NetApp ONTAP Reviews

We're using it as a file-based solution. The majority of our business users are file-based. We're also using it for virtualization for backup storage. Its programs are very good.

We are also evaluating the All Flash FAS solution. 

The group that I work with is media-based, so we usually use large files as compartments. 

We do use ONTAP for our mission-critical applications.

We save space through deduplication. While it depends on the application that we're using, we can save anywhere from 2G to 3G, which is really good.

• It is easy to manage. 
• A novice can use it.
• The Snap features of ONTAP.
• It has all the good features that everyone wants.

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.

Stability is very good. 

You can scale it however you want, depending on your data center footprint. I don't see higher limitation for how far you can scale. It's the same interface so you don't have to worry about managing it.

I would rate the tech support as a nine out of 10. We get the support when we need it.

The initial setup is straightforward. We did not have to worry about the configuration, as NetApp comes in and installs it.

We used a reseller, who was really good, for the deployment. 

We are seeing ROI from ONTAP. Within three years of using the products, we barely saw any complications with its usage. We have been using it for over ten years now.

ONTAP has helped our organization reduce its overall cost of storage (somewhere in the high millions).

1. 1. We receive the best support for a lower price point.
   2. The price point is very competitive and inexpensive compared to what you receive from other vendors in the market. 

We just started knowing NVMe over Fabric. We haven't used it but I think it's a great idea. They are trying to make the data closer to the CPU, so it will give you more confidence.

Our approximate cost per IOP is $0.18 USD to $1.00 USD depends on the scale of the site. 

We deployed it for storage consolidation, core banking solutions and to host core banking applications. We have also deployed it for disaster recovery replication solutions. We have a combination of on-premises and ONTAP Cloud for data protection, replication, and instances.

We also use this solution for databases on flash and DFF deployed for core database systems to manage call database systems.

It is a unified solution, and you have all the licenses for all the protocols available on the ONTAP. It also has easy management, so if somebody's running ONTAP 8, they can still manage ONTAP 9. It's the same commands, just a few syntax changes. It is very easy to manage in terms of system and GUI management. You can set up the system in under 15 minutes, and it will be up and running. Also, regarding system administration, it is fascinating that we can manage the smaller systems the same way we manage the bigger systems. There is no difference in terms of system administration and creating logs. The simplicity of the OS is a key selling point, and mixed customers appreciate it.

It's a perfect system, we have been using it for many years, and many changes have been made, but the rate of technology could be improved. It takes about 60% of the raw capacity to get a user to capacity. It is a lot, and competing solutions don't take up to that in terms of the rate.

I don't think anything needs to be added in the next release. The ONTAP 9 is perfect, and none of our systems have upgraded to the new updates. The updates usually address significant failures. We don't have any technical issues with NetApp ONTAP's system, and with no updates, it is still perfect. However, it needs to be monitored due to security threats, so most updates ensure that security is well managed and handled.

We have been using this solution for 11 years and are working with the latest updates. It is a hybrid environment and deployed both on cloud and on-premises.

It is stable and reliable.

It is one of the most scalable storage solutions.

The technical support is fantastic. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

We've worked with Dell and HP products. The scalability in NetApp ONTAP is the best. The technology is almost the same across solutions, and you can create volumes, logs and maps. In addition, the NetApp ONTAP is unified, and you can do all protocols on a single controller. For other solutions like HP, you have to buy system licenses. For NetApp ONTAP, if a customer starts with a very small system and grows, they can buy bigger ones and integrate them with smaller ones with no issue because they are running the same operating system.

The setup is straightforward, and our company provides all the implementation services. If all information is available and there is a power supply, the system is set up in less than 30 minutes. I rate the setup a ten out of ten.

Maintenance is the function of the customer and the kind of application that is deployed on the product. Usually, the system comes with a minimum of three-year support by the OEM, and NetApp ONTAP takes charge of doing that for patch replacements, patch upgrades and access to software updates. In addition, they have the next business day and four-hour support. However, four-hour support is unavailable in our region in West Africa due to resources, so we sell next business day support.

Weekends are challenging to provide support, but partners intervene during the weekend before NetApp ONTAP comes up on the next business day. So, we have various support, but West Africa has limited choices due to the cost and contract business. However, most of our customers enjoy it and don't have issues.

Everybody can work with NetApp ONTAP. I have customers with very low budgets running NetApp ONTAP, which is where the NetApp ONTAP Cloud comes in. It doesn't have to be hardware. NetApp ONTAP is software that is now a commodity like VMware so that you can buy it on Amazon, Azure, and as a commodity. If you're a big company, you have access to bigger platforms, and if you're a small company, there are smaller platforms.

The price is relative. Once the value is appreciated, price is a much simpler issue. In terms of licensing, I feel NetApp ONTAP is a bit pricey compared to other solutions, but it has value, and the total cost of ownership of the NetApp ONTAP system is cheaper than the others. The initial cost might be a bit high, but over a period of time, it's cheaper. I rate the price a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. Regarding advice, if you are looking for a unified environment where you can use all your protocols anytime, you want NetApp ONTAP to be the answer. If you want scalable storage with good OEM support where you can deploy on a hybrid environment across multiple clouds and on-premises, NetApp ONTAP is also the answer.

Our primary use case for ONTAP is that our whole platform is running on ONTAP. We have all the client data that we're using on the files, in our data center.

It's hard to say how this solution has improved our organization because we've been using it for 18 years now. It works great, it really does what it should and we've been really, satisfied customers. 

Our whole platform is so big that this solution is mission critical for our company. We also have a metro cluster internally where our virtualization stuff runs on.

ONTAP has really reduced our costs because we learned that we could use our storage with fewer machines and drive down data center costs.

The most valuable features are stability and performance, and that with the cDot feature we can move data around without any interruption. Also, the hardware maintenance is really, really, easy and fast. 

We are discussing ONTAP for AI. We are having a look at it, but we haven't used it yet.

We have been using deduplication on our web volumes and have seen about 25 to 28% data reduction. That's not that much because mail storage is pre-compressed by the clients, and we do not save anything there.

Synchronous NetMirror and FlexCache features will be back again. This is really great. It will help us be more efficient but it will take some time until it really comes down and we can use it.

We hope that SSD's will be cheap enough so that we can consolidate and save reg space in the future.

Stability is really great. It's awesome. Of course, we have hardware failures, but they really work great. The failover mechanisms do what they should do and, we are very satisfied with that.

cDot only scales to 24 notes so scalability should be better, bigger, but we are one of the only customers that are facing this problem.

Their technical support is mostly very fast. Our system account manager takes really great care of that. Sometimes, parts are shipped in the middle of the night, when nobody is on site which could be improved.

Our FAS9000's do, 150,000 IOPS per head which is less than around one dollar per IOP.

I would rate this solution a ten, especially the cDot version because it really helps focus on our real problems, and storage is, not the greatest problem anymore and really works great.

We use this storage device for databases, storing databases, and VMware. When it comes to databases ,we have Oracle, SQL, and mission-critical applications. Therefore, we need very good response times, and we get very good response times from NetApp All Flash systems.

Queries are being completed in less time. For example, we have seen a three times improvement when it comes to running a query. If query used to take an hour, now it takes 10 to 20 minutes.

• It does both file and block storage.
• The compression works well. We get a 3:1 ratio.

• We would like to be able to provide feedback immediately after receiving technical support.
• Make it a simpler. Our entire industry is moving towards simplicity or automation, we spend a lot of time doing storage allocation. It's too complex.
• Have integration with other storage providers. 
• I would like cloud integration where we can send data to the cloud. Engineers should be able to click on one button (integrated with their phones), and move the data from NetApp to cloud.

It's a stable product. So far, we have not seen any issues. It has worked as expected, meeting our expectations.

It scales up, so I don't see any issues with scaling the system.

When it comes to support, we usually go into NetApp chat and request help. Most of the time, our interaction with their support is nice and they are willing to help.

Sometimes, you have a team of people, where 10 or 15 people are working, and you are not going to get the same result from everyone. It happens when we call support sometimes that we do not get what we need, then we work with the manager.

ONTAP has helped us reduce the cost of storage by a lot. We were using IBM XIVs (hybrid system) and were paying high costs, except for the maintenance. Now, we are on all-flash and we pay less than what we used to pay.

ONTAP is an operating system, but we also wanted to invest in all-flash. We evaluated multiple products and we liked ONTAP's performance and its cost.

The initial setup is too complex. It should be one click. Anyone with basic knowledge of storage should be able to set it up. Instead, there are too many moving pieces. You have to do plaster configuration, north configuration, and port configuration, and these things should be fully automated. Customers should be answering a few questions and system should be ready for application on user portals.

The overall implementation was done by a reseller, IS. 

We see ROI, but I was expecting more. Right now, what happens is I have a team of 10 or 12 people, and the investment is going into managing them instead of doing something new.

Moving to all-flash from hybrid, we brought the response time down from 10 milliseconds to some milliseconds.

We evaluated Pure Storage and NetApp. Cost was a value factor in selecting NetApp.

We are in a testing phase at this moment for machine learning, AI, and real-time analytics . We have a team who is testing Docker on this.

In future, we will be using NVMe over Fabric. At the moment, we are still immature.

Deduplication, data protection, and NetApp block are some of the valuable features of the product.

The GUI of NetApp ONTAP is an area with certain shortcomings that need to be considered for improvement.

I have been using NetApp ONTAP for over three years. I am using the solution's latest version.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company has a dozen users of NetApp ONTAP.

I rate NetApp ONTAP's support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate my experience with NetApp ONTAP's setup phase a ten out of ten.

The product is deployed on-premises.

The deployment process took a day to two to be completed.

Two people look into the software part during the deployment process of the product.

I rate NetApp ONTAP's pricing a seven out of ten.

In NetApp ONTAP, both the hardware and the software are the same. The only thing with NetApp ONTAP is that you can't buy it separately because it comes with the box, which is its hardware.

I definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. It's a very friendly and usable tool with lots of features, majorly storage.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My primary use case for ONTAP is for VMware. We also use it for exchange and file storage.

ONTAP's improving my organization by allowing us to automate. The ability to automate day to day tasks, when using NetApp storage, frees up more time for forecasting, troubleshooting, and more planning.

The primary features that are most important to me, currently for ONTAP, are stability, first and foremost, and the ability to automate. ONTAP offers me PowerShell cmdlets and I can use Ansible via API to automate our day to day tasks. Previously, it was all the other software like, SnapManager, and Snapshotting, which a lot of other vendors didn't have.

I would like to see them have a continued focus on stability because there's so much software involved that it'd be really nice to just continue to have developers focus on that. It's the most important thing in the end, and other than that, I think they're working on a lot of the stuff that I personally am looking for, as well as more Ansible modules, and PowerShell modules.

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.

Scalability, for us, has been pretty good with ONTAP, since they went from 7-mode to ONTAP. Now that we can cluster environments, and have multiple nodes in the cluster, we've been able to scale to the point that our organization requires, as far as the capacity and performance.

We don't go directly to NetApp, but when we do interface with NetApp directly, we've had a pretty good support experience. There have been times where it's been difficult, depending on who's on staff at that time, and how long it takes to escalate. Recently, we've worked with our account reps, to nail down how to escalate immediately, and since we did that, we've had a lot better experience.

We knew we needed a new solution because I've always worked with NetApp, although we had another solution with a different company, and it came down to feature set. The solution we had didn't have SnapMirror, Snap plug-ins, and integration with VMware at the time, and  SRM. At that point, it was the feature set that made us switch over to ONTAP. At my current company, it's more of deciding to stay with the technology, and that's because of the existing feature set and ability to automate with it.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. That's where the reseller provides a lot of value. They have access to NetApp tools. NetApp would also have access to that, but we tell them the requirements, and what we're looking for, and what we're using it for. They come up with config, we look over it, maybe make some changes, go back and forth, and then, come up with the final config. We've had a good experience with that.

We used Datalink, and it's been okay. Mixed reviews with that. Delay in escalation is the only complaint there. Otherwise, they do provide additional stuff that NetApp wouldn't provide out of the box such as architecture and design help. In that aspect, it's been really great, but for support, it's kind of been easier just to go direct.

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.

I would rate ONTAP as an eight. From 7-mode, they've come a long way, and I really like the features that they include. I'll give it an eight and not a ten because we run into a lot of bugs which have resulted in some issues, like outages, so I have to dock it there. As far as feature set and automation go it's a great product.

We use it for everything, like the NAS and SAN functionality. It's a back-end for the host VMs and the Microsoft SQL Database, which is directly attached to them. We also use all-in-one file servers.

We got rid of about 25 Windows file servers, which is great. We don't have to patch them every month anymore. We now have an all in one solution, which are virtual storage machines (SVMs). For example, previously, executives would try to use presentation material on the file server and the screen would not come up for a long time. Now it come up instantly.

We use it for our mission-critical applications, such as SQL Databases and NetApp AFF.

It has multiple uses. It does everything in one box. 

I would like them to support NetApp All Flash in upcoming NVMe versions. We have an AFF8040 and NVMe version 9.4 does not currently support it. 

I would like to have an easier connection to the cloud on the back-end. Something that brings the cold data out to the cloud and brings it back when needed. We want ONTAP to do this.

While the data efficiency features are great, I want to see more efficiency and compression type of technology.

It works. It is great and reliable. We haven't had any issues. Hardware failure is rare. We have no performance issues with our AFF.

When a disk failed, it was automatically detected. They sent me a disk and I wasn't even aware of it. It happened on Sunday and they sent me a disk on Monday morning.

Scalability is awesome with a cluster node, not only can you scale up, but you can also scale out.

ONTAP tech support needs some improvement, but it has improved quite a bit.

Previously, the support center was in India and Asia. They had some communication problems but their technical skills were not up to par. Then, they pulled the technical support back into North Carolina, as this helped a lot. I can talk to a Level 1, which most of the time I don't need. When I have an issue, I know exactly what I'm talking about. I know there's a bug and need to go to Level 2. Also, our large corporation global team gets involved as soon as I open a case, and they put me through to Level 2 or Level 3, which helps a lot.

We were previously using Hitachi with NetApp. However, Hitachi is lacking in all the features. Our companies chose Hitachi because it was cheaper, but this was back in the early 2000s. Hitachi doesn't have any NAS functionality. File systems could not be migrated unless we connected to a Windows system, then Windows provided the file system function.

We looked into this solution because of its high availability and disaster recovery. We are in a dangerous business because something could blow up and everything would be lost. So, offsite backup replication, SnapMirror, and SnapVault are very important.

It was extremely easy to set up from day one.

I implemented everything myself.

It has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage. Replacing the Windows license alone provided us savings. 

We have been able to save a lot of space because there is deduplication and compression.

Just buy ONTAP and go for it.

When we were considered products, we also looked at Dell EMC. Previously, Dell EMC products only provided SAN functionality. We had to buy separate Celerra as NAS heads to attach to the SAN back-end. 

NetApp has much smarter way of doing everything. Their Snapshot technology, by just copying the index, is much better than Dell EMC, which forces you to cut a snapshot, taking up I/O.

Data Domain has a lot better deduplication technology than NetApp, and that is bad for NetApp. 

We have been using Fibre Channel, but we are planning on moving over to NVMe. We're on a 32G Gen 6 switches and HBA cards. We need to convert it to see how it will affect the speed, but it should drastically increase the performance of the connection.

NVMe over Fabric with existing Fibre Channel infrastructure is wonderful. It is easy to convert. We don't have to do much at all. It's just a matter of how we present. Instead of using WWPNs, we use an IQN number. So, it's connecting the same volume over iSCSI and Fibre Channel mixed. We just have another means to talk to the hosts.

ONTAP is the OS for NetApp storage controllers. We use it to provision storage or line volumes for our internal customers requesting storage either for databases, the storing of flat files, etc.

ONTAP 7-mode is a bit archaic, but with the clustered mode, it is straightforward. Also, if you add OnCommand Unified Manager, it is awesome.

We have a lot of mission critical systems, so we normally use ONTAP for all of them along with our databases and applications, e.g., Oracle Databases, like the BI and the CRM. We also have a VMS, which takes care of our virtual management systems.

It's easy to use. So, we don't have much stress. 

• SnapMirror
• Snapshot
• FlexClone volume: Cloning of volumes, volume move, and volume create.

I would like it to be more user-friendly. When you open the main dashboard, anyone should be able to know exactly what is going on, even without a tech background. Minimal training should be required.

Stability and performance have been great.

Sometimes it takes a while for us to upgrade. We need to ensure the applications running are compatible with the upgrades that we will be running. So, it takes us a little time to upgrade. However, all the upgrades, including the latest one (ONTAP 9.4), have been awesome.

Its scalability is good.

I'm here at NetApp Insight because I needed to talk to a few of the NetApp customer representatives about cost. In Africa, especially in West Africa, NetApp doesn't chat with their customers. Therefore, we always have to go through the local partners or vendors. 

I just spoke to a woman on the technology team. She's promised to be in touch and have somebody come to Ghana to speak to the high-end customers, like Vodafone, MTN, etc.

ONTAP's technical support is awesome and always ready to help.

We did not have a solution before NetApp, and NetApp was the first, but now we have Huawei as well.

We first used the NetApp 7-Mode version. Now, we use the cluster version. The cluster version is more flexible and easier to use.

Because most of us were new to the product, the initial setup was a bit cumbersome. Once we were trained, it was fine. 

We used a local vendor for the deployment with professional support from Nigeria. Our experience with them was good.

We have seen ROI.

It doesn't help reduce the overall cost of storage.

We have been able to save about 3TB to 5TB of storage. We still need to do more on the compression bit, then provisioning, to save more going forward.

The product costs an arm and leg; it's expensive.

We looked at NetApp, Dell EMC, HPE, and Huawei.

We chose NetApp because of efficiency and performance. Its product is up-to-date.

Fabric is good. I have yet to experience NVMe.

Sometime in the future, we will look at AI and machine learning.