If they can make the application free like other vendors or include it in all the packages, it would be great. Once we bought a license for NetApp AFF A250, but the company didn’t include SnapMirror, which lead to issues while transferring data. We had to reach out to the vendor again which lead to logistical issues. It was quite frustrating as we had already incorporated the product cost into the budget, and it is quite difficult to include it again. That was a bad experience.

We are working based on the environment. If the client wants to move to a higher version or a more capable on-premise product, we must be able to integrate Flash Pool with SnapMirror.

The NetApp storage is entry-level storage. I'd like to see compression and deduplication and encryption improved, and I'd like to have real-time replication so I have a zero RPO. Snapshotting always creates a delay so if they could come out with a block-by-block replication, that would be great. 

The solution's dashboard and reporting could be improved.

The price could be cheaper. 

The tool should also work on third-party solutions.

Just keep it as bug-free as possible.

The customers want to know when a SnapMirror subscription is completed and whether it can be extended. We have to do manual verifications about the subscriptions often.

We have different families of storage, such as the E-Series and Flash systems, but NetApp cannot be set up between them.

Currently, there is only a command-line interface, but some users would benefit from the inclusion of a graphical user interface.

This has to do with Snapmirror to an unlike NetApp unit and disks but the process is called Deswizzling. This process can get out of control sometimes and cause excessive disk utilization. You really have to be careful with Snapmirror planning as it relates to how often synchronizations are completed especially on large volumes. The other improvement area could be support for replication from Windows file servers. There is the NetApp OSSV solution but you are version locked with ONTAP. You cannot run cluster mode on 8.2.x and still support OSSV. There is an appliance but that can get a bit pricey. There are open source solutions if you look hard enough and put some effort into implementation.

The product itself doesn't have any big issues. What is lacking and what we need to use other products for, is to have active data centers. You need to implement another solution for it, but that is also available from NetApp. So I don't think there is an option to put that into SnapMirror either. It's lacking that functionality but it's available with other solutions from the same vendor.

It is not as efficient as it needs to be. It doesn't compress the data really well when it is forwarded to a secondary site. The download performance could be better.

Our company is Oman, and there is a ticketing problem here. If there are issues, we have to go to the partner who did the implementation. We need to contact the partner, then the partner has to get the log, and then they will raise the ticket on our behalf. After that, the tech support team contacts the partner and then it gets to us. We would like to get support ourselves or the ability to directly log the ticket or even call without having to go through the partner. We want to report the problem to tech support directly and then take it from there.

In terms of improvements for the solution, I think they already have a different product, AFF, where you can get much better performance and more combination as well as data security and data savings, if they have a different protocol already, which they are lacking now.

This solution is stable but needs improvements with the network.

In the next release, I would like to see data reduction included and WAN optimization.

I think that NetApp needs to improve the performance of SnapMirror with controller volume access. This is because when you have many SnapMirror jobs running, the controllers give priority to accessing volumes and transfers remain slow. It is very difficult to understand how to change this in 7-Mode.

The user interface could be simplified. They might want to have fewer options on it, to make it less complicated. There are a lot of options we never use ourselves. They're often very specialized and don't apply to us.

At the moment, we are not using the synchronous mirror, but we can implement the synchronous mirror. The only thing is that it needs another license. This is the same issue we have with business continuity. It needs another license to be implemented. You need too many separate licenses for the features. They should add some of the aspects of the premium bundle into the basic bundle. Sometimes our customers choose other replication services because of the initial cost of the licenses.

None for now.

The new coursework models need to be improved. The bandwidth monitoring could also be better.

On very large data sets with a lot of changes, the interval between mirrors can be rather long.

The price needs to be improved. It is not that it is too high, but it would be good to be reduced.

There is new technology available that is using storage called NVMe with the drives. We are now using a scanning device called a Standard SATA Drive.

I must say that Netapp will have to come out with Better performance and Faster Data replication technologies.

In the next release, I would like to get an active IP number solution.