The primary use case of NetApp in our company is providing NAS services. This includes both CIFS and NFS.

I have been working with ONTAP for five years. So, I started with NetApp ONTAP 7-Mode, and now, I'm working on NetApp ONTAP C-mode. My familiarity and skill with this product is quite good.

Autodesk has been using this product for more than five years.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Data ONTAP is it's very user-friendly, It gives the administrator or engineer a lot of scope to look into the locks. It has a fair amount of visibility into what is happening. We do not have to depend on the support all the time.

If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily.

What needs improvement?

NetApp could certainly improve on the support side. They do not need to improve so much on the product side for now, because we have procured a high end system.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is quite good. However, when it comes to bugs, this is where we are taking a hit. We have ended up in situation where new releases of the ONTAP create an issue in our current infrastructure. We either need to go back or find a solution to fix the bug created by the bug. This is the issue that we face now.

We are not putting a lot of stress on our environment, about a five out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of NetApp is good. In NetApp, we have close to three petabytes of data.

We cannot compare the scalability of the on-premise solution with the cloud solution because cloud works in a different way from the on-premise version.

When it comes to the logical partitions, the scalability is fine. Though, after a set time limit, you need to procure physical boxes to increase your storage capacity.

How is customer service and technical support?

I would rate the technical support as a five out of ten.

When it comes to support provided by NetApp, they have room for improvement. Every time we go through their support, we end up answering the same routine questions. We don't reach out to support without doing our initial troubleshooting. After, our initial troubleshooting, we find something, then we reach out for support. Once we reach out to support, support takes us back to the same basic level of troubleshooting, which takes away some time in urgent cases. This is where NetApp support should create an improvement plan.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not consider anyone else for NAS.

What other advice do I have?

NetApp is a user-friendly solution. I would recommend it to colleagues, because of its user-friendliness for implementation and running your operations.

I use the on-premise version of this product.