Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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 6.9% mindshare in the category. NetApp is ranked #2 in CSDS , with an average rating of 9.5, and holds a 22.9% 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

2,343 Views
2,015 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Read 64 NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP reviews

11,286 Views
564 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, SolarWinds and others in Storage Management.

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

Buyer's Guide

Storage Management

October 2026

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Helped 917,884 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 (7th), Cloud Backup (25th), Public Cloud Storage Services (11th), 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 6.9%, up 5.1% compared to last year.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Software Defined Storage, holds 22.9% mindshare, down 26.3% since last year.

Storage Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell VPLEX	6.9%
NetApp OnCommand Insight	8.6%
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor	7.6%
Other	76.9%

Storage Management

Cloud Software Defined Storage Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP	22.9%
IBM Spectrum Scale	25.4%
Portworx Enterprise	15.8%
Other	35.900000000000006%

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Featured Reviews

Sayed Zuber

Sr. Storage And Backup Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

It's an excellent solution for data mobility and disaster recovery, but the CLI can be difficult for beginners

Dell VPLEX currently requires Flash Player to access the GUI. It would be better to have a web-based HTML management interface. The encryption could also be improved. When the host writes data, it goes from VPLEX back to the physical storage. The physical storage device will do encryption or use an algorithm called Data Address Encryption. If there are vulnerabilities between the host and the storage device, you can lose your data. I suggest encrypting the data before it is sent from the host to the storage. I would also recommend using the NVM protocol in VPLEX. It still has Flash Player and a local SATA disk built into the Flash Player. You need to Flash the disk to SAS and then SATA. The NVM protocol is better.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The support is good, and you don't have to wait long before things get done."

"The solution works well. It's very reliable."

"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."

"Its mirroring capabilities allow for data to be mirrored across two different data centers, so if one center were to crash or fail, the other center could take over and keep everything running smoothly."

"Mobility enables us to carry out an internal migration of data."

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

"Due to the large number of models and different brands it is a very good solution to virtualize volumes."

"VPLEX/VE is an amazing feat of engineering."

More Dell VPLEX pros

"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 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."

"ONTAP's snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are pretty useful in recovering your data from a time in a snapshot. That's pretty useful for when you have an event where a disaster struck and then you need to recover all your data. It's pretty helpful and pretty fast in those terms."

"Another feature which gets a lot of attention in our environment is the File Services Solutions in the cloud, because it's a completely, fully-managed service. We don't have to take care of any updates, upgrades, or configurations."

"If you have a larger amount of data than normal in cloud, it is easy to provision and maintain. Waiting for the delivery of the controller, the configuration of enclosures, etc., all this stuff is eliminated compared to using on-premise."

"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 unified file and block-storage access across our infrastructure is invaluable. Without it, we can't do what we do."

"With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros

Cons

"It needs to improve the thin reclaim on certain arrays."

"The administration is difficult, so we want to add hyper-converged infrastructure."

"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."

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

"I would like to have site-to-site replication capability for applications."

"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."

"Today, it needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."

More Dell VPLEX cons

"I think the challenge now is more in terms of keeping an air gap. The notion that it is in the cloud, easy to break, etc. The challenge now is mostly about the air gap and how we can protect that in the cloud."

"There is room for improvement in tier one support, especially with potential language barriers and communication challenges."

"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 to see more information about Cloud Volumes ONTAP using Google Cloud Platform on NetApp's website."

"NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance."

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

"When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."

"The cost needs improvement."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company."

"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."

"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."

"The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing."

"The cost is quite high."

"Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration."

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

"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

14%

Construction Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

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...

See all answers

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 15% of the time

IBM SAN Volume Control vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 10% of the time

Huawei OceanStor DJ vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp OnCommand Insight vs Dell VPLEX

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell VPLEX Competitors

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 5% 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 3% of the time

Amazon FSx vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 3% of the time

CTERA Intelligent Data Platform vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 3% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell VPLEX

October 2026

Download Dell VPLEX product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

October 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, SolarWinds and others in Storage Management. Updated: October 2026.

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