Azure NetApp Files vs Densify comparison

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Azure NetApp Files

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Densify and Azure NetApp Files are competing in the cloud optimization space. Densify is preferred for cost management, while Azure NetApp Files has an edge in Azure integration and performance.

Features: Densify offers real-time resource optimization with insights for cloud efficiency, integrated ITSM/EA applications, and the ability to forecast resources for better planning. Azure NetApp Files provides seamless Azure integration, ultra-fast SQL backup and restore, and SnapMirror for data protection and replication.

Room for Improvement: Densify could enhance multi-cloud support, improve intuitive dashboard interfaces, and refine integration with analytics tools for more real-time insights. Azure NetApp Files might develop more competitive pricing structures, extend flexibility beyond Azure to other platforms, and enhance support for non-Azure environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Densify is known for its user-friendly deployment and robust customer support, aiding in smooth integration with current systems. Azure NetApp Files benefits from strong integration within Azure, making it more straightforward for Azure users but may need improved support for non-Azure-related queries.

Pricing and ROI: Densify offers competitive pricing with potential for strong ROI through cloud optimization savings. Azure NetApp Files is perceived as more expensive but delivers ROI through enhanced performance and Azure integration, beneficial for businesses committed to the Azure platform.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure NetApp Files vs. Densify Report (Updated: June 2025).

Azure NetApp Files vs. Densify

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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

Ranking in Cloud Migration

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Storage (8th), Public Cloud Storage Services (9th)

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Migration

16th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (35th), Virtualization Management Tools (11th), Cloud Analytics (3rd), Cloud Cost Management (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of Azure NetApp Files is 15.5%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 2.3%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Migration

Featured Reviews

AjayKumar13

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.

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Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at Kyndryl

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility."

"We use Azure NetApp Files mainly for backup."

"It is faster. It is quicker. It is reliable."

"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 downtime, which is a strong point. Based on the money spent, we can get performance improvements and high availability."

"This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."

"I like the SnapMirror feature in Azure NetApp Files. It helps me create backups with snapshots and makes data recovery and compression."

"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."

More Azure NetApp Files pros

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."

"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."

"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

More Densify pros

Cons

"We were looking for a clustered solution that has over-complicated things because we had it in AWS, which is Amazon. There was a solution for clustered NetApp. That meant there would be two NetApps that were not clustered because there was no solution for a cluster. We would like there to be an HA cluster solution."

"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 initial setup was not straightforward. We had help from the NetApp team."

"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."

"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."

"The deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions."

"Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution."

"We would like to see more paired regions for the replication."

More Azure NetApp Files cons

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on your scaling and consumption."

"The licensing fees for this solution vary, ranging from a single shelf to a full suite."

"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."

"The performance has improved by about 30 percent."

"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."

"Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features."

"It is expensive in small environments, which could be better. The reason is the four terabyte minimum. A one terabyte minimum would be better."

"The price of Azure NetApp Files could be better."

More Azure NetApp Files pricing and cost advice

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."

"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

25%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 ...

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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 ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?

It is expensive, especially with NetApp Ultra Storage.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Microsoft Azure File Storage vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 36% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 30% of the time

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon FSx vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 7% of the time

Nasuni vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 7% of the time

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Cloudability vs Densify

Compared 36% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Densify

Compared 32% of the time

Intel Granulate vs Densify

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Densify

Compared 14% of the time

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Product Reports

Azure NetApp Files

Download Azure NetApp Files product report

Download Densify product report

Also Known As

NetApp ANF, ANF

No data available

Overview

Azure NetApp Files is designed for unstructured data, virtualized SAP systems, SQL backups, NFS and CIFS protocols, Azure Virtual Desktop storage, and optimizing file share services. It supports high performance and networking integration in Microsoft Azure.

Azure NetApp Files offers features such as SnapMirror for data protection, rapid provisioning, elastic scaling, and ultra-fast SQL backup and restore. It provides a seamless experience with fast snapshotting, high availability, security, and ease of setup. Users benefit from significant performance improvements and the ability to manage substantial workload migrations effortlessly. This service is ideal for environments like Azure Kubernetes Service and cloud EPM platforms, where speed, flexibility, and performance are crucial.

What are the key features?

Flexibility: Adaptable to diverse storage needs.
Rapid response time: Ensures quick data access and operations.
SnapMirror: Provides replication and data protection.
SEC compliance: SnapLock ensures regulatory adherence.
Ultra-fast SQL backup: Quicker backup and restore operations.
Elastic scaling: Easily adjusts resources based on demand.
Fast snapshotting: Enables quick data snapshots.
High availability: Ensures consistent data access.
Security: Robust measures for data protection.

What are the expected benefits and ROI?

Performance: Notable improvement in processing speeds.
Simplicity of setup: Easy deployment and configuration.
Scalable management: Handles significant workload migrations with ease.
Cost efficiency: Allows comparing throughput versus cost effectively.

Azure NetApp Files is implemented in various industries requiring robust file storage solutions, from educational environments where performance boosts are critical to businesses leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service for containerized applications. It supports high-demand environments, optimizing data management and improving efficiency.

NetApp

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Sample Customers

SAP, Restaurant Magic

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

Azure NetApp Files vs. Densify