Having real-time replication gives us the capability to recover from any data loss as quickly as possible. Without SnapMirror, we'd be relying completely on our data backup, and we'd be dealing with a 24-hour lag. With SnapMirror, data is updated every 15 minutes. 

The solution enables customers to protect data on different sites. It doesn’t stop us from working on our active site while data is moved to the passive site. It’s a big value. The data is compressed. The tool seamlessly moves data over the network without putting pressure on the network.

The biggest benefits I've seen are the speed of the process, correlated with the moment when we need to start. We just need to have a lot of alignment with a lot of people to do things. It's quite fast. 

A NetApp storage solution allows a company to architect a disaster recovery plan that protects all company data. For instance, you have a production NetApp. All company CIFS data is located there. All VMware NFS volumes are located there. All server LUNs are located there. In essence, the livelihood of the company is served up from a central NetApp storage system because all company data is there. This production storage system offers local snapshots for easy restore capabilities. You can then Snapmirror all of this data to a separate NetApp storage unit in a different hosting facility. You can also implement Snapvault. If disk-based recovery is enough you can stop there. Or if you prefer, one can implement tape-based backup via NDMP against the DR NetApp SAN then ship tapes offsite to Iron Mountain or somewhere else. This essentially gives you local Snapshot to production, Snapmirror to DR SAN and offsite tapes. This is a simple and brief description but should provide an outline to its benefit to an organization as it relates to disaster recovery or a backup solution. There are a number of different capabilities a NetApp filer provides that is a clear benefit to any organization.

We have a VMware environment and many NFS exports to Linux servers which are easy to replicate. If we lose the main environment, we can restore all the applications to the recovery site to the appointed LUNs, and then the NFS servers to another server using storage from the DR site.

With VMware, this is very simple because you replicate the identical volume where it is stored in your datastore. I think that recovery for VMware is too simple and you don't need any tool to support this procedure, only directing the LUNs to another ESXi and executing the procedure inside VMware to mount datastore.

In the Oracle environment, the procedure to restore the database on the recovery site is simple as well.

We are using the solution to backup our two data centers between our location site and our data center in Milan, and, in both directions: from Grassobio to Milan and from Milan to Grassobio. From the customer's side, we are storing all of our customer's data as an application in our cluster on our data center.

We have migrated data from old and expiring Netapp hardware using Snapmirror - thereby allowing us to decomm the old hardware and save power, maintainence, cost etc.

It's very robust, very fast, and very easy to set up.

I can not say much, but obviously Netapp came out with different types of GUI based management tools for Performance management and Replication Management which has made acceptability of Netapp environment better than earlier.