Dell PowerVault Disk Backup and Discovery (DL, TL & ML Series) vs. NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

For small to medium sided environments, it's great, or for low demand but being able to hit higher IOPS on demand. It's still entry-level compared to EqualLogic hardware but a great contender in the field.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Tape Solution
• Small Business Solution
• Good for direct attached storage purposes like video security.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Maintenance is tough. Dell recommends bringing the unit down for any kind of maintenance of upgrades.
• Internal IOPS monitoring could be greatly improved.
• Arrays are locked down to Dell licensed disks.

Incentivized

• 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"

Incentivized

It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Our initial deployment was handled by pro services. Most later deployments were handled in-house. All went very smoothly. Documentation made it relatively easy to set up new systems which allowed us to do it in-house. When using pro services they were professional and comprehensive.

Incentivized

couple vendors but nothing to write home about....

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• If you need a lot of disks attached to a system, PowerVault is the way to go.
• The cost of the unit is reasonable, and you can extend the life of the unit pretty far.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized