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IBM SoftLayer vs NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 2024

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

IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
22nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp Cloud Volumes Servic...
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
19th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (18th), Cloud Storage (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.
CC
Enables us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time
NetApp delivers High Availability. It's critical to our work. That was the main driver for using NetApp. We have a highly resilient service and if you have a highly resilient service, you are only as resilient as the least resilient part of your infrastructure. That's what we were having trouble with our file system before. It was becoming troublesome, so we needed to find something that was much more highly resilient so that's why we moved to NetApp. The complexity of moving large numbers of files to the cloud depends on what you're trying to do. But for us, it was really simple. I imagine for large enterprise customers it is probably pretty tricky. They're probably on all different technologies inside a large corporation and they may or may not have very large pipes going to them. So if you're in a data center to the cloud then it's going to be easy, but if you have hundreds of branches like if you're a bank and have lots of branch banks, they might have very small pipes out to the internet. It might take forever. In our use case everything's brand new files, so it was pretty trivial. We didn't migrate to the cloud, we were already on the cloud, so it was a nonissue for us. NetApp enables us to share data across VMs. It actually reduced the amount of data storage we need. We were having to have storage attached to each VM. And now we can aggregate that storage across multiple VMs, so that actually gave us a net reduction, which was a good thing. We switched from using block storage to file storage to share data between our VMs. It made it easier, frankly but I worry about the scalability in the future. For the moment it made life easier. We were using block and then we moved back to file with NetApp.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"High availability is very important to us because we have a production environment. High availability is the highest priority for us to continue keeping our systems running."
"Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better."
"In terms of its storage snapshot efficiencies, the service is highly efficient. We are only doing things in small batches right now because we have not converted all of the data, but we have tested them in the Google Cloud and they work efficiently."
 

Cons

"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"I would like for the sales team to get in contact more often and let me know what I should be doing next, what we should be doing about new features. So it would be nice if I heard a little bit more from him. From a technology perspective, I have no complaints."
"It would help if they increased the area in which they employ artificial intelligence, by starting to do assessments on the environments, to project those. They're not using any AI tools, currently, on the administrative side."
"The user interface has room for improvement. We would like this service to be more integrated with Azure, which is very easy to manage and use. It was easy to create volumes and add capacity pools in Azure, but in Google Cloud, we can only create separate volumes. We need more management or configuration options in the user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We don't need so much space, and there is no option to pay as we go or use just what we need. Also, the only way to increase performance is by increasing the level of the service."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Public Cloud Storage Services solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
30%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Also Known As

CloudLayer
CVS for Google Cloud, NetApp CVS for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for GCP, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for GCP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
Atos, Bandwidth, Wuxi NextCode
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SoftLayer vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.