NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs VMware Live Recovery comparison

"Unified Manager, System Manager, and Cloud Manager are all GUI-based. It's easy for somebody who has not been exposed to this for years to pick it up and work with it."

"In terms of administration, the portal which provides the dashboard view is an excellent tool for operations. It gives you volume divisions, usage rates, which division is using how much data, and more. The operations portal is fantastic for the support team."

"The main benefit we get from this product is the ability to deploy it anywhere we want, whether that's on-prem, a remote physical location, or in the cloud. It doesn't matter from an operational perspective where it is. The command line and operating system are the same."

"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."

"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."

"They have very good support team who is very helpful. They will help you with every aspect of getting the deployment done."

"If anything happens, their technical support will come onsite and fix it."

"In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."

"It has a good and effective user interface."

"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."

"In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application."

"Testing failover capabilities."

"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."

"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."

"VMware SRM is a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."

"We are getting a warning alert about not being able to connect to Cloud Manager when we log into it. The support has provided links, but this particular issue is not fixed yet."

"How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically."

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

"We've just been dealing with general pre-requisite infrastructure configuration challenges. Once those are out of the way, it is easy."

"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."

"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."

"We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side... But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers."

"The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge."

"Technical support can take some time to respond."

"There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases."

"I would like to see improved integration services with other solutions, such as SIEM management or security monitoring."

"When starting up the replication and converting it to the virtual machine I had some problems. I had to start the process again and that is inconvenient."

"It has a lot of dependencies on VMware infrastructure, and testing can be complex. Testing often requires extensive approval at the organizational level."

"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."

"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."

"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."

"The solution's pricing is reasonable."

"They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage..."

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

"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."

"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."

"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."

"The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company."

"It is reasonably priced, and its cost hasn't been a significant factor in our implementation."

"The cost of SRM is a little bit high, especially for smaller companies."

"The price of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery should be lowered in order to compete better in the market."

"The pricing is good."

"VMware SRM is a little bit pricey."

"VMware sells in bundles of 50 VMs, so if we want to expand, we have to buy the whole bundle."

"We pay a yearly licensing fee for VMware SRM, which is not very expensive."

"Licensing costs explode after 75 VMs."