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."Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"Replication to the cloud is the most valuable feature. Deduplication and compression are also very important to us. We are in the process of adopting to the cloud. We are going to AWS and we are trying to do a safety technician call out with integration to the cloud. NetApp allows us to move some of the volume to the cloud, at the same time that we continue providing the cloud services that we have on premises."
"The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens."
"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 solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are the best thing since sliced bread. Rollback is super easy. It's just simple, and it works. It's very efficient."
"One of the features our customers like is that it can be used from one cloud provider to another. They can use it from Azure to AWS or vice versa. That way, they don't need to use the same provider for backups. If something goes wrong on the primary site, having the same data in another cloud service provider is important."
"The most valuable features are tiering to S3 and being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule."
"The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises."
"This solution has made everything easier to do."
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive."
"We've just been dealing with general pre-requisite infrastructure configuration challenges. Once those are out of the way, it is easy."
"How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically."
"NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance."
"There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges."
"The solution could be better when we're connecting to our S3 side of the house. Right now, it doesn't see it, and I'm not sure why."
"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP needs to have customizable pricing options such as 10 TB increments. They seem to have only two options: 10 TB or 250 TB."
"We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 8 reviews while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.2, while NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "The initial setup is straightforward, but the solution has strict compatibility methods". 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, DataCore SANsymphony 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 Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.
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