Snapshot is a valuable feature by itself. The best thing about the product is the integration into some applications, like Oracle or SQL, via plug-ins. The product is application-aware. If we take a snapshot from Oracle, it is consistent. The consistency of Snapshot is very significant.

The most valuable features of the solution are its resilience and capacity to recover files. If you face any problems in NetApp Snapshot, it is very easy to recover files.

The NetApp product is really awesome. There may be others in niche spaces that can fill a particular use case better than NetApp, or provide a less expensive alternative, but in our environment, NetApp is our go-to storage provider. There will be specific use cases that bring competing products into the data center, so I'm not a purist, but we've had phenomenal success with NetApp and its support. It's been a great relationship for the entire duration. They have evolved well technologically, and they've done a great job of getting past the idea of being a vendor for spinning disks. They have repositioned themselves as a management system for your data regardless of where it resides. I just can't speak highly enough.

Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapVault have worked really well for us over the years. The next piece of that puzzle that we will be adding is data tiering, particularly as we start to move some of the stuff that I currently house on a SATA disk (e.g. departmental shares, user shares, etc.) to the cloud. There's a lot of data that's accessed frequently, and there's a lot of data that's not. 

NetApp's FabricPool technology will allow me to basically set up a series of rules and then tell it, "Okay, go do it." When a block becomes hot, it brings it into my fastest storage. If the block is accessed less frequently, it goes out into warm storage. If it cools down even further it goes to cheaper and deeper storage. The product automates moving the data blocks from one tier to another based on the rules we create. There's a lot of promise there because the cloud is never cheaper than on-prem until you can take advantage of some of that cheap and deep stuff. Of course, this isn't directly related to snapshots, but when discussing NetApp, the focus is on an intertwined collection of data management tools, and snapshots are just one piece of a larger strategy.

The integration with the cloud is seamless. They have a singular management interface that makes it so you don't really have to know or care where the data resides.

The greatest value in the Snapshot technology lies in the fact that we can mirror these snapshots to a remote site. In fact, one of the features that will be enabled that I have been looking forward to (and it's been around for a while now, but it's still above the version I'm running) is a continuous data protection scheme with near real-time mirroring. A lot of times my snapshot schedule might be every hour. By definition, if I snap it and mirror it every hour I could lose 59 minutes and 59 seconds worth of data. In most cases, that is acceptable for our business.  With the addition of synchronous mirroring, we can tighten the RPO for our most critical data.

Because of SnapMirror and SnapVault, I can keep (for example) two weeks' worth of data on my primary storage, yet I can keep a year's worth of weekly backups on the remote array. If somebody says "Gosh, you know, we had this file. I don't know exactly when we deleted it, but the last time we knew we had it was March." Then I have those weekly snapshots and can go and try to recover that data for them. It's not as slick as it could be. Most traditional backup solutions will allow me to just type in the file name, and it will tell me where the data is. With the NetApp Snapshot approach, the search is really very manual, but it is doable, and it does give us a longer-term retention strategy. The snapshots are immutable, so if I end up getting ransomware or something like that, we have the facility to roll back.

From a functional standpoint, it's been, pretty much bulletproof. I have never gone to a snapshot and have not been able to do what I needed to do.

It's extremely user-friendly, it is a set-it-and-forget-it kind of setup.

It doesn't occupy a lot of space and is very easy to use once you schedule the snapshots.

So, space usage is a key benefit. NetApp products are easy to use. As long as it does what it needs to do, we're fine.

The speed and efficiency of snapshots impacted our recovery time objective (RTO). It's a ten out of ten improvement, which means it works perfectly for our needs.

The most important feature to us is creating live snapshots without impacting user access to the file. NetApp's processes are transparent to users and allow us to create point-in-time snapshots, enabling us to replicate that data into the cloud in real time without any impact.

The second feature is the possibility of storing long-term snapshots. We can keep a snapshot for more than one, two, or seven days, which is important as a backup strategy.

NetApp Snapshot uses copy-on-write technology, meaning data consumption will only grow if you have an active snapshot and write new data into the array.

The most valuable features of NetApp Snapshot are the integration with other vendors and customization.

NetApp Snapshot's most valuable features are the snapshot capabilities, you can take snaps of shared directories, files, and VMs.

The most valuable features are the console which is the on top command that we use daily. The console is very nice for viewing and we really do use it on a daily basis. They also throw in file arms and disk size. 

We normally have two VR sites that we just replicate. We'll start it in the evening and already by the next day we can see that the replication time rate is moving, the turnover rate is verified and there's no issue. I believe that there's now a new NetApp with flash and lots of other features, although I don't remember the name of the hardware.

The most valuable features of the solution are the repurposing and backup features.

The replication and SV protocol features are valuable.

• It centralizes your data. 
• It lets your storage take care of backup, DR, and BCP. 
• You never have to worry about protecting your virtual machines. 

Snapshot has a specific purpose as a means to take a temporary picture of the current state of the data. This is its main feature but also the most important and valuable. Really, it is the only thing that it does.

The speed is the most valuable feature. The interface is user-friendly and we can do a lot of customization with it. 

The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure. We are able to easily do Azure backups and restores.

The data protection provides peace of mind.

The most valuable features of this solution are the snapshot and clone capabilities.

This solution is easy to use.

The solution is fast and it doesn't use any disc space at all. You can also take as many snapshots as you like. These are the solution's most valuable features.

What I find most valuable, is the simplicity of the technology. It has a user-friendly interface.

The feature that's most valuable is the ability to take a snapshot from a machine or VMware.