In my experience with this equipment we have installed it for clients with different characteristics, in manufacturing companies with the configuration between their virtual environment and storage, in clients with storage in different sites making communication and data transfer between them, also in clients with SAP HANA where servers from different platforms and storage communicate
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.
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.
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.
This equipment model was selected for the characteristics it has which perfectly covered the functionality requirement in the implementations that were carried out, also for the ease of installation, configuration, administration and growth that it has. Customers have been satisfied with all the benefits of the equipment and above all that it is not necessary to invest too much time in its administration, since once implemented nothing else has to be done and the maintenance time used is the minimum since it is a very reliable and safe team
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.
