We performed a comparison between Azure NetApp Files and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Zerto, Nasuni and others in Cloud Migration."Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its flexibility."
"I like the SnapMirror feature in Azure NetApp Files. It helps me create backups with snapshots and makes data recovery and compression."
"The most valuable features of the solution is replication to another region and the performance. The solution is stable. The solution is scalable. The initial setup is straightforward."
"One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities."
"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."
"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 availability is good, meaning downtime or network issues rarely occur. The system also offers flexibility, allowing for increases in data volume, IOPS, and other capabilities without requiring downtime, which is a strong point. Based on the money spent, we can get performance improvements and high availability."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution."
"The solution needs to improve it's ABS environment."
"Reserved Instances for Azure NetApp Files would improve more use cases, making them more valuable in Azure as the cost would be reduced."
"The deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions."
"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."
"This solution would be improved with more innovation."
"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."
"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."
"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."
"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."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
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Azure NetApp Files is ranked 3rd in Cloud Migration with 15 reviews while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 8 reviews. Azure NetApp Files is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.2. 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 Storage Spaces Direct writes "The initial setup is straightforward, but the solution has strict compatibility methods". Azure NetApp Files is most compared with Microsoft Azure File Storage, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Nasuni and NetApp ONTAP, whereas Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, StarWind Virtual SAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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