NetApp ONTAP Pros and Cons

The product allowsfor the centralization of large environments.

The performance of the hardware is good.

We've seen return on investment for ONTAP specifically on the performance recently. Where we had our file storage solution sitting on a hybrid storage solution and we were having continuous performance issues, as our workloads went up we were able to put in an 8300 all-flash array. Since we've put that in, we've been under one-millisecond latency, and that's allowed us to not have delays in some of our EDI transactions. Our end customer integrates and interfaces with that technology. Fewer outages equal more business, more profit, more revenue, and immediate ROI. We've been really happy with the new All Flash hardware solutions.

The product is stable, easy to deploy and it just works.

The solution is very easy to configure.

You can scale it however you want, depending on your data center footprint.

Vauable features include the ability to manage our data anywhere, multiple consumption modes, and rapid deployment.

Technical support is good but they can take some time on critical problems.

The setup can be a bit complex, depending on the environment.

Some of their products have been really good for us, on certain versions. We've run into a bunch of verts, though. That's NetApp's word for their bugs. Stability has been the main complaint that I've had with the product. Because it's so feature-rich and has so much software related to it, it does come with a decent amount of bugs so we do a lot of upgrades to patch bugs.

We had a few small issues with setup, but once everything was done it just worked.

The back-up side of the solution could be improved, as could the archive. We still have to rely on third-party backup programs and other archiving solutions. If it was offered by NetApp itself, it would be much better.

It takes them a few seconds to do a failover. I hope they can reduce this to milliseconds or at least drive it down to less than two seconds. Some of their competitors are already doing this.