Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"We use the mirroring to mirror our volumes to our DR location. We also create snapshots for backups. Snapshots will create a specified snapshot to be able to do a DR test without disrupting our standard mirrors. That means we can create a point-in-time snapshot, then use the ability of FlexClones to make a writeable volume to test with, and then blow it away after the DR test."

"The ability to do a straight SnapMirror from our on-prem to the cloud with no other data transitions is excellent."

"It gives a solution for storage one place to go across everything. So, the customer is very familiar with NetApp on-prem. It allows them to gain access to the file piece. It helps them with the training aspect of it, so they don't have to relearn something new. They already know this product. They just have to learn some widgets or what it's like in the cloud to operate and deploy it in different ways."

"The most valuable features are that it's reliable, simple, and performs well."

"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."

"Lastly, the API and web services are fairly good. That is an important feature too. We write some code to do different things. We have code that runs to make sure that everything is being backed up as we say it is and we try to also detect places where we may have missed a backup."

"ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms."

"NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well."

"VPLEX hardware migration to spare equipment in case of major disruption."

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

"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 initial setup is complex."

"There can be delays in getting performance reports."

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

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

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

"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP needs to have customizable pricing options such as 10 TB increments. They seem to have only two options: 10 TB or 250 TB."

"I would like to have more management tools. They are difficult to work with, so I would like them to be a bit more user-friendly."

"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."

"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP does have a bit of initial complexity for users who are new to the system."

"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."

"The encryption and deduplication features still have a lot of room for improvement."

"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."

"If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful."

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

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

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase."

"If we wanted to use the AWS solution, we would have to manage two or three different platforms and pay more money than what we should have to pay, as some of the features don't even exist. If we wanted to, we could use AWS cloning, but it is useless because it uses more space, is more expensive, and takes more time."

"They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product."

"I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs."

"The cost is quite high."

"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."

"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."

"They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy."