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."It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Technical support has been very helpful. They provide us with pretty good solutions that we can implement moving forward."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"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."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"The FlexClones make all the management easier for us."
"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."
"The ease of use in terms of how the product works is valuable. We are able to work with it and deploy the storage that we need."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is its similarity to the physical app, which makes it familiar. It's almost identical to a real NetApp, which means you can run all of the associated NetApp processes and services with it. Otherwise, we would definitely have to deploy some hardware on a site somewhere, which could be a challenge in terms of CapEx."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of file storage."
"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 pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers."
"Integration with other vendors is not available."
"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."
"If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful."
"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 to see them improve the perspective of start and search in the panels. This would allow for better visualization of the contents that are captured in the tool."
"The encryption and deduplication features still have a lot of room for improvement."
"The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases."
"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 like to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."
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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