It is fantastic for disaster recovery. We've used it in DR tests for years and it just works. This is the primary reason I can think of why a company would use this feature set.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are strong areas where NetApp SnapMirror exceeds by providing multiple recovery options without the need for additional software or degrading network performance.
The volume size on the destination partner always has to be bigger than the source. This can get annoying. Not sure if they have made this automatic in future releases.
When you break a SnapMirror to use the destination volume you have to redirect all requests to the new volume. This isn't really a con but it is something you need to think about.
Very well versed and a good product to deal with downtime to recover from the failure is pretty good. Also, NetApp's engagement on Incident calls is very professional and humble. I would give a 100% rating to this product as I have been working on this for the past 5 years. It is stable, fast and highly reliable
It just works 99% of the time. Even if there's a network outage, jobs just pick up after the outage is over. The only reason it's not a 10 is the weakness of the GUI interface for configuration. For me, all configuration has to be done at the command line.
NetApp support has always been great. With the NetApp Auto-support system/web portal, the visibility into your NetApp storage is incredible. There have been times when I've been contacted by them for an issue that I haven't even discovered yet. For example, I received a call 20 minutes after a drive failed in our filer. I hadn't checked my email at that time and therefore didn't see the alert.
We originally had an EMC storage device. We had quickly outgrown the device and looked for alternatives. We were drawn to NetApp because of the great software solution surrounding it. We had been using a combination of backup solutions previously combining the Dell EMC box with Backup Exec and a tape library. NetApp replaced all of that nicely. No more tapes. Seamless replication no only locally but also to a remote location.
