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Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

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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 (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
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell VPLEX6.9%
NetApp OnCommand Insight8.6%
SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor7.6%
Other76.9%
Storage Management
Cloud Software Defined Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP22.9%
IBM Spectrum Scale25.4%
Portworx Enterprise15.8%
Other35.900000000000006%
Cloud Software Defined Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sayed Zuber - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"Technical support from Dell is quite good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of file storage."
"One thing I have noticed is that it is very simple to move the data where we need to move it, delete it, or archive it if we need to archive it to StorageGRID."
"One of the most valuable features is its similarity to the physical app, which makes it familiar. It's almost identical to a real NetApp, which means you can run all of the associated NetApp processes and services with it. Otherwise, we would definitely have to deploy some hardware on a site somewhere, which could be a challenge in terms of CapEx."
"If your organization is looking for cost savings, NetApp is the way to go."
"CVO provides all the functionality any customer would need on cloud; it's a single solution that covers everything."
"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."
"The FlexClones make all the management easier for us."
"The support is its most valuable feature as they provide on-call support, respond to issues in a timely fashion, and also offer disaster recovery."
 

Cons

"Today, it needs a huge effort that is not acceptable during disaster recovery."
"I would like to have site-to-site replication capability for applications."
"The licensing model for enterprise storage (EMC VMAX) and integrating the solution into the actual storage frames instead of a separate product."
"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."
"Cost. This is really expensive."
"The administration is difficult, so we want to add hyper-converged infrastructure."
"The initial setup is complex."
"Initial setup was a little bit complex when connecting to VMAX."
"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."
"I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI."
"The support is good in general but the initial, front-line support could be improved. Because I have already been using the product for so long, when I call support I would rather talk to somebody who is a little bit more advanced or senior, rather than talking to the first-level support. Usually, it takes some time to reach out to their senior support."
"Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now."
"It would be fantastic if NetApp could offer a solution that's as user-friendly as Google Drive for seamless cloud storage integration."
"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."
"We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."
"Me gustaría verlos mejorar la perspectiva de inicio y búsqueda en los paneles. Esto permitiría una mejor visualización de los contenidos que se capturan en la herramienta."
 

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."
"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."
"Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two."
"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."
"For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."
"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."
"We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to."
"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
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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: October 2026.
917,403 professionals have used our research since 2012.