Strong and Reliable storage
August 28, 2020

Strong and Reliable storage

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NetApp FAS series

NetApp has been defined as a Global standard for NAS (CIFS, NFS) workloads in our company, so it is being actively used in several of our sites across the globe. The largest sites using it are the USA, Brazil and Norway.
One of the main reasons for it to be selected as the standard for NAS workloads is the resiliency and high availability it provides. In Brazil, we have ~5000 users accessing more than 700TB of user data (CIFS shares) on a daily basis. We didn't have a single availability incident in the last 7 years!

Pros

  • NAS Workloads (CIFS, NFS)
  • Snapshot retention/management
  • Disaster Recovery protection (SnapMirror and SnapVault)
  • Storage efficiency (compress, deduplication)

Cons

  • The workload balance between the nodes is managed manually
  • The technical and intangible benefits overcame any financial burden.
NetApp is a truly unified solution, with a single OS to manage both SAN and NAS workloads.
Both the legacy EMC solution we had in place and the 3PAR + Storeasy solutions used a server host backed by SAN LUNs to provide NAS workloads. It works but adds some complexity and performance/availability issues.
Also, the 3PAR + Storeasy solution used a Windows host as the 'NAS server', and Windows is not so good to manage NAS workloads at this size.
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.

Do you think NetApp FAS Storage Arrays delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with NetApp FAS Storage Arrays's feature set?

Yes

Did NetApp FAS Storage Arrays live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of NetApp FAS Storage Arrays go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy NetApp FAS Storage Arrays again?

Yes

Nutanix AOS, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
In my opinion, NAS workloads and data protection are two of the strongest points that Netapp has. It sounds a kind of obvious as they created the NAS concept. A NetApp FAS cluster suits very well for scenarios/companies where the unstructured data (users CIFS shares) are one of the most important workloads. This is our scenario in many of our sites and this is why it was selected to be our standard solution. It also handles SAN workloads very well, but maybe you`d rather go with an HCI solution for block workloads.

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