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.
Support. Support. Support. It's been a welcomed surprise to have a hard drive land on my desk, and a better surprise to have a NetApp tech arrive soon after to install the drive. I didn't even know the drive failed-- now that's support.
AS stated, the ability of these devices to host multiple virtual servers, entire infrastructures, and work well and fast, is a definite strength.
The ability to stack these devices and have failover.
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!
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.
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.
NetApp FAS is very agile compared to other similar products. It especially caters to NFS and does it expertly. Compellent, Clariion, and EqualLogic all boast similar overall functionality but lag behind in innovation such as a full HTML5 web UI without the installation of additional components. Full PowerShell integration is also very helpful for automation.
