Did not live up to expectations
April 27, 2021

Did not live up to expectations

Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NetApp FAS series

I've used several NetApp FAS series devices in different organizations to handle large storage requirements for various systems or entire data centers. It has been used as top-tier storage with innovative enterprise features like flash cache and deduplication. I've also used many of its backup features that are touted as a big part of the NetApp software.

Pros

  • Clustered storage
  • Multiple connectivity options (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, CIFS/SMB, etc.)
  • Options for mapping volumes to different connectivity types

Cons

  • Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
  • Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
  • Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"
  • Deduplication
  • High-performing storage
  • Backup functions
  • Large storage capacity served general data requests well
  • Managing the product long term incurs a large administrative overhead
  • NetApp FAS series did not provide high-performance storage as well as other providers
We had chosen NetApp FAS series because of its high performance, deduplication, manageability, and backup features. Although I have been able to use these NetApp FAS series features, the implementation of them has not worked as well as with other storage providers. There was probably a time where NetApp FAS series was one of the most innovative storage platforms on the market, but it appears that time has passed.

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

No

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

No

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

No

Did implementation of NetApp FAS Storage Arrays go as expected?

No

Would you buy NetApp FAS Storage Arrays again?

No

Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, VMware Cloud on AWS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
The NetApp FAS series has the features to be an enterprise-class storage system, however, at this point they do not perform as well as other storage systems. Management of the system is very involved and requires a lot of oversight. Having to divide up the disks into groups and volumes and LUNs or shares is a nightmare to manage in a large environment. Deduplication is another feature that is great in theory, but the CPU overhead to run the deduplication job is ridiculous. Having to decide between saving space and just having enough CPU to serve IO requests is not a user-friendly choice to have to make.

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