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Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
19
Ranking in other categories
Storage Management (4th)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (9th), Cloud Backup (27th), 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 6.8%, up 6.7% compared to last year.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Software Defined Storage, holds 23.1% mindshare, down 29.4% since last year.
Storage Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell VPLEX6.8%
NetApp OnCommand Insight8.4%
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor7.2%
Other77.6%
Storage Management
Cloud Software Defined Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP23.1%
IBM Spectrum Scale25.9%
Portworx Enterprise16.6%
Other34.400000000000006%
Cloud Software Defined Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Shailendra Choudhary - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
SB
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"VPLEX/VE is an amazing feat of engineering."
"We have see performance improvement in our databases."
"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."
"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."
"With the help of EMC VPLEX we simplified the architecture and improved the response time."
"The best feature of VPLEX storage is its ability to consolidate storage. It also provides the highest RPO and RTOs for replication technology. VPLEX enables application mobility."
"It’s a great product; very reliable."
"My advice would be to go for it; it is a great product and a great piece of software, and NetApp is cutting edge when it comes to software in the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is its exceptional performance and storage efficiency."
"Snapshot copies and thin clones have made our recovery time a lot faster."
"It gives us a way to optimize resource usage in the public cloud, without overpaying or wasting resources, while providing unified storage no matter what data you have and ensuring we have control of the data and know what it's being used for."
"I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships."
"It is a good system; it is very stable as far as what I've been using with it, and I find that support from it is really good as well."
"The solution's high-availability features are cost-effective for us because we are able to use the cloud benefits to reduce the cost of DR."
"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."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is complex."
"It needs to improve the thin reclaim on certain arrays."
"Cost. This is really expensive."
"Today, it needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."
"Much room for improvement exists."
"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."
"We experienced increases in latency in accesses to disks and some bugs on engines."
"The solution is expensive and requires more budget, so people in the SMB segment do not prefer it."
"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."
"I would like to see them improve the perspective of start and search in the panels. This would allow for better visualization of the contents that are captured in the tool."
"In the next release, I would like to see more options on the dashboard."
"The key feature, that we'd like to see in that is the ability to sync between regions within the AWS and Azure regions. We could use the cloud sync service, but we'd really like that native functionality within the cloud volume service."
"The solution is not stable when using single nodes. This is a problem. NetApp should work on this solution to make it more stable with HA nodes and resolve this issue."
"It needs better reporting. Right now, we had to put everything one to the other just to figure out what could be the issue."
"The support is good in general but the initial, frontline support could be improved."
"I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution."
 

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."
"Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it."
"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."
"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."
"The solution's pricing is reasonable."
"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."
"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise53
 

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...
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, ...
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...
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...
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.
What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
I use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP mostly in customer companies.
 

Also Known As

No data available
ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO
 

Overview

 

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: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.