultimately the fastest way to move data. We replicate everything to another site for disaster recovery. 

We like the SnapMirror technology or Snapshot technology that allows us to recover directly off the NAS rather than backing it up to a secondary device. 

Just the ease of management, and it's very highly scalable. We've got one cluster that has about one and a quarter petabytes of data, and then we replicate that to an off-site. So altogether, we've got over three petabytes of data. And if it wasn't compressed and deduped like it is, we probably have more like eight or nine petabytes of data. So it does a really good job with that.

AFF is obviously the faster model because our AFFs are all flash, and they're a lot faster.

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Buyer's Guide
NetApp FAS Series
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp FAS Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
DC
Principal Architect Infrastructure Solutions at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature is SnapMirror.

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Hakan Pehlivan - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Bilgipark Görüntü ve İletişim San. Tic. A.S.

The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is its stability. We had a system installed five years ago, and we never touched it. It is very stable, and we never met with any performance issues. Also, the solution's management and administrative interfaces are very useful and user-friendly. The solution's technical support is very good in Turkey.

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Muhammad Alihyder Bhuiyan - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Operations at NCC Bank PLC

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that the tool is good and serves as a relevant product at a global market level. My company receives good support for the tool, and the solution also offers many local support engineers.

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EA
Manager, System at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The solution provides fast performance.

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Martin Sandell - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer at Basefarm

The most valuable features are compression and dedupe. Since we mainly use them for backup purposes, being able to compress and deduplicate data is crucial. 

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CA
NetApp Pre Sales Specialist at Altron

The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is the snapshot and the FlexClone for Oracle and Microsoft SQL environments. Additionally, the integration can be done with most all on-premise and cloud providers.

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AdrianoSimao - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project and Infrastructure Service Manager at CEDSIF - Ministry of Finance

The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.

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MD
Storage Administrator at Softcell Technologies Limited

Most of the important features are already included, like compression, deduplication, snapshots, and more. 

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it_user527190 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a marketing services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable features are the snapshots, the flash pool that we’re using, and cluster mode. When we are doing an upgrade, there is less of an impact on the customer when you use cluster mode. It still has some with CIFS, but at least it has less impact.

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Sarthak Panchal - PeerSpot reviewer
Module Lead - NetApp Admin, CMA at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

NetApp FAS Series provides all the essential capabilities of E-Series. It is a complete package and even more reliable than E-Series.

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Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers

The solution's most valuable feature is deduplication. Also, its features for file and block protocols work the best.

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Maciej-Kieliszek - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at EXnIT

The product is flexible. 

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Temitope Oladeji - PeerSpot reviewer
NetApp Product Manager at Hiperdist Ltd

The product has a unified technology. We can use different protocols from the same controller. It is a unified solution that allows users to run multiple applications on a single storage.

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Ozair Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Manager - Infrastructure at Synergy Computers

Snapshot, deduplication, and compression features are valuable. I also like the product’s OS. The product is the most reliable because it is based on Linux.

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Luca Raimondi - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at NUM AG

The NetApp FAS Series is useful, because it makes restoring a single file easy, but after that, nothing more. It's just a repository of the virtual machine, so I could use it or another solution, but it's reliable, e.g. it has two nodes with high availability, so this is the reason we choose to use this solution.

This solution also accelerates virtualization, but not so much, because it's not an all-flash solution. The FAS2620 is a traditional solution with some cache, so it's not so fast, but it's enough for my company. AFF is all-flash, but this solution: FAS, is not all-flash, but people like it.

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PS
Service manager at VST ECS

The strong point is that our clients like this are RAID DP (Dual Priority). SnapMirror and MetroCluster features are also very useful for DC, DR solutions.

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MuhammadAli5 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Unit Head at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The best feature is its ONTAP product line for Ransomware protection. Another benefit is the hybrid and unified model. It also has features for file storage and block storage.

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CP
Sr. Infra. Support Egineer / Tech .Consultant at CANAR OFFICE SYSTEMS

Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature. Whenever an application needs more IOPS, it will automatically be reserved for higher-performance storage like SSDs or SaaS-based hard disks.

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AS
System Engineering Manager at BTC Networks

The input and output per second performance are satisfactory.

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LS
Computer System Administrator at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

For us, the greatest aspect of the solution is the fact that it just runs. It is amazingly resilient. That's very important to us, because we are basically, with some exceptions, have a 24/7 operation. 

The newer features will be able to do things without interrupting the user experience, such as moving volumes on the fly, as well as adding and removing nodes to the clusters. That general set of features is pretty important to us.

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RS
System Administrator at ON Semiconductor Phils. Inc.

The most valuable feature for us is the combining of HA and SnapMirror.

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it_user332655 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator with 1,001-5,000 employees

All SIFS and NFS are valuable. It allows our Windows and Unix teams to have a centralized point to share data between the two. When a potential army recruit provides info at various locations, FAS gives us a drop point where the system can pull info from various locations.

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SR
Information Technology IT Manager Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The file sharing feature is most valuable.

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AC
Broadcast Technology Director at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

The product is user-friendly and helps to evaluate the performance of each node. It ensures that if one node encounters an issue, the system can immediately redistribute the workload without interruptions. This setup provides uninterrupted operation for our systems. The high throughput, averaging 1.5 gigabits per second, also ensures that users can connect and work without encountering issues.

NetApp FAS Series follows a portfolio-based security system that allows us to manage folders and specify which files can be uploaded. For example, we can configure folders to only accept file types like MP3, MP4, or MKV. This ensures that only permitted file types are uploaded to the designated folders, enhancing our security measures.

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MohamedAmr - PeerSpot reviewer
Infra Business Development Manager at GBM

The solution has tiers inside which means we do not only need to use SSDs.

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Temitope Oladeji - PeerSpot reviewer
NetApp Product Manager at Hiperdist Ltd

I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. Although it has the capacity to do multiple, you have to go the route to enable that. Sometimes it isn't convenient. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.

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it_user3396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services

Powerful
Easy to use
High availability

DFM

OCI

Data fabric

FPolicy

Cluster-mode

Hybrid cloud solution

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PM
ICT-I Manager at KTDA

The most important features are SnapVault, Snapshots, and SnapMirror.

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AC
Broadcast Technology Director at a media company with 501-1,000 employees
  • First of all, I think it is very suitable storage for media.
  • When editing and recording at the same time, its performance is quite sufficient.
  • The fact that it is redundant for the controller provides sufficient security.
  • I can share all volumes as a single space through the FlexGroup structure.
  • You can manage departments independently by creating more than one SVM.
  • Ontap is a very stable and reliable operating system.
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it_user332607 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Administrator at University of Central Florida
  • Snap mirror as it gives us a way to snap to our two disaster recovery sites to instantaneously bring up VMs
  • Dedupe helps us to save a lot on OS files for VMs
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GA
CEO at BDPR Technologies Limited

One of the features that are so nice and which the bank loves so much about the NetApp FAS Series is its cloning feature. You can clone a database of any size, and when you clone it, the clone itself at the time it is created only occupies a very, very small footprint on the storage. It is when you sever the clone from the main database that you'll have a larger footprint.

For example: You have a database of one terabyte, then you clone that, and it will occupy just a few gigabytes. This means you now have a clone which you can use for a number of things: reporting, backup, or anything you like. You can even use it to test a new product you are trying to bring into the market. However, the moment you sever the clone from the main database, then it becomes WORM-free terabytes on its own, so that's one advantage.

The other advantage is that when you want to do a backup no matter the size of the database, you can do a snapshot. The snapshot takes up a very tiny space on the disc. From that snapshot, you can then take your data and migrate it to a backup storage. The backup storage could be via disc storage. It could be cheap and you can migrate it without any performance implications on the production systems, and that's very, very good.

You can also do replication. You can do one-to-one replication when you have a multi storage and replicate it to under storage, which is located long distance from where you are running your production system. You can do one too many replications and that is okay. You can replicate the data, not just to another data storage, but to multiple data storages, so there's flexibility.

This solution also has deduplication capabilities, so you can compress the data and deduplicate it so that the space to occupy, or the footprint becomes smaller. 

There is a lot of data management tools today, and in the past you have to buy your data management tools separately. At present, when you buy NetApp storage, all the software tools are made available to you as a bundle, so that's another thing I like about the NetApp FAS Series.

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it_user332772 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
  • High Availability – most important thing with all big storage systems
  • Flexible – it uses all different kinds of protocols (SAN, fiber channels)
  • Virtual Management Console – helps with and integrates with vSphere. I’ve deployed it, but haven’t configured it. Looks really promising.
  • Snap Drive – integration with Windows for SQL exchange is critical
  • Can update without taking the system down
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Sourabh Madan - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution architect at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.

The tool's most valuable features are ease of use, ease of access, expandability, availability, and performance. NVMe drives have improved their performance. 

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Ramy Adly - PeerSpot reviewer
HPC & Cloud systems administrator at Brightskies

The solution is very stable and reliable. We guarantee our users' snapshots and the long life of data. Also, the support is professional and nice. It is simple and powerful.

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AB
Storage and System Engineer at Thales Services SAS

Other tools, like OnCommand Unified Manager and Config Advisor, help us a lot in managing our environment.

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WC
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It is very stable and integrates very well with other components.

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it_user332598 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer at Sirius Computer Solutions
  • Dedupe
  • Also, our customers look for fast connectivity and cost efficiency.
  • It's TCP/IP vs. fiber channel, which tends to be more costly.
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FK
Assistant Director, IT at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

One of the valuable features of the solution is data consolidation and visualization - and snapshots of course. The solution is easy to manage. 

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it_user281973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Flexibility.
  • Saves space with deduplication.
  • All protocols on the same box. This means that you don't need to have a appliance to export. For example, an NFS volume on CIFs volume.
  • Easy integration to some cloud environments, like Amazon AWS.
  • Deduplication, now on cluster mode, runs on aggregate and no more on volume only. This means that you must put all their VMware environments on the same aggregate. If you have volume from prod, dev, and homolog that shares the same virtual machine, you will have a big gain on space saving.
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it_user281973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

It gives us the flexibility to work with all protocols on the same Storage Box. The WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) is the best feature implemented on this storage solution. Also, the DataONTAP is very reliable and stable, and I haven't had any problems yet. If you configure NetApp using the best practices, you should not have any issues with the performance. Lastly, the de-duplication works very well with all applications in a VMware environment, and you will save a lot of space. In my experience we save more than 80% of the space using deduplication on the volume, and if you have allflash fas you will have gain of the 3:1 and 4:1 on the your storage on the all environment without lost performance.

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it_user331866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief General Manager at SVC Bank

Today we use it for replication of our transaction data, and for storing data, for which we use the snap mirror feature. Primary and disaster recovery storage centers are connected. Snap mirror backup software does block level copy from primary site to the disaster recovery.

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it_user331830 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at PTSO
  • Snapshot
  • Snapmirror
  • FlexClone
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it_user331812 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP Systems Integrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The flexibility to use in OpenStack with multiple data types, Cinder, Swift, etc.

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AO
IT Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I have found all the features useful in NetApp FAS Series.

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it_user332616 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
  • Redundancy
  • Snap mirroring
  • Home-drive capability, which looks at a user name and gives the correct rights to folder
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it_user350622 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator - Backup & Storage Specialist at METRO SYSTEMS Romania

What impressed me the most about these systems are their excellent reliability, ease of administering (both in GUI and command line), and their very good documentation that is easy to access and understand. It provides very good storage, High Availability, and data protection by employing the use of two separate storage controllers that can take over each other's role as soon as any of them goes down. The technology has been improved even more after the introduction of the cluster cDot ONTAP OS.

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it_user332652 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Adminstrator at SRPNet
  • Software features, such as being able to do snapshots and file system optimization
  • High Availability -- components fail so this is a nice feature to have when failing over. There's no downtime, so we don’t lose data.
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it_user330081 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Computer Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think that the flexibility with the volume, resizing, and performance.

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it_user527118 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its flexibility: It will support anything; from Windows CIFS shares, to UNIX NFS shares, to block-level storage; on the same platform; on the same disks; with the same interface. It's not specific to one set or another set.

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it_user354033 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner Storage at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Reliability
  • Snapshots
  • Ease of tooling
  • Integration with our systems
  • It's multiprotocol
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VF
IT Manager at a maritime company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable features are the NAS features and NetApp's excellent support.

It's user-friendly, and I am happy with the dashboard, customization, and security.

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it_user806046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant
  • SnapManagers for SQL
  • Exchange and Oracle
  • SnapMirror for DR
  • CIFS management for shares/permissions
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it_user821337 - PeerSpot reviewer
‎Cloud Plattform Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Integrated backup functionality (SnapVault and SnapMirror)
  • Option to mirror synchronously
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it_user614595 - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT Network Administrator at a maritime company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Reliability
  • Rich features
  • Ease of management
  • Excellent support

A reliable and easily managed storage system is a key performance factor. The system also has more features than we require.

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it_user332793 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales - Regional Southern California at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

NetApp, as a design group, builds solutions that are reliable. Other companies don’t have the fortitude of NetApp. They have a very strong commitment to the multimedia industry, for example.

Other products lose performance over time, but NetApp OS is speed-optimized.

NetApp is also a very stable company that offers various storage options at the highest level of build and reliability. Products will be supported for the duration of a customer’s needs.

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it_user405642 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Consultant at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Multi Protocol
  • Scalability
  • Homogeneous hardware

There are various modes and protocols you can use at the same time. For customers who use NetApp 7-Mode, I would rate Data ONTAP 8/10 and for Clustered Mode 7/10.

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it_user332619 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer III at Providence Health & Services

NAS functions, as it's primarily used for all our file shares. We have other NAS devices, but this is easier.

Also, High Availability is a valuable feature.

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it_user330882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Tech-Architect, Storage at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Being able to run any flavor of files and block storage. It's easier to manage, and we’re looking to phase out legacy systems and to go with FAS.

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SV
Software & Services Advisor at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

SyncMirror (for legacy to new platform migration, prior to CDOT availability), SnapManager Suite (for application aware data protection features, namely Oracle and Microsoft), FlashCache & FlashPools (for accelerating workloads, volumes and/or entire aggregates).

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it_user527277 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Analyst at a local government with 501-1,000 employees

It takes your standard IOPS in your drives and it gives you much greater performance out of that aggregate. You can run a smaller aggregate with SSDs in the flash pool, and it'll give you the IOPS of many more spindles. What it does is it brings your SATA disks aggregate up to the SAS speed, depending upon how many spindles you're running, and your SAS aggregates perform much better.

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it_user310452 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Deduplication
  • High Availability
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PS
Service manager at VST ECS

This is a good product. I like that the NetApp FAS Series can use both SAN and NAS at the same time, and that's what most customers are looking for. Especially, the features like Metro Cluster and Snap mirror are also really good.

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it_user793935 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • NAS stability
  • Simple customer support
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it_user332664 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Manager at Wilson Trailer
  • Clone – we updated to Dynamix AX 2012, and not a week has gone by that we haven’t fired up a clone to test a user, code, etc.
  • Disaster Recovery suite of functions
  • Quick backups that don’t impact system
  • Refreshes test environments quickly
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it_user332643 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Data Storage Engineer III at University of Kentucky

Snapshot, because so much of it is on our end-user storage, our users often delete things they’re not supposed to. Having snapshots to revert these deletes quickly and easily is very valuable.

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it_user351141 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
  • Clustered data ONTAP
  • Data compression
  • High Availability
  • Snapshot technology
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it_user346119 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The integration with VMware is the most valuable feature for us because we run a lot of VMs and the backup is very good when you run your VM in NFS.

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it_user332604 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Redundancy
  • Snap technologies (snap mirror, snap shots)
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it_user332232 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have clusters, and can do non-distruptive upgrades with cDOT and can spin up VMs as needed. We have the flexibility to give people NAS storage.

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Ramy Adly - PeerSpot reviewer
HPC & Cloud systems administrator at Brightskies

NetApp FAS is highly stable and reliable, especially under a heavy load. That is what I like most about the NetApp.

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it_user3396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services

Better performance and lower costs.

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it_user351177 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect IT at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Snapshots
  • Mobility of data
  • High Availability
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it_user332670 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Storage Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The performance allows me to provide backend storage for large number of VMs and databases at a competitive price point.

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EH
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. You can experience two disk failures and still be up. Another feature is the deduplication. It saves a lot of space. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage.

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it_user829644 - PeerSpot reviewer
Berater with 11-50 employees
  • Ease of use
  • Robust Snapshot functionality
  • You can use it in two datacenters with SnapMirror-ing.

It has a very good implementation of the Active Directory services, so implementation into a Windows network is easy. 

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it_user332259 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

It’s a decently mature product that has a lot of documentation and standards and is something to be relied on.

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it_user331854 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administor at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Management, for a person who’s not a storage administrator In a couple of weeks, you can get the basics of createing virtual storage, and carving out chairs and LUNS.

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MC
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution is easy to use.

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EE
Co-founder at Forest Technology

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. 

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AS
System Engineer at Symbol Technologies PLC

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

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SK
Chief Evangelist & CEO at Evantage IT Consulting Services Pvt Ltd
  • Lesser resources needed for snapshot and recovery
  • Easy to manage
  • Recovery process is easy
  • Integration with other tools is available.
View full review »
SR
Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user352242 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Technician at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user332244 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees
  • Uptime
  • Performance
  • High Availability
  • Disaster Recovery
  • NetApp as a company is doing well
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it_user330924 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • High Availability
  • Reliability
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it_user829644 - PeerSpot reviewer
Berater with 11-50 employees
  • Snapshots for user self-service restore
  • Ability to use mirroring and SnapVault have made backup no longer necessary.
View full review »
it_user627942 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

We like its resilience. It's reliable storage.

View full review »
it_user520506 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Fast Snapshots
  • Thin provisioning
  • Simple management
View full review »
Buyer's Guide
NetApp FAS Series
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp FAS Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.