We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct 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."It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"Its functionality and technical support are adequate to help prevent failure due to errors."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is its exceptional performance and storage efficiency."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of file 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."
"Unified Manager, System Manager, and Cloud Manager are all GUI-based. It's easy for somebody who has not been exposed to this for years to pick it up and work with it."
"ONTAP is great for helping you migrate on-premise workflows to cloud environments."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"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."
"I would like to see better integration with Active IQ."
"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."
"The navigation on some of the configuration parameters is a bit cumbersome, making the learning curve on functions somewhat steep."
"Multipathing for iSCSI LUNs is difficult to deal with from the client-side and I'd love to see a single entry point that can be moved around within the cluster to simplify the client configuration."
"Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud)."
"If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful."
"The data tiering needs improvement. E.g., moving hard data to faster disks."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 7 reviews while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.6, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable solution with an easy initial setup process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, StarWind Virtual SAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Google Cloud Storage and Nasuni. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
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