Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

"Storage virtualization and geographic resilience for Metro Sans, plus a great performance improvement."

"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."

"Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract."

"The solution works well. It's very reliable."

"The best feature of VPLEX storage is its ability to consolidate storage. It also provides the highest RPO and RTOs for replication technology. VPLEX enables application mobility."

"Its mirroring capabilities allow for data to be mirrored across two different data centers, so if one center were to crash or fail, the other center could take over and keep everything running smoothly."

"Mobility enables us to carry out an internal migration of data."

"The most valuable feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots."

"The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises."

"The tool's most valuable features are the SnapLock and SnapMirror features. If something goes wrong with the data, we can restore it. This isn't a mirror; we store data in different locations. If there's an issue on the primary site, we can retrieve data from the secondary site."

"The most valuable features are tiering to S3 and being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule."

"Replication to the cloud is the most valuable feature. Deduplication and compression are also very important to us. We are in the process of adopting to the cloud. We are going to AWS and we are trying to do a safety technician call out with integration to the cloud. NetApp allows us to move some of the volume to the cloud, at the same time that we continue providing the cloud services that we have on premises."

"The ability to see things going back and forth has been quite useful."

"The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens."

"ONTAP is great for helping you migrate on-premise workflows to cloud environments."

"The solution’s unified file and block-storage access across our infrastructure is invaluable. Without it, we can't do what we do."

"There can be delays in getting performance reports."

"I would like to have site-to-site replication capability for applications."

"The initial setup is complex."

"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."

"Today, it needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."

"VPLEX's engine-based architecture is complex, so the implementation is challenging and takes more time. It's also difficult to fix hardware issues. When an appliance fails, it takes Dell EMC a long time to fix it because spare parts are in short supply."

"The price is a problem with EMC due to the fact that it's more expensive than the other vendors."

"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."

"NetApp's support could improve"

"Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database."

"Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now."

"I would like to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."

"The solution could be better when we're connecting to our S3 side of the house. Right now, it doesn't see it, and I'm not sure why."

"When it comes to a critical or a read-write-intensive application, it doesn't provide the performance that some applications require, especially for SAP. The SAP HANA database has a write-latency of less than 2 milliseconds and the CVO solution does not fit there. It could be used for other databases, where the requirements are not so demanding, especially when it comes to write-latency."

"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."

"The product is more restricted with underlying cloud."

"VPLEX is a little bit expensive in my personal opinion."

"We struck a great deal with Dell EMC, so for us, VPLEX was not very expensive."

"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."

"It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees."

"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."

"We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to."

"For enterprise customers, it's a very cost effective. But in the SMB segment, yeah, pricing is a little bit challenge for your time."

"Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it."

"For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."

"Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost."