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NetApp FAS... a universal storage problem solver!
April 26, 2016

NetApp FAS... a universal storage problem solver!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NetApp FAS series

We are a large NetApp customer that uses the full NetApp product portfolio. We have approximately 20PB of NetApp FAS in use today ranging from very small remote office configurations all the way to large corporate data center installations. We are a long term customer with over 8 years of experience with NetApp in production at our company.
  • 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.
  • Netapp needs to modernize and unify their management tools, and off tap integration products.
  • Netapp lost focus on solving customer business problems. They were too focused on their transformation to Clustered data ontap.
  • NetApp needs to move from a controller pair architecture (Tier2) to a multi-controller active-active architecture (Tier1).
  • Reduced support costs through standardized global process and tools
  • Reduced configuration variety between various site scenarios.... in turn enabling automation and standardization.... in reducing TCO
  • Decrease RTO & RPO through the use of NetApp FAS snapshots and data protection capabilities.
Over the years we have consumed pretty much all industry storage solutions. Over the years we have used all major vendors and many start up storage vendors. The main reason we have liked NetApp FAS is due to the exhaustive capabilities and standardized management capabilities from a global company perspective. We don't have to buy 5 platforms to solve 5 different problems. We have been able to buy a single solution that is able to solve those 5 different problems. This is a significant operational advantage to our organization.
NetApp FAS is a great platform to solve a large variety of different problems. It is ideal for large organizations that have a variety of different business scenarios and locations. This ability allows global support organizations to have standard tools and methods even in a variety of use cases and site sizes. On the flip side, this flexibility is also sometimes the weakness of the platform. In very specialized use cases/areas such as low latency with flash this can be a detriment. We still seem to use specialty arrays to solve these point requirements.