Likelihood to Recommend The best scenario where we found the Cisco Storage Area Networking is best suited is for an architecture where we need a robust technology that provides high level SLAs regarding downtime due to maintenance activities. Our infrastructure provides the core to our Data analytics team, which provides the data needed for our commercial and management leaders to make the right decisions thanks to the data. We need our infrastructure to be robust and reliable, when it runs smoothly, we can focus on other aspects of IT Infrastructure areas, giving our inside business clients the service they need.
Read full review It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
Read full review Pros Zoning High MTBF Buffer Credits Read full review The selling point for NetApp FAS is the application and data protection integration capabilities they provide. We have been able to use NetApp FAS in a variety of use cases with a standard set of management tools. NetApp FAS has evolved over the years from just NAS to also include block protocols. At this time they support almost all industry standard protocols. Read full review Cons Read full review 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" Read full review Usability It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
Read full review Performance My rating of Cisco Storage Area Networking is a solid 10 regarding low-latency network is due to the high needs our data analysis teams need on their tasks. They have a lot of batch jobs that last quite some time and that also overlaps in a series of periods during the day. Their batch jobs need to run flawlessly, so our commercial teams can make the right decisions right on time. Our data also needs to be backed, up, when we run backup jobs, it is important that they do not decrease the efficiency regarding the service. This is also a key point in our choice to use Cisco Storage Area Networking as our backbone.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We looked at the Brocade G series and IBM SAN switches, but the seamless integration into our AAA suite and availability of skills in our local market were big factors. We also have these deployed in FlexPod and VxBlock environments, which the reference architectures provide additional confidence in the solutions overall compatibility, supportability and sustainability.
Read full review NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
Read full review Scalability We have not reviewed this product's overall security vs others but have not noticed any issues.
Read full review Return on Investment Enhanced reliability and minimized downtime. Ensuring continuous data availability. New business model that change CAPEX into OPEX with an evergreen equipment maintenance. Read full review The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about. Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either. Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime. Read full review ScreenShots