NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Other Solutions Considered

JV
Infrastructure Consultant - Storage, Global Infrastructure Services at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

We looked at Azure Files and just regular file servers in Azure. We also looked at a couple of other not well-known vendors who are in the cloud, like SoftNAS. Basically, when we were exploring options in the cloud over two years ago. Now, when we started kind of the journey of trying to see what was available in the cloud over two years ago, nobody had the capabilities of NetApp. To date, I don't find that there is real competition for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP at the scale that they're doing it at. 

While I have been aware of Cloud Volumes ONTAP for probably over three years, it wasn't at the scale or refinement that we needed then. That's partly why we didn't go with that solution earlier. However, it met our requirements by the time we got on it.

The solution provides more granularity and feature-rich options than if we used management options provided by the native cloud service, like Azure.

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AE
Lead Storage Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees

We evaluated AWS and Azure file transfers for replicating data between on-prem and cloud. We also tried AWS and Azure native volumes for cloud and those solutions were much better. 

The reasons that we went with NetApp:

  1. The data fabric technology created a single standard for everything.
  2. Cost.
  3. Our familiarity with it. We didn't have to learn anything new.

If we wanted to use the AWS solution, we would have to manage two or three different platforms and pay more money than what we should have to pay, as some of the features don't even exist. If we wanted to, we could use AWS cloning, but it is useless because it uses more space, is more expensive, and takes more time.

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JH
Lead Storage Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I always try new products. I've used the SoftNAS product, and a couple of other generic NAS products. They don't even compare. They're not on the same page. They're not even in the same universe. I might be a little biased but they're not even close. 

I have looked at Azure NetApp Files, which is another product that NetApp is putting out. Instead of Cloud Volumes it's cloud files. You don't have to deploy an entire NetApp infrastructure. It gives you the ability to do CIFS at file level without having to manage any of the overhead. That's pre-managed for you.

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Buyer's Guide
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Timothy Benson - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff System Administrator at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We did not evaluate any other solution. 

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SG
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Very few of the cloud service solution providers have that tiering option. Tiering results in a lot of savings.

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PR
Storage Architect at NIH

We use Caringo. It's object storage migration for age old data. It is a cheap solution for us, so that's why we use that. When we compared prices, Caringo was much cheaper.

Once we migrated everything to Caringo, there were challenges because it's another vendor, and then you're working with two different vendors. We started having issues, so now we use StorageGRID.

We chose NetApp because we already had the infrastructure. Adding additional resources and features into the mix is much easier because it's one vendor, and they understand the product. If we needed to add something and improve on the solution, it's much easier.

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BB
Systems Administration at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

We did evaluate other products, but that was a long time ago.

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BF
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

They use some native things that are inherent to the AWS. They have looked at those things. 

NetApp has been one of the first ones that they looked at, and it is the one that they are very happy with today.

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AB
Storage Admin at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

For the DR we are using NetApp but for the production, a lot of the cloud architects in our company want to go native to Azure or native to AWS. Since we are a NetApp Cloud shop for a while and even our RND on-prem is mostly just all on NetApps. We want to keep that going, going into the cloud because it's a lot simpler to manage our infrastructure, our storage and take advantage of all the efficiencies that NetApp provides. Whereas if you don't use that, all of those savings, and if you have a lot of data as we do, petabytes of data, and Microsoft and AWS, take advantage of all those efficiencies and we don't because we don't have that capability. With the NetApp integration, we can take advantage of all those efficiencies and other performance.

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NM
Sr. Systems Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees

We did not evaluate other solutions because we use on-premise NetApp. NetApp works best with NetApp.

We did look at other solutions just to see how they were working, but back then, when we were implementing it, they were nowhere even close to as mature as NetApp. We looked at the Dell EMC Isilon but it was not even close to what NetApp was capable of in the cloud. They were not even close to building something in AWS at that point. It was an easy decision.

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PV
Vice President at DWS Group

We did consider several options. 

In GCP, we also considered NetApp's Cloud Volumes services as well, but it did not have good performance. 

Another solution that we tried was Qumulo, which was a good solution, but not that good. From a scaling out perspective, it can scale out a file system, whereas NetApp is not like that. NetApp still works with a single VM. That is the difference.  

We also evaluated the native GCP file offering. However, it did not give us the performance for the application that we wanted.

We do use the cloud performance monitoring, but not with a NetApp product. We use Stackdriver. NetApp provides a separate thing for the monitoring of NetApp CVO, which is NetApp Cloud Manager.

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GL
Consultant at I.T. Blueprint Solutions Consulting Inc.

When it comes to choosing the right solution for our clients, they trust our judgment in recommending something that they know is going to work for them. 

Most of our clients are looking for availability in disaster recovery data and centralizing it into one cloud location. In some cases, a customer doesn't want to go with multiple clients, they want to have it all in one place. They are also looking for simplification in management of the entire solution, provisioning, managing copywriting from a similar interface and a company that can be responsible for the support.

Our customers evaluate other vendors as well. They have looked at AWS, several from Veeam, and partners from ASR for different replication software.

Customers decide to go with NetApp because of our recommendations.

I have experience with other application services including Commvault, Veeam, and ASR.

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NG
Storage Engineer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We looked at third-party hosting with either our own, dedicated hardware or shared NetApp hardware. I wasn't that involved in that evaluation process, but I figure that the costs for the work-around were too high or the solution was too complex for us to go with.

CVO enables us to manage our native cloud storage better than if we used management options provided by the native cloud service. With the native solutions, you don't get any of the advantages of the NetApp in terms of being able to deduplicate and having clear management of the snapshot-ing. Also, at the time, there wasn't an easy way to back up to a cloud NetApp. There was nothing. Now they have a slightly different solution where they'll mount it for you but, at that time, you created your own cloud instance and your own cloud file and you managed that. Now, you can access a solution that is managed by AWS or by NetApp.

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Sakthivel.Subbarayan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I have used IBM and Hitachi.

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PK
Sr Systems Engineer at Ucare

I have tried Pure Storage and EMC RecoverPoint, but ONTAP is easier to use.

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CG
Service Architecture at All for One Group AG

We have a single-vendor strategy.

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JK
Principal Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We also use Avere Gateways. That's pretty much it.

I was the one who evaluated and approved the use of ONTAP Cloud.

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SG
Principal Enterprise Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We looked at Azure Files and the Amazon EFS file system.

The pros for NetApp were definitely the stability, performance, and availability, out-of-the-box. Even Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be set up in HA. With Azure as well as AWS, you have to have your own custom solutions on top of them. Another advantage with NetApp is the admin portal which has a very good dashboard. Because it gives a good view of usage in real time, decisions become easier for the business.

The only challenging part that we faced with NetApp was that it would have been good to have a sandbox available for a PoC scenario. Without it, what we had to do was get a trial license and set it up. With Azure and AWS, you go directly to the console and just provision it. With NetApp, we had that initial period where we had to set it up on a trial license for a month, and when that was getting close to expiring, we had to extend it.

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EA
Senior Systems Administrator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We've looked at other storage solutions and we just keep coming back to NetApp because they provide us with everything we need. They have great support and the hardware has drastically improved in horsepower and capacity, so we're happy to stay with them.

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LP
Technology Advisor Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

In the past, we have tried to resell other solutions, like Wasabi, and we evaluated the Commvault solution. NetApp has many solutions for us, not just the storage and itself. It doesn't just create a repository for saving things with a lower cost. NetApp has cloud products as well as an open-source project. That variety of offerings is the main aspect that is important for us.

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AD
Infrastructure Architect at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

We were looking at a few solutions, including AWS FSx for Windows. FSx for Windows, at the end of the day, was a step back from the abilities for file shares for us. We would be stepping back to a Windows-based file server versus NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror, and global replication of functions. The other option was a complete platform shift, which would've been more of a migration platform than we were willing to commit to.

We're evaluating FSx for ONTAP as well. If that looks attractive, we will transition some workloads to that as well. Potentially, in the future, we could use Cloud Insights as the other NetApp product.

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KR
Systems Programmer at a university with 10,001+ employees

Our shortlist was really only NetApp. We looked at about a dozen other products, Hitachi and everything else, but NetApp really had the best product.

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Junaid Maumdar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Devops engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We looked into FSx, which came out after implementing NetApp. We tried to use the AWS NetIQ solution with the EFS. That said, their EFS is only for Linux. There was a way to do EFS for Windows also by using Samba Share, yet that gets a little bit complicated and unreliable, so we chose NetApp at that time to keep things simple.

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TK
CTO at Poria

We chose NetApp because after we did the pilot, we saw the difference between both of the companies.

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AS
Cloud Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I work with file solutions from other vendors. We have vendors like Elastifile which I used to work with but it was acquired by Google. I also checked a Google-native solution. And Azure has file shares as well as something called NFS Blob, but it also uses the NetApp in the backend. It's a NetApp CVS. It's not like CVO, it's quite different, but it does provide the same functionality, such as file services like CIFS or NFS. But that solution lacks other things. It doesn't work like CVO because CVO provides a lot of features.

CVO provides all the functionality any customer would need on cloud. It's a single solution that covers everything.

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RR
Lead Engineer Architecture & Engineering Services at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We did not evaluate other solutions. We only evaluated ONTAP.

NetApp is an industry leader as well as we have experienced with NetApp on-premise. That is the reason we chose NetApp as a reliable partner.

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AC
Storage Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We did evaluate other solutions.  We evaluated the main players in this area, like EMC.

There are some features that we really liked from NetApp. One of them is the ability to consolidate files and blocks. Other vendors have some mirror solutions, but they are not in the maturity level that NetApp is. We also really like that NetApp has a product for the cloud that is really working and is proven and valuable. Other vendors do not have that, or if they have it, you need to deploy something in the middle. That is something that we like. We don't need to deploy anything. We can just run the backup directly from the OS and spin out the solution.

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DJ
Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is reliable, and Commvault is not reliable.

Dell EMC sucks. They are not innovative. They haven't done anything in years.

NetApp is the best solution out there.

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PP
Senior System Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

We evaluated Hitachi and IBM, but still we are using NetApp because of its marketing.

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YM
Senior Manager, IT CloudX at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We checked Dell EMC and HPE but we chose NetApp. The Storage team made the decision. One of the main reasons they chose NetApp was the existence of NetApp on-prem and the knowledge of it the team had. We are familiar with NetApp and the products are good, so we decided to extend the success to the cloud as well.

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RT
Lead Storage Operations at Autodesk, Inc.

We did not consider anyone else for NAS.

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JC
Pre-sales SE at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The customer was happy with NetApp and did not look at any alternatives.

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Buyer's Guide
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.