We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Scale and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP 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."We can have multiple systems within the same file system."
"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better."
"The profile share is a valuable feature."
"It is incredibly scalable and stable."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"GPFS monitoring is the best feature."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."
"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."
"They have very good support team who is very helpful. They will help you with every aspect of getting the deployment done."
"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."
"The solution’s unified file and block-storage access across our infrastructure is invaluable. Without it, we can't do what we do."
"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."
"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."
"If you have a larger amount of data than normal in cloud, it is easy to provision and maintain. Waiting for the delivery of the controller, the configuration of enclosures, etc., all this stuff is eliminated compared to using on-premise."
"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."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"This is probably the biggest challenge, getting everything upgraded, because it just takes time. We wish it was a faster solution to be able to do everything at once, but you have do each node individually. The more nodes, the longer it takes."
"Integration with other vendors is not available."
"The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well."
"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."
"Maybe it needs integration with HA."
"It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step."
"There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges."
"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."
"When it comes to a critical or a read-write-intensive application, it doesn't provide the performance that some applications require, especially for SAP. The SAP HANA database has a write-latency of less than 2 milliseconds and the CVO solution does not fit there. It could be used for other databases, where the requirements are not so demanding, especially when it comes to write-latency."
"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."
"I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution."
"I would like to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."
"The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge."
IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked 3rd in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 10 reviews while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews. IBM Spectrum Scale is rated 8.4, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Scale writes "A stable solution with valuable profile-sharing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". IBM Spectrum Scale is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, Portworx Enterprise, DDN IME, VMware vSAN and IBM Cloud Object Storage, whereas NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Google Cloud Storage and Veeam Backup & Replication. See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
See our list of best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors and best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.
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