We performed a comparison between NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Software Defined Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The most valuable features are that it's reliable, simple, and performs well."
"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."
"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."
"Its scalability is very good."
"The main benefit we get from this product is the ability to deploy it anywhere we want, whether that's on-prem, a remote physical location, or in the cloud. It doesn't matter from an operational perspective where it is. The command line and operating system are the same."
"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."
"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."
"The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."
"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."
"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."
"Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive."
"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."
"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."
"It can be very expensive."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 13 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 87 reviews. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Portworx Enterprise and Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. VMware vSAN report.
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