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Most Helpful Review
Anonymous User
Researched Azure NetApp Files but chose NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP: Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control
The solution enabled us to deliver on our cloud-first strategy. It also provided us some savings and consolidation capabilities from a volume... Read more »
Christian Gruetzner
You can increase performance online without taking the old instance down
It does extremely fast backup and restore processes. For our customers, it has the benefit that we don't influence their running of SAP systems... Read more »
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Quotes From Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros
"The FlexClones make all the management easier for us.""NetApp's XCP Migration Tool... was pretty awesome. It replicated the data faster than any other tool that I've seen. That was a big help.""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.""Another feature which gets a lot of attention in our environment is the File Services Solutions in the cloud, because it's a completely, fully-managed service. We don't have to take care of any updates, upgrades, or configurations.""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.""We use the mirroring to mirror our volumes to our DR location. We also create snapshots for backups. Snapshots will create a specified snapshot to be able to do a DR test without disrupting our standard mirrors. That means we can create a point-in-time snapshot, then use the ability of FlexClones to make a writeable volume to test with, and then blow it away after the DR test.""We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us.""The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are good. Snapshot copies are pretty much the write-in time data backups. Obviously, critical data is snapshotted a lot more frequently, and even clients and end users find it easier to restore whatever they need if it's file-based, statical, etc."

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"It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent.""The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility.""The critical features of this solution are SnapMirror for replication, data protection, and SnapLock.""Using NetApp Files got us out of a really difficult situation quickly, effectively, and at a reasonable cost.""For us, with Azure NetApp Files the ease of use has been big. We have an operations organization where ease of use is key, especially when we're starting to go offshore with that [responsibility] as well.""It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something.""You can change it non-disruptively. You can increase the size and decrease the size online, which is a huge benefit compared to Azure disks. It just works seamlessly. You don't need to stop the instances."

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"Implementations with other products are easy.""The interface is very good.""General user familiarity with Office 365 products make adopting this solution easy to adopt in production.""Integration with the entire Azure platform.""The initial setup is fairly easy."

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Cons
"The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that...""Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair.""One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have.""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.""The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data... I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud.""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.""We have used technical support. As long as they don't call me at four o'clock in the morning to tell me that a drive failed and they are sending me another one, I like it. They have a tendency to do that.""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."

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"We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up.""This solution would be improved with more innovation.""We would like to have backup functionality built-in so that we don't run into the issue where the replication process makes a copy of the corrupted data.""I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region.""The speed of Azure NetApp Files, from what we PoC'ed, has been tolerable. We've had some challenges with it so far, being in a PoC, but after we [overcame] those challenges, it became tolerable.""I have a hunch that storage could be now the most expensive portion of our monthly bill. So I can imagine that, not this year, but next year we will be talking about looking deeper into ways how we can optimize the cost.""Reserved Instances for Azure NetApp Files would improve more use cases, making them more valuable in Azure as the cost would be reduced."

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"Sometimes it takes very long to refresh the information.""The pricing could be improved. They need to make the costs more transparent so users know what they will be charged and why ahead of time.""The initial setup is complex. Unless you have done it a few times it, it is going to be hard.""Lacks integration with other platforms.""Microsoft Azure File Storage is not that scalable. Once you reach the boundaries, you need to migrate to another solution."

More Microsoft Azure File Storage Cons »

Pricing and Cost Advice
"They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage...""The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company.""In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer.""Cloud is cloud. It's still expensive. Any good solution comes with a price tag. That's where we are looking to see how well we can manage our data in the cloud by trying to optimize the costs.""I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs.""Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost.""Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two.""For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Pricing and Cost Advice »

"The solution’s combination of the ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot. It is very fast to deploy. It's very easy to maintain. You don't have to do a lot in the cloud to maintain this thing, so it gives good performance. It's fast to deploy, easy to maintain, and it gives a better performance. These are the most basic three criteria for any application. This saves cost because the manpower you need to deploy is going down. You're getting better performance and not buying new resources. You have resources available in the cloud. It's just a couple of clicks, then you're good to go.""The performance has improved by about 30 percent.""The licensing fees for this solution vary, ranging from a single shelf to a full suite.""Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features.""NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties which customers like us are willing to pay. Could it be cheaper? Yes, but if you combine fully supported, fully managed, easily provisioned, scalable, and quick all in one product, it's a good selling point. You can ask a lot of money for all these. If you have a use case like we do, it's a perfect match. It's like the Porsche of storage solutions in the cloud. It is totally worth the cost.""It is expensive in small environments, which could be better. The reason is the four terabyte minimum. A one terabyte minimum would be better."

More Azure NetApp Files Pricing and Cost Advice »

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Questions from the Community
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What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?
Top Answer: It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand… more »
Read all 6 answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?
Top Answer: NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties… more »
Read all 3 answers
What needs improvement with Azure NetApp Files?
Top Answer: I have a hunch that storage could be now the most expensive portion of our monthly bill. So I can imagine that, not this… more »
Read all 6 answers
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure File Storage?
Top Answer: General user familiarity with Office 365 products make adopting this solution easy to adopt in production.
Read all 3 answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure File Storage?
Top Answer: The pricing is a little bit hard to determine. I never know how much it's going to cost me in advance, only after the… more »
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure File Storage?
Top Answer: I think the place where the product really needs the most attention is in the Intune and the MDM products. They are… more »
Read all 3 answers
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Also Known As
ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVONetApp ANF, ANF
Learn
NetApp
NetApp
Microsoft
Overview

The leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services and supports up to a capacity of 368TB. Software service supports various use cases, such as: File shares and block-level storage serving NAS (NFS, SMB / CIFS) and SAN (iSCSI) Disaster Recovery, Backup, and Archive DevOps Databases (SQL, Oracle, NoSQL) Cloud Volumes ONTAP is offered in a standard single-node configuration or in a High Availability (HA) configuration.

Extreme File Performance
Azure NetApp Files allows you to target any of your business-critical file workloads with extreme file throughput with sub-millisecond response times.With three service levels you can change on-the-fly, you get the performance that’s best suited to the application.

Simple, Seamless Experience
A seamless Azure experience for your file services workloads. You can deploy and manage Azure NetApp Files directory from the Azure Portal or automate using the Azure API or CLI integration.

Secure Your Data
Built-in capabilities ensure your data is protected at all times in Azure: from always-on encryption to point-in-time data copies (without added capacity costs). And with Microsoft‘s world class support, you can rest assured that you‘re in good hands with Azure.

Fully managed file shares that use the standard SMB 3.0 protocol

Key scenarios:

  • Share data across on-premises and cloud servers
  • Migrate file share-based applications to the cloud with no code changes
  • Integrate modern applications with File storage
  • Simplify hosting for high availability workload data
Offer
Take Control with Unified Cloud Storage
Start Free Trial

Sign up for a 30-day trial to see how Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help you optimize cloud storage costs and performance, while enhancing data enterprise-grade protection, security, and compliance - wherever your data lives.

Run your most demanding Linux and Windows file workloads in Azure
Find out more

Running performance-intensive and latency-sensitive file workloads in the cloud can be hard. Use Azure NetApp Files to migrate and run complex, file-based applications and simplify storage management.

Learn more about Microsoft Azure File Storage
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Sample Customers
Rohit, AdvacnedMD, D2L, Trinity Mirror, Eidos Media, WireStorm, Cordant Group, JFK Medical Center, ALD Automotive, Healthix, City of Baton Rouge, ON SemiconductorSAP, Restaurant MagicTalon, Camden
Top Industries
REVIEWERS
Healthcare Company26%
Comms Service Provider10%
Energy/Utilities Company10%
Computer Software Company10%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Computer Software Company30%
Comms Service Provider20%
Manufacturing Company10%
Media Company6%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Computer Software Company33%
Comms Service Provider17%
Manufacturing Company16%
Media Company6%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Computer Software Company41%
Comms Service Provider15%
Media Company6%
Manufacturing Company6%
Company Size
REVIEWERS
Small Business7%
Midsize Enterprise13%
Large Enterprise80%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business8%
Midsize Enterprise15%
Large Enterprise77%
REVIEWERS
Small Business22%
Midsize Enterprise22%
Large Enterprise56%
No Data Available
Free Report: Azure NetApp Files vs. Microsoft Azure File Storage
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure NetApp Files vs. Microsoft Azure File Storage and other solutions. Updated: January 2021.
Download now
457,459 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Azure NetApp Files is ranked 3rd in Public Cloud Storage Services with 7 reviews while Microsoft Azure File Storage is ranked 2nd in Public Cloud Storage Services with 5 reviews. Azure NetApp Files is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Azure File Storage is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Azure NetApp Files writes "We can expand our storage on-the-fly without the need to reprovision". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure File Storage writes "A cloud file storage solution that plays well with familiar products but is difficult to configure and build-out". Azure NetApp Files is most compared with Dropbox, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure Block Storage, whereas Microsoft Azure File Storage is most compared with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Oracle Database Backup Service, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier and Google Cloud Storage. See our Azure NetApp Files vs. Microsoft Azure File Storage report.

See our list of best Public Cloud Storage Services vendors.

We monitor all Public Cloud Storage Services reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.