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NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

Score9.9 out of 10

54 Reviews and Ratings

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What is NetApp FAS Storage Arrays?

NetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about NetApp FAS Storage Arrays.
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NetApp FAS Systems Are Top Notch Appliances That Just Work

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Two primary uses: we have a NetApp FAS Storage Arrays system serving as our primary DR target system, and we have a few smaller ones in remote offices serving data to small offices. We also use one as a test system.

Pros

  • Easy to use GUI interface
  • Easy to use command line interface
  • Core functionality (serving data) "just works"
  • Great performance for what we need

Cons

  • GUI needs to add additional functionality
  • Would be helpful to have more flexible size options for purchase (i.e. purchase less storage if needed)

Return on Investment

  • Over time, the amount of rack space and datacenter power required to run our storage environment has gone from 4 full racks to less than 1/2 of one rack. Space/power savings is amazing!
  • Over time, continual improvements in the operating system has drastically improved performance release after release. No one ever says anything about performance for nearly 10 years!
  • The amount of space used for the same amount of content continues to drop as deduplication and compression capabilities continue to improve.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Pure Storage FlashArray

Other Software Used

NetApp AFF A-Series, Veeam Data Platform, NetApp Active IQ

Excellent Storage solution

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was used for backing up our enterprise database and applications backups . All non prod , prod databases were backed on daily basis to these systems , they were mounted on database servers for the same

Pros

  • Fast
  • Reliable
  • Very good IO
  • Less latency

Cons

  • Complicated restore process

Return on Investment

  • Very lucrative option in the market

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Veritas NetBackup

Other Software Used

MariaDB Platform, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX

Great Performance and Reliability While Being Stable and Convenient To Manage

Incentivized
Adam ParadisView profile
Virtualization Administrator in Information Technology at University of Maine System (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The FAS8300 is snappy and very powerful. This NetApp FAS8300 implementation supports NFS-connected storage for over 25 VMware hosts which house over 900 VMs along with direct-Linux connections for hundreds of guest operating systems. Connected disk tiers range from an SSD flash pool to achieve faster access and to 900 GB to 8 TB in size.

Pros

  • Administration through web GUI and CLI.
  • Reliability.
  • Performance.

Cons

  • Web GUI. It is fairly fast and concise, however, it is missing many fundamental settings that can only be done via CLI.
  • Updates; while these have progressively become easier this functionality is still lacking on the GUI side.
  • Performance reporting is decent but doesn't provide detailed data. High-level graphs help, but are not very concise when troubleshooting.

Most Important Features

  • Reliability.
  • Performance.
  • Security.

Return on Investment

  • Performance has never been subpar even with over 1000 NFS connections.
  • Reliability.
  • Expensive. Like a lot of enterprise-grade storage platforms, it's fairly expensive.

Other Software Used

vSphere, Veeam Backup & Replication, Cisco UCS Manager

Did not live up to expectations

Incentivized
Chris SaenzView profile
Lead System Engineer in Information Technology at Azusa Pacific University (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Clustered storage
  • Multiple connectivity options (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, CIFS/SMB, etc.)
  • Options for mapping volumes to different connectivity types

Cons

  • Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
  • Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
  • Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"

Most Important Features

  • Deduplication
  • High-performing storage
  • Backup functions

Return on Investment

  • Large storage capacity served general data requests well
  • Managing the product long term incurs a large administrative overhead
  • NetApp FAS series did not provide high-performance storage as well as other providers

Alternatives Considered

HPE EVA P6000 (Discontinued), HPE MSA and Pure Storage FlashArray

Other Software Used

Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, VMware Cloud on AWS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

NetApp FAS series acting as a CIFS business server

Incentivized
Albert BuendíaView profile
IT System Engineer in Information Technology at Uriach (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Volume snapshots
  • CIFS server
  • Snapmirror between both NetApp storage instances
  • Hardware snapshots with backup software

Cons

  • Software Management
  • Bundle software is hard to implement and use
  • Tecnical support is lacking, at least here in Spain

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact for bridging information security gaps.
  • Overall business satisfaction improvements.

Alternatives Considered

Pure Storage FlashArray

Other Software Used

Arcserve Backup, VMware ESXi, Veeam Availability Suite