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Azure NetApp Files vs Microsoft Azure Block Storage comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Azure NetApp Files improved performance by 30%, reduced costs, increased efficiency, but some users found unclear ROI early on.
Sentiment score
7.5
Organizations reduced costs significantly using Azure Block Storage, enhancing data protection, reliability, and ROI with promising long-term benefits.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Azure NetApp Files support is praised for responsiveness, though effectiveness varies, with some users relying on internal teams.
Sentiment score
5.2
Microsoft Azure Block Storage support is variable, with response times and quality depending on support tiers and payment levels.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Azure NetApp Files is highly rated for scalability, flexibility, automation, and minimal maintenance, with some size and availability concerns.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Azure Block Storage is highly scalable and flexible, automatically adjusting to data increases, though some report capacity limits.
It is a significant advantage of the product.
The ability to scale is well-supported.
Block Storage allows for extensive scaling, and I can scale it to as much as I want.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Users highly rate Azure NetApp Files for its stability and reliability, consistently handling increased loads without issues during migrations.
Sentiment score
7.9
Many users praise Microsoft Azure Block Storage's stability, though some larger customers report occasional availability and regional reliability issues.
None of the other storage vendors have all these features so easily manageable and fast to set up as Block Storage.
Overall, the stability is very good.
The stability of block storage could be rated as nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Azure NetApp Files needs innovation, better versioning, cost optimization, simpler deployment, better support, and enhanced disaster recovery and replication.
Microsoft Azure Block Storage needs better pricing transparency, user support, integration, documentation, and improvements in performance, scalability, and security.
Its compatibility with various platforms could be enhanced to allow for a seamless operation across different cloud environments.
Some alternatives are cheaper and available for long trial periods before the payment.
Considerations on security regulations and hardware vendor information might be useful.
 

Setup Cost

Azure NetApp Files offers flexible pricing with pay-as-you-go and subscription models, but may seem expensive for small deployments.
Microsoft Azure Block Storage offers scalable, moderately priced solutions with pay-as-you-go pricing influenced by tier and data access frequency.
For medium-sized companies, especially when discussing cost and scalability, it can be quite expensive.
It is reasonable, however, it can be cheaper.
It is pay-as-you-go, related to the size and usage of the storage.
 

Valuable Features

Azure NetApp Files provides flexible, secure, high-performance storage with fast provisioning, scaling, snapshots, SQL backups, and high availability.
Azure Block Storage provides scalable, secure, and cost-effective storage with seamless integration, redundancy, easy management, and flexible APIs.
The tool allows me to download to my device, control access, and manage data with ease.
I can store data, use the storage account as a queue, and the pricing is also quite economical.
The ability to increase and scale out is really easy, allowing us to manage a large amount of data with reduced dependency on scalability issues.
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure NetApp Files
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (8th)
Microsoft Azure Block Storage
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Azure NetApp Files is 7.1%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is 0.9%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

We can expand our storage on-the-fly without the need to reprovision
Ease of provisioning: It's very easy to consume the product. We are not doing this manually. We are doing this programmatically, but it's very easy and seamless for us to consume it. It's like any other Azure component. It's very good and well-integrated into the ecosystem of Azure. There is tight integration. We didn't need to learn anything new. It feels like we know everything already, although under the hood, the product is something totally different. However, it seemed very easy for us. It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something. The performance is quite good, so it's almost on par with the make of SSD storage. It provides a quick, scalable storage solution. We were looking for a supported solution. We didn't want to experiment. We didn't want to look for open source, though we did look into open source initially before we bumped into NetApp. We figured out that adding yet another unknown into our system was not going to bring us benefit. It would be another problem that we would need to tackle. So, we said, "Okay, let's look for a supported solution," and NetApp was one of them. Then, we turned to NetApp.
MatsHagberg Olsson2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers secure data management with affordable tools and minimal hassle
The most valuable feature is that it's very affordable in comparison to competitors. The absolute best feature is the Azure Storage Explorer tool. The tool allows me to download to my device, control access, and manage data with ease. Additionally, the joint use of Azure portal further facilitates management depending on my location.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
34%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...
What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?
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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?
The solution's competitors like Oracle or Amazon are not cheap either. I think we're paying two million dollars for Azure NetApp Files. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is exp...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Block Storage?
We use the solution to develop SaaS platforms on Azure. We utilize various Microsoft components like block storage and databases for this purpose.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Block Storage?
Pricing could be rated as eight out of ten. It is reasonable, however, it can be cheaper.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Block Storage?
At the moment, I do not have anything specific in mind for improvements. The most important thing for me is accessibility and easy provisioning to multiple servers with different vendors.
 

Also Known As

NetApp ANF, ANF
MS Azure Block Storage
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Restaurant Magic
Mazda, BlinkBox, Rakuten Showtime, Xbox One, Serko, ChronoDrive
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure NetApp Files vs. Microsoft Azure Block Storage and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.