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."I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships."
"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 most valuable features of this solution are SnapShot, FlexClone, and deduplication."
"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."
"So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the license consumption and also the consumption of the underlying cloud storage."
"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."
"The ability to do a straight SnapMirror from our on-prem to the cloud with no other data transitions is excellent."
"The ability to see things going back and forth has been quite useful."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"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 most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud)."
"Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now."
"There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges."
"The solution could be better when we're connecting to our S3 side of the house. Right now, it doesn't see it, and I'm not sure why."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see something from NetApp about backups. I know that NetApp offers some backup for Office 365, but I would like to see something from NetApp for more backup solutions."
"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."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Google Cloud Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex. See our NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. VMware vSAN report.
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