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Azure NetApp Files vs Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure NetApp Files
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (6th), Cloud Storage (11th), Public Cloud Storage Services (12th)
Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

AjayKumar13 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud/Data/Database Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees
Fast, reliable, and helps meet our SLAs
The most valuable feature is that the sixty-terabyte database snapshot can be done in less than two to three minutes. It is faster. It is quicker. It is reliable. You don't need to take the snapshot. Snapshots are compressed. It doesn't take storage from the back end. It takes three minutes to do sixty terabytes of the database. You don't have to go to the tape and store it outside, which takes hours and hours. It also uses a lot less of the storage. It's very easy to restore or copy the snapshots to other locations for disaster recovery. There are a lot of benefits. In terms of the snapshot's rapid restore capability, we were testing the load of performance testing, and we needed to rebuild the DR site. If I need to rebuild the DR for a standby database, it takes sixty terabytes to copy onto the another site, which will take at least a day. Now, the snapshot is easy. We just copy the snapshots, and then we do the cross-region application. The snapshots came along with that, and that's where we were able to build the DR site within a few hours rather than days. All together, instead of a four-day process, instead of a day.
ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"This solution is intuitive, easy to learn, and easy to use."
"You can change it non-disruptively. You can increase the size and decrease the size online, which is a huge benefit compared to Azure disks. It just works seamlessly. You don't need to stop the instances."
"This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."
"It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something."
"One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities."
"Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial."
"The performance has improved by about 30 percent, and the solution’s combination of ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"The solution has a blueprint pattern where you can club multiple machines, define middleware components, define dependencies of components, and create an application pattern for a Java stack that can be consumed across all services using the same TOSCA patterns for CloudCenter, vRealize Automation, and ServiceNow."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"However, for the rest of the solution, the product is doing a great job for what we require."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"The tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
 

Cons

"We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up."
"The deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions."
"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."
"Features are being added to this product at a very slow pace, and they should be speeding that up and being a little more aggressive."
"We were looking for a clustered solution that has over-complicated things because we had it in AWS, which is Amazon."
"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."
"We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up."
"It is expensive in small environments, which could be better. The reason is the four terabyte minimum."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end."
"The pricing depends on your scaling and consumption."
"We are currently on a pay-as-you-go model with the storage that we use."
"The solution’s combination of the ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot. It is very fast to deploy. It's very easy to maintain. You don't have to do a lot in the cloud to maintain this thing, so it gives good performance. It's fast to deploy, easy to maintain, and it gives a better performance. These are the most basic three criteria for any application. This saves cost because the manpower you need to deploy is going down. You're getting better performance and not buying new resources. You have resources available in the cloud. It's just a couple of clicks, then you're good to go."
"Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features."
"NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties which customers like us are willing to pay. Could it be cheaper? Yes, but if you combine fully supported, fully managed, easily provisioned, scalable, and quick all in one product, it's a good selling point. You can ask a lot of money for all these. If you have a use case like we do, it's a perfect match. It's like the Porsche of storage solutions in the cloud. It is totally worth the cost."
"It is expensive, especially with NetApp Ultra Storage."
"In the cloud, pricing depends on how you manage it. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's all about optimizing charges and showing the cost back. So, it's more about managing the expenses rather than being inherently expensive or cheap."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...
What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?
The availability is good, meaning downtime or network issues rarely occur. The system also offers flexibility, allowing for increases in data volume, IOPS, and other capabilities without requiring ...
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Also Known As

NetApp ANF, ANF
CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Restaurant Magic
NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, CTERA and others in Cloud Migration. Updated: February 2026.
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