We performed a comparison between IBM SoftLayer and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Public Cloud Storage Services."The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The most valuable features of this solution are SnapShot, FlexClone, and deduplication."
"For us, the value comes from the solution's flexibility, speed, and hopefully cost savings in the long term."
"We're able to use the SnapMirror function and SnapMirror data from our on-prem environment into Azure. That is super-helpful. SnapMirror allows you to take data that exists on one NetApp, on a physical NetApp storage platform, and copy it over to another NetApp storage platform. It's a solid, proven technology, so we don't worry about whether data is getting lost or corrupted during the SnapMirror."
"It makes sure we have control of the data and that we know what it's being used for. The main thing for us is that we need to know what applications are consuming it and responsible for it. The solution helps us do that."
"The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens."
"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."
"ONTAP has been very stable for us, specifically in the cloud environment. It allows us to have high availability as well as standalone systems if that's what we want within our specific workloads. Also, on-premise has been a very stable environment. We have very few outages and when we do, we work with support to get systems back online in a timely manner."
"The ease of use in terms of how the product works is valuable. We are able to work with it and deploy the storage that we need."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The product is more restricted with underlying cloud."
"They definitely need to stay more on top of security vulnerabilities. Our security team is constantly finding Java vulnerabilities and SQL vulnerabilities. Our security team always wants the latest security update, and it takes a while for NetApp to stay up to speed with that. That would be my biggest complaint."
"One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have."
"Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud)."
"The support is good in general but the initial, front-line support could be improved. Because I have already been using the product for so long, when I call support I would rather talk to somebody who is a little bit more advanced or senior, rather than talking to the first-level support. Usually, it takes some time to reach out to their senior support."
"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."
"When it comes to support provided by NetApp, they have room for improvement. Every time we go through their support, we end up answering the same routine questions."
"I'm very happy with the solution, the only thing that needs improvement is the web services API. It could be a little bit more straightforward. That's my only issue with it. It can get pretty complex."
Earn 20 points
IBM SoftLayer is ranked 22nd in Public Cloud Storage Services while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 6th in Public Cloud Storage Services with 60 reviews. IBM SoftLayer is rated 8.6, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM SoftLayer writes "Stable with excellent speed and agility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". IBM SoftLayer is most compared with Amazon AWS, 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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