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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 offers a large compatibility matrix and valuable features."
"With VPLEX, we are able to automate this process where failovers between sites now occur automatically."
"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."
"It’s a great product; very reliable."
"Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract."
"Due to the large number of models and different brands it is a very good solution to virtualize volumes."
"We have see performance improvement in our databases."
"Technical support from Dell is quite good."
"For the price, the quality of the hardware, the quality of the support, the features it offers, I'm thrilled with NetApp."
"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."
"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."
"The biggest advantage is that it works as expected, there's less maintenance so you don't need too many people to support it, and you save money in the long run."
"SnapMirror helps mirror metadata and data volumes between endpoints in a data fabric."
"Cloud Volumes ONTAP is great because of the storage efficiencies that it provides."
"The ability to do a straight SnapMirror from our on-prem to the cloud with no other data transitions is excellent."
"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."
 

Cons

"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."
"The administration is difficult, so we want to add hyper-converged infrastructure."
"These are all pretty trivial for larger customers but VNXe as a main production storage array running a workload important enough to give it a multi-site stretched vSphere cluster is something I think is unlikely to be present in those customers."
"Based on our requirements, we bought this product for doing online data migrations without data disruption, but we realized that there is a limit to backend storage that can be encapsulate to it."
"It needs to improve the thin reclaim on certain arrays."
"Cost. This is really expensive."
"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."
"The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure."
"I would like this solution to be brought to all the three major players. Right now it's supported only on AWS and Azure. They should bring it to Google as well, because we would like to have flexibility in choosing the underlying cloud storage provider."
"I would like some more performance matrices to know what it is doing. It has some matrices inherent to the Cloud Volumes ONTAP. But inside Cloud Manager, it would also be nice to see. You can have a little Snapshot, then drill down if you go a little deeper."
"Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management."
"The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data... I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud."
"The navigation on some of the configuration parameters is a bit cumbersome, making the learning curve on functions somewhat steep."
"I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution."
"The encryption and deduplication features still have a lot of room for improvement."
 

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."
"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."
"If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp."
"Some flexibility around the licensing model would help. The product is licensed based on capacity. Basically, the largest capacity license that you can buy is 368 terabytes. At this point, NetApp is addressing some people's concerns around this."
"We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to."
"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."
"Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two."
"They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy."
"They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product."
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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
11%
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.
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