Dell VPLEX vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

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

"The capacity to migrate machines onto VPLEX is great — it's very clean. We can migrate machines and add arrays easily."

"Dell's technical support is awesome. We received instant support from EMC as long as we had an active contract."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The most valuable feature is deduplication, as we have no duplication in the snapshots."

"So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the license consumption and also the consumption of the underlying cloud storage."

"The most valuable features are tiering to S3 and being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule."

"We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too."

"This solution has helped us because it is easy to use."

"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."

"The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high."

"The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are the best thing since sliced bread. Rollback is super easy. It's just simple, and it works. It's very efficient."

"This solution has made everything easier to do."

"Dell VPLEX should improve its integration and user interface and be easier to configure."

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

"VPLEX hardware migration to spare equipment in case of major disruption."

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

"There can be delays in getting performance reports."

"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 initial setup is complex."

"The price is a problem with EMC due to the fact that it's more expensive than the other vendors."

"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."

"Their support and development teams can collaborate better to resolve an issue."

"We would like to have support for high availability in multi-regions."

"We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full."

"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."

"I rate the scalability a five out of ten."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is, as we know, is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now."

"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."

"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."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase."

"Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two."

"It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees."

"For enterprise customers, it's a very cost effective. But in the SMB segment, yeah, pricing is a little bit challenge for your time."

"The solution's pricing is reasonable."

"I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs."

"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."