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."The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"It gives a solution for storage one place to go across everything. So, the customer is very familiar with NetApp on-prem. It allows them to gain access to the file piece. It helps them with the training aspect of it, so they don't have to relearn something new. They already know this product. They just have to learn some widgets or what it's like in the cloud to operate and deploy it in different ways."
"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."
"The feature which I like the most is that it has the capabilities that the traditional storage system offers. It provides all the functionality. The deduplication and compression work exactly like ONTAP's traditional storage. So people who have experience with that find it very easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it."
"Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise."
"CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes."
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"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."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"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."
"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."
"We would like to have support for high availability in multi-regions."
"The encryption and deduplication features still have a lot of room for improvement."
"The cost needs improvement."
"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."
"I would like some more performance matrices to know what it is doing. It has some matrices inherent to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. But inside Cloud Manager, it would also be nice to see. You can have a little Snapshot, then drill down if you go a little deeper."
"I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI."
"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."
"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."
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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 NetApp OnCommand. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
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