Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and NetApp solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #4 in SM , with an average rating of 7.0, and holds a 6.8% mindshare in the category. NetApp is ranked #2 in CSDS , with an average rating of 9.5, and holds a 23.8% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Dell VPLEX

Read 19 Dell VPLEX reviews

1,722 Views
1,446 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Read 64 NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP reviews

8,636 Views
432 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Dell VPLEX

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell VPLEX and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Dell Technologies, IBM and others in Storage Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Storage Management Report (Updated: July 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Storage Management

July 2026

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Helped 907,372 peers since 2012

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

Dell VPLEX

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Storage Management (4th)

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Storage (9th), Cloud Backup (28th), Public Cloud Storage Services (12th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Management and Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Dell VPLEX is designed for Storage Management and holds a mindshare of 6.8%, down 7.1% compared to last year.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Software Defined Storage, holds 23.8% mindshare, down 28.4% since last year.

Storage Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell VPLEX	6.8%
NetApp OnCommand Insight	8.3%
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor	6.9%
Other	78.0%

Storage Management

Cloud Software Defined Storage Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP	23.8%
IBM Spectrum Scale	26.3%
Portworx Enterprise	17.3%
Other	32.599999999999994%

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Featured Reviews

Shailendra Choudhary

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Has supported enterprise projects consistently but pricing remains a challenge for broader adoption

We are system integrators and resell the HCI solution. We have worked with Dell VPLEX for approximately two to three years. We have been in several RFCs, and Dell VPLEX is implemented in the enterprise segment only. The solution is expensive and requires more budget, so people in the SMB segment do not prefer it. We typically recommend Dell VPLEX for customers who already work with other Dell products.

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reviewer5948293

Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Offers performance control and cloud integration while supporting data management with granular flexibility

The scalability of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is interesting. We have thought about it, but we haven't used it. I think the scalability is something you scale up rather than respond to peak demand. It wouldn't help with outages either; the scaling is manual, and there are no processes we've used to automate that for unexpected scenarios. We like the scalability; it's enough for what we're planning to use, but we haven't used any advanced features. The standard platform is NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which is their cloud service. In fact, that's probably the most experience I have with NetApp. I've experienced it on-premise, but kind of secondhand.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It’s a great product; very reliable."

"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."

"For a new application setup, it worked like a charm."

"We have see performance improvement in our databases."

"VPLEX offers a large compatibility matrix and valuable features."

"With VPLEX, we are able to automate this process where failovers between sites now occur automatically."

"Storage virtualization and geographic resilience for Metro Sans, plus a great performance improvement."

"The business continuity is sorted, as the data is in two data centers, i.e., readable and writable, and if one side goes down, there is no downtime and the other side continues non-disruptively."

More Dell VPLEX pros

"The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises."

"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 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."

"ONTAP has been very stable for us, specifically in the cloud environment. It allows us to have high availability as well as standalone systems if that's what we want within our specific workloads. Also, on-premise has been a very stable environment. We have very few outages and when we do, we work with support to get systems back online in a timely manner."

"NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well."

"The ability to do a straight SnapMirror from our on-prem to the cloud with no other data transitions is excellent."

"If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily."

"I highly recommend that customers using native cloud storage from hyperscalers transition to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP as it offers numerous features and functionalities such as inline deduplication, compression, compaction, autonomous ransomware protection, snapshot technology, and flex cache that are unavailable with other hyperscalers."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros

Cons

"The initial setup is complex."

"Due to the bug with Broadcom, we have had a massive crisis on VPLEX. This little bug has caused roughly one thousand machines to go down."

"VPLEX hardware migration to spare equipment in case of major disruption needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."

"Initial setup was a little bit complex when connecting to VMAX."

"The price is a problem with EMC due to the fact that it's more expensive than the other vendors."

"The licensing model for enterprise storage (EMC VMAX) and integrating the solution into the actual storage frames instead of a separate product."

"Much room for improvement exists."

"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."

More Dell VPLEX cons

"The product is more restricted with underlying cloud."

"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."

"I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI."

"It does not have tutorials in languages such as French, German, Spanish."

"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."

"The dashboard is a little bit clunky. I like to see it a little bit more on the simplistic side. I would like to be able to create my own widgets and customize what I want to see a little bit more versus what is currently there. That would be helpful so that when I log in, I go straight to my widget or my board without going to multiple places to get to what I need to find or build."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is, as we know, is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now."

"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP does have a bit of initial complexity for users who are new to the system."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"VPLEX is a little bit expensive in my personal opinion."

"We struck a great deal with Dell EMC, so for us, VPLEX was not very expensive."

"They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage..."

"They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy."

"Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have."

"For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."

"Cloud is cloud. It's still expensive. Any good solution comes with a price tag. That's where we are looking to see how well we can manage our data in the cloud by trying to optimize the costs."

"If we wanted to use the AWS solution, we would have to manage two or three different platforms and pay more money than what we should have to pay, as some of the features don't even exist. If we wanted to, we could use AWS cloning, but it is useless because it uses more space, is more expensive, and takes more time."

"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."

"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

13%

Outsourcing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	53

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Dell VPLEX?

Some of the products are very easy to implement, while others are more difficult, and our team seeks support help when required. Regarding the integration part, the delivery team handles all integr...

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What is your primary use case for Dell VPLEX?

We are implementing Cohesity, Hitachi, Dell, and Nutanix, VMware, vSAN; multiple products. We have recently started working with Cohesity because there was not much presence in India for Cohesity, ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Dell VPLEX?

Hitachi Systems Microclinic has been renamed to Hitachi Systems India Private Limited. The email address has been changed to shailendra.chaudhry.hd at hitachi-systems.com from shailendra_singh.chau...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is actually quite reasonable in price compared to other native cloud storage options. For example, a customer using 100 TB of AWS storage would not benefit from deduplica...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

It would be nice to see technology supporting the Elastic Fabric Adapter on Amazon AWS, therefore getting RDMA technology for more low-latency connections.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

I use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP mostly in customer companies.

See all answers

Comparisons

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 12% of the time

IBM SAN Volume Control vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 12% of the time

Huawei OceanStor DJ vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp OnCommand Insight vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 9% of the time

Huawei Data Management Engine (DME) vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 8% of the time

More Dell VPLEX Competitors

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 7% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 5% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon FSx vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 4% of the time

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 3% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell VPLEX

July 2026

Download Dell VPLEX product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

July 2026

Download NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP product report

Also Known As

No data available

ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO

Overview

Dell VPLEX enhances storage management by offering virtualization, seamless data migration, and data center mirroring, making it ideal for enterprise applications needing high availability and data security.

Dell VPLEX stands out with its ability to integrate with multiple storage back-end systems, providing transparent data movement and deduplication. Its metro and geo-clustering capabilities ensure high availability, making it suitable for enterprise applications requiring maximum uptime. Supporting online migrations without disruptions, it offers high RPO and RTO for replication. However, it faces challenges in storage tiering, administration ease, and reducing costs, with users seeking better replication capabilities, cloud integration, and a web-based interface. Its licensing model and hardware dependencies can raise expenses, and configurations may be complex due to outdated technologies.

What are Dell VPLEX's Key Features?

Storage Virtualization: Abstracts physical storage into virtual resources.
Seamless Data Migration: Supports online migrations without disruptions.
Mirroring: Offers data mirroring across multiple data centers.
High Availability: Features metro and geo-clustering capabilities.
Integration: Works with diverse storage back-end systems.

What Benefits and ROI Can Users Expect?

Enhanced Data Security: Provides high RPO and RTO for replication.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces downtime with transparent data movement.
Geographical Resilience: Supports multi-data center redundancy management.
Cost Management: Potential for reduced costs with efficient data management.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Dell VPLEX is crucial for centralized storage in VMware environments and databases, helping manage redundancy and virtualization. They implement it as a front-end appliance, enabling connectivity between servers and storage appliances, facilitating seamless multi-vendor environment operations.

Dell Technologies

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an efficient storage management solution for managing and storing data in the cloud. It offers seamless integration with cloud providers, advanced data replication capabilities, and high data protection. With reliable performance, it is ideal for industries like healthcare and finance.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Kindred Healthcare, Regis Aged Care, WeBank SpA, Panduit, Munson Healthcare

1. Accenture 2. Acer 3. Adidas 4. Aetna 5. AIG 6. Apple 7. Bank of America 8. Barclays 9. Bayer 10. Berkshire Hathaway 11. BNP Paribas 12. Cisco 13. Coca-Cola 14. Comcast 15.ConocoPhillips 16. CVS Health 17. Dell 18. Deutsche Bank 19. eBay 20. Eli Lilly 21. FedEx 22. Ford 23. Freescale Semiconductor 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. Honeywell 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. Intuit 30. JPMorgan Chase 31. Kellogg's 32. KeyCorp 33. Liberty Mutual 34. L'Oréal 35. Mastercard

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Dell Technologies, IBM and others in Storage Management. Updated: July 2026.

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