We performed a comparison between IBM SAN Volume Control and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Dell Technologies, NetApp and others in Storage Management."The solution is easy to use, easily configurable, and easy to upgrade, manipulate, and add new storage."
"The product has an ultra-low latency."
"The virtualization layer has been great."
"The most valuable features of IBM SAN Volume Control are the copy services, performance metrics, and analysis. Additionally, they have upgraded and introduced visual volumes."
"With SVC it is very easy to manage and to use for migration, meaning that when we want to move or to keep control of the volume or update a server database, it is very easy. That's why we use it."
"Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise."
"The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after."
"CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes."
"This solution has made everything easier to do."
"The ability to see things going back and forth has been quite useful."
"It is much easier to control data since we can run queries across all our platforms with just one solution. Not only that, we can also monitor all the platforms with Active IQ, where we can see all the alerts, messages, and space consumption through a single application. This is regardless if the data is on-prem or AWS. It is much more efficient."
"The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high."
"I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships."
"I would like to see the usage of virtualized storage boxes improved. I'd like to see this feature fixed, especially for SVC controller, and to be able to hold more storage."
"Patch management and upgrades must be made easier."
"IBM SAN Volume Control could improve by better integrations with other vendor systems. IBM SAN Volume Control can store the environment and are able to integrate with Veeam, but I don't know if they can integrate as well with SVC or other vendors' systems."
"IBM support can be very slow."
"They just need to put in the snap volume because now they use what is called a flash copy. This means that you have to take all the volume instead of NetApp which uses their snapshot."
"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."
"In the next release, I would like to see more options on the dashboard."
"We are getting a warning alert about not being able to connect to Cloud Manager when we log into it. The support has provided links, but this particular issue is not fixed yet."
"The solution is not stable when using single nodes. This is a problem. NetApp should work on this solution to make it more stable with HA nodes and resolve this issue."
"How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically."
"I would like some more performance matrices to know what it is doing. It has some matrices inherent to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. But inside Cloud Manager, it would also be nice to see. You can have a little Snapshot, then drill down if you go a little deeper."
"Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive."
"I would like this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well, because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider."
IBM SAN Volume Control is ranked 6th in Storage Management with 5 reviews while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews. IBM SAN Volume Control is rated 9.2, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM SAN Volume Control writes "Easily configurable, and easy to upgrade, manipulate, and add new storage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". IBM SAN Volume Control is most compared with Dell VPLEX, Dell Storage Resource Manager and Huawei OceanStor DJ, whereas NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Google Cloud Storage and Portworx Enterprise.
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