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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."
"The support is good, and you don't have to wait long before things get done."
"Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract."
"Technical support from Dell is quite good."
"The most valuable feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots."
"The best part of the solution is the virtualization layer due to the fact that, for all our pain points during migration, we use the virtualization with VPLEX."
"With VPLEX, we are able to automate this process where failovers between sites now occur automatically."
"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."
"The stability has been really good."
"The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after."
"NetApp is a user-friendly solution, and I would recommend it to colleagues because of its user-friendliness for implementation and running your operations."
"I would recommend NetApp because it is a stable product."
"Even with that size of infrastructure, it's being supported by three people, and it's not like we're working 24/7; it gives us the ability to do a lot, to do more with less."
"If anything happens, their technical support will come onsite and fix it."
"The tool's most valuable features are the SnapLock and SnapMirror features. If something goes wrong with the data, we can restore it. This isn't a mirror; we store data in different locations. If there's an issue on the primary site, we can retrieve data from the secondary site."
"CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes."
 

Cons

"VPLEX hardware migration to spare equipment in case of major disruption needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."
"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."
"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."
"With Dell VPLEX, there are some bugs with Broadcom."
"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."
"Cost. This is really expensive."
"VPLEX's engine-based architecture is complex, so the implementation is challenging and takes more time. It's also difficult to fix hardware issues. When an appliance fails, it takes Dell EMC a long time to fix it because spare parts are in short supply."
"The licensing model for enterprise storage (EMC VMAX) and integrating the solution into the actual storage frames instead of a separate product."
"The support is good in general but the initial, frontline support could be improved."
"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP does have a bit of initial complexity for users who are new to the system."
"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."
"We have used technical support. As long as they don't call me at four o'clock in the morning to tell me that a drive failed and they are sending me another one, I like it. They have a tendency to do that."
"It's limited. We're trying to figure out better methods as we need to scale out more."
"It would be fantastic if NetApp could offer a solution that's as user-friendly as Google Drive for seamless cloud storage integration."
"Multipathing for iSCSI LUNs is difficult to deal with from the client-side and I'd love to see a single entry point that can be moved around within the cluster to simplify the client configuration."
"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP needs to have customizable pricing options such as 10 TB increments. They seem to have only two options: 10 TB or 250 TB."
 

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 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 solution's pricing is reasonable."
"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."
"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."
"It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees."
"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."
"They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product."
"We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to."
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910,454 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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.
910,454 professionals have used our research since 2012.