NetApp StorageGRID Pros and Cons

The ability to get to the StorageGRID from anywhere on my network. The solution is remote. You don't have to be at a physical location.

The implementation with NetApp went smoothly. It is a 'setup and forget' type of appliance.

It has enabled us to save money on storage costs. We removed our tape library.

It has improved our operational efficiency through time consumption and logistics by 40 to 50 percent. Everything that had to do with our legacy tape solution has been improved and is now more efficient.

The speed of the disks removed the bottleneck from our storage.

It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more.

It helps automate our storage infrastructure.

Right now, we have an older StorageGRID. I like that we can grow it.

It improves our operational efficiency.

There was a small amount of confusion when working with StorageGRID and Active Directory for access. We had to do things three to four times resulting in our engineer troubleshooting a couple of things. The location of the menu, along with what is inside the menu: configurations, settings, etc., is not straightforward to users. Most users are Windows-based. So, when make logical changes to the menu which are not similar to Windows, users and administrators get confused.

The redundancy and reliability are great, but I also see room for improvement there. I would like to see more efficiency in the storage and dedupe/compression solutions.

The only real issue that we have run into is, when we are cloning, we cannot do a thin provision clone, it has to be a full clone.

I would like to see them integrate more with the monitoring platforms. It is a bit difficult to get automated monitoring of the system.

The processes around installation and upgrade need improvement.

It has its quirks here and there, but it is an older NetApp system.

We want to move towards Azure in the cloud. Right now, the system is all physical.