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."It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"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."
"The ability to see things going back and forth has been quite useful."
"ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms."
"The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises."
"It's very easy to set up, and within 40 minutes, you can apply storage notes in Azure."
"The most valuable features are that it's reliable, simple, and performs well."
"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."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We started with a small pilot and we then moved to production with no downtime at all."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"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 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 this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well, because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider."
"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 to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."
"It would be fantastic if NetApp could offer a solution that's as user-friendly as Google Drive for seamless cloud storage integration."
"Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management."
"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."
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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 Nasuni. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
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