We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"There are many benefits to this solution. Storage virtualization and the ability to migrate massive amounts of data to other systems without impacting your client are the most valuable. It is non-disruptive for my users. We migrated 350 terabytes of data in one night to a new machine without a small system going down and a single user complaining about the performance. You have to fine-tune a lot of storage machines constantly for performance and for making sure that they are optimal, but IBM Spectrum Virtualize does this by itself. It does the adjustment on its own, and it does it right. That's what makes it different. I had a huge VSP from Hitachi, which is also a type of virtualization-based engine but with a decent size. It was a continuous performance-tuning exercise. I never had that issue with IBM Spectrum Virtualize."
"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."
"Its scalability is very good."
"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."
"The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high."
"One of the features our customers like is that it can be used from one cloud provider to another. They can use it from Azure to AWS or vice versa. That way, they don't need to use the same provider for backups. If something goes wrong on the primary site, having the same data in another cloud service provider is important."
"In terms of administration, the portal which provides the dashboard view is an excellent tool for operations. It gives you volume divisions, usage rates, which division is using how much data, and more. The operations portal is fantastic for the support team."
"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."
"With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically."
"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 only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."
"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."
"The solution is not stable when using single nodes. This is a problem. NetApp should work on this solution to make it more stable with HA nodes and resolve this issue."
"If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful."
"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."
"The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases."
"We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side... But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers."
"When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."
"The encryption and deduplication features still have a lot of room for improvement."
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IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 8th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 3 reviews while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 13 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.6, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Enables us to build an infrastructure and replace storage with no disruption to our hosts whatsoever". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VMware vSAN, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Portworx Enterprise and VMware vSAN. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
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