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NetApp Reliability and Support is Not Quite There
August 09, 2019

NetApp Reliability and Support is Not Quite There

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

Overall Satisfaction with NetApp FAS series

We use a NetApp FAS3210 in our main office and a FAS2240 offsite in our colo. The FAS3210 is our primary storage for all of our VMWare environment, which includes 9 VMWare hosts and over 220 virtual servers. The FAS2240 in the colo is used for a handful of production VMWare machines, as well as the storage of some offsite backup from our executive office.
  • It was fairly easy to implement with guided assistance from NetApp.
  • We haven't had many drive failures.
  • The pricing was right.
  • We have had too many troubles with the controllers, had one die completely, and are now fighting an issue where the two don't communicate.
  • They try to nickel and dime you with extra costs for additional features.
  • Software upgrades are too difficult.
  • It has been very problematic as far as the controllers go.
  • Support has been quite terrible, among the worst to be honest.
  • It hasn't completely died, so it's kept our servers online 99.9% of the time over the years.
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.
Among the worst support we've ever had. The reason I say this is we had one of our 2 controller boards die completely. They sent a technician out, which was obviously a 3rd-party contracted person, and he didn't know much about NetApp, but was able to swap the board out. He contacted support and handed the phone over to me, and the technician walked me through reassigning disks to the new controller, but he had me assigning the wrong disks, which caused our whole SAN to go down, and we lost connectivity to all our 220+ servers for many hours. It was a complete nightmare. Then this past October out of the blue we get an alert that the controllers have lost high availability. Basically, they aren't communicating with each other. Also, keep in mind these controllers aren't connected to each other via a cable, they are both contained in the same chassis, so it must be a bug. I've been working with support still since then, almost going on 1 year! They constantly miss our calls, ignore my emails/calls, etc. It's very frustrating to deal with.
Only other SAN we used before this was an EMC CX300 that was used for around 8 years. It was ok in that it didn't have major issues, just some bad drives here and there, but the interface and setup of it were horribly difficult.
NetApp, as far as the storage itself goes, is quite fine. It was very competitively priced when we looked at it, so it's probably good for medium to large businesses. Smaller businesses could probably get by with a much cheaper solution, possibly even just a NAS device. It would also be good for any offsite backup as well.