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Azure Backup vs NetApp SnapCenter comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Backup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp SnapCenter
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
51st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Azure Backup is 3.4%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp SnapCenter is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Terry Tull - PeerSpot reviewer
Straightforward to set up and manage and allows us to monitor all backups in one place
I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as an eight out of ten. Setting up Azure Backup was pretty straightforward, especially if you follow the steps in the right order. It might seem a bit complex at first, but with experience, subsequent setups become easier. Planning is key to optimizing its effectiveness. Deploying Azure Backup typically takes around half an hour to an hour to set up one VM, involving creating a recovery services vault, defining a backup policy, and configuring storage options. For a more comprehensive setup including proper recovery planning, it might take a few hours. The key steps involve creating a resource group, and a recovery services vault, selecting a storage type, and defining backup policies. I deployed the solution myself.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates well with various applications , provides a cloning feature for creating snapshots or clones of volume and a centralized command
It is basically centralized command control software. When the users visualize the workflow of the backup, the management and the customer storage administrator know the ins and outs of the backup and recovery. They can make the strategy for their backup and recovery and the certainty of their backups and restore. Strategic planning: Also, it is easy to make a strategy when you have visualized the inflow and outflow of the backup and recovery. With the CLI or native way, without any UI or management tool, you might not be able to create any strategy at all. This is especially important when you have multiple storage systems inside your data center or organization. You need a tool that connects and visualizes the workflow of the backup and recovery from all the storage systems and NetApp storage systems installed within the organization. It is very important when you have multiple storage systems, and you need to manage your backup and recovery workflow. Ease of Management: Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp has its own product called SnapCenter. Other vendors need to acquire third-party software or integrate with other software to manage storage systems. NetApp has its own solution, which is SnapCenter. NetApp's SnapCenter gels well with their storage systems and products. Ease of management is already there. It's a fine software with easy installation, management, and understanding. It's not a complicated software to understand.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Azure Backup is good because it is entirely cloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe."
"First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client. You can schedule it as you like. You can also control the bandwidth, so the backup will not utilize. The internet will depend on the bandwidth."
"We use the normal features for Azure Backup, specifically to make backups of the VMs."
"I have no issues with the stability at all. So I don't necessarily care about the stability of the product. I look more at whether or not can I recover. And I haven't had a failed recovery yet. I've got no failed recoveries of all my years."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Backup is the file recovery and file vault."
"This solution is easy to configure and restore. It is a Microsoft product so is easily compatible with other solutions."
"You can select the tiering for your backup and manage your cost."
"It offers seamless integration."
"Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on."
"It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter."
"It has very fast backup and can handle a huge amount of data. It also enables really fast recovery."
"What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues."
"It helps with strategic planning because it is easy to make a strategy when you have visualized the inflow and outflow of the backup and recovery."
"Most banks and financial institutions use the solution."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
"The backup process finishes very quickly."
 

Cons

"Azure Backup needs improvements in allowing more specific backup options rather than just full VM snapshots."
"I would like to have the option to increase the frequency of the backups. Azure Backup does backups on an hourly basis, but I would prefer it to take backups more often."
"The area that I believe needs improvement in Azure Backup is the restoring time."
"On-prem can be complex to set up but the cloud is simple."
"For companies frequently accessing data or not using Microsoft Azure, the solution may not be very helpful."
"The solution is still in its infancy; it's not a mature product yet."
"Azure Backup could improve the backup data copies because they are not immutable."
"The support for Office365 backup is atrocious and is something that has to be improved."
"The GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot."
"The product lags in terms of availability."
"My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60... They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times."
"We have hundreds of servers and systems and hundreds of customers and they're separated in a multi-tenancy way in NetApp SVM. Right now, the problem is that it always scan all SVMs. If I backup Customer A, it scans all SVMs, or tries to scan all SVMs, if there is a backup relationship on the storage. But it doesn't have the permissions, so we run into timeouts or the backup just takes too long. They're fixing that in the upcoming release..."
"The interface usability needs improvement. It should be more user-friendly and easier for customers to use."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
"The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support."
"I have an issue with SnapCenter because sometimes a VM cannot be backed up... The way SnapCenter works is that it makes a backup of all the VMs and then it removes all the old backups. If one VM cannot be backed up for some reason, it has already created a new backup for all the VMs but it cannot remove the old backups. It ends up creating so many backups in VMware and it will cause a performance problem if the condition is not fixed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Backup is a moderately priced solution."
"It is a very cheap cloud solution."
"The product is neither too expensive nor too cheap."
"We are paying about $100,000 USD per year, just for a couple of servers."
"Support payment works by the level of partnership and the number of shares."
"Azure Backup is a product that is priced at a cheap rate, and it is a great tool."
"This is an expensive solution in the Bangladesh marketplace."
"The product's pricing is a three or four out of ten, where one is inexpensive, and ten is costly."
"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."
"The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."
"The product is inexpensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Backup differ from Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Vee...
What do you like most about Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is easy to configure and restore.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is expensive relative to the value we get from it. I do not have specific details about the licensing cost as it falls under another department.
What do you like most about NetApp SnapCenter?
Most banks and financial institutions use the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp SnapCenter?
The product should be free because it is just software to administrate systems purchased from NetApp, which are already expensive.
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapCenter?
The interface usability needs improvement. It should be more user-friendly and easier for customers to use.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SnapCenter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
All for One Steeb AG, Accenture
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. NetApp SnapCenter and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.