We performed a comparison between Azure NetApp Files and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Zerto, Nasuni and others in Cloud Migration."This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."
"Using NetApp Files got us out of a really difficult situation quickly, effectively, and at a reasonable cost."
"It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent."
"I think the easiest part is, when you do a comparison, it is the throughput versus the cost. And it's much easier to set up."
"The critical features of this solution are SnapMirror for replication, data protection, and SnapLock."
"I like the SnapMirror feature in Azure NetApp Files. It helps me create backups with snapshots and makes data recovery and compression."
"I think the easiest part is, when you do a comparison, it is the throughput versus the cost. And it's much easier to set up."
"One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The main hurdle in promoting this solution is the price. Its price definitely requires an improvement. It is more expensive than other options, so customers go for a cheaper option."
"The main area for improvement is in the support ticket system. Since it's a SaaS platform, support tickets are managed by Microsoft or NetApp backend. This can sometimes lead to cross-functional challenges for organizations."
"I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region."
"Reserved Instances for Azure NetApp Files would improve more use cases, making them more valuable in Azure as the cost would be reduced."
"I have a hunch that storage could be now the most expensive portion of our monthly bill. So I can imagine that, not this year, but next year we will be talking about looking deeper into ways how we can optimize the cost."
"Azure NetApp Files is expensive."
"We would like to have backup functionality built-in so that we don't run into the issue where the replication process makes a copy of the corrupted data."
"The solution needs to improve it's ABS environment."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
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Azure NetApp Files is ranked 3rd in Cloud Migration with 15 reviews while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 8 reviews. Azure NetApp Files is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of Azure NetApp Files writes "We can expand our storage on-the-fly without the need to reprovision". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable solution with an easy initial setup process". Azure NetApp Files is most compared with Microsoft Azure File Storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Nasuni and Wasabi, whereas Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, StarWind Virtual SAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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