We performed a comparison between NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and VMware SRM 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."There is unified storage, which provides flexibility. It is set up perfectly for performance and provisioning. We are able to monitor everything using a separate application. It provides error and critical warnings that allow us to take immediate action through ONTAP. We are able to manage everything, log a case, and follow up with the support team, who can fix it. That is how it is unified."
"NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as 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."
"We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too."
"If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily."
"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."
"It's very easy to set up, and within 40 minutes, you can apply storage notes in Azure."
"This solution has helped us because it is easy to use."
"My impression is that the initial setup process is relatively straightforward."
"Automated recovery is one good feature, SRM also offers simplified management. It has a centralized interface for configuring, testing, and executing disaster recovery plans across multiple sites. This means management from a single point, even for many sites."
"Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications."
"It made the DR process a lot faster and easier for recovery after we were familiar with the product operation."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"The most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"I would like to see more aggressive management of the aggregate space. On the Cloud Volumes ONTAP that we use for offsite backup copies, most of the data sits in S3. There are also the EBS volumes on the Cloud Volumes ONTAP itself. Sometimes what happens is that the aggregate size just stays the same. If it allocates 8 terabytes initially, it just stays at 8 terabytes for a long time, even though we're only using 20 percent of that 8 terabytes. NetApp could undersize that more aggressively."
"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP needs to have customizable pricing options such as 10 TB increments. They seem to have only two options: 10 TB or 250 TB."
"I would like to see better integration with Active IQ."
"Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud)."
"There is room for improvement with the capacity. There's a very hard limit to how many disks you can have and how much space you can have. That is something they should work to fix, because it's limiting. Right now, the limit is about 360 terabytes or 36 disks."
"Their support and development teams can collaborate better to resolve an issue."
"We've just been dealing with general pre-requisite infrastructure configuration challenges. Once those are out of the way, it is easy."
"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."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"You cannot use VMware SRM in conjunction with storage replication software."
"This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint."
"If you have a failover case, you need to work on it manually. It would be helpful if this could be automated. It would simplify things."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews while VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 73 reviews. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8, while VMware SRM is rated 8.0. 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 SRM writes "A scalable solution that integrates well with the VMware platform, but its platform agnostics do not support on-cloud usage". NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Google Cloud Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VMware SRM is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Zerto, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery and Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service . See our NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. VMware SRM report.
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