NetApp SnapCenter vs Own Data Platform comparison

"It's a centralized, easy-to-use solution empowering RBAC management, monitoring, notifications, extensive logging, and backup schedules for standalone as well as groups of the same types of environments. The cloning capabilities accelerate development."

"A feature that stands out is cloning databases. If you have a SQL database and it's huge, like one terabyte, the classical SQL way would be to do a backup-restore to create a clone of your database for test purposes. With SnapCenter now, we can clone a database but through the Snapshot technology, which means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly."

"The simplicity of backup and restore directly with VMware is an advantage and the time to backup and restore is reduced."

"The most valuable feature is that it's centralized. In the old SnapManager days, we had software for each server. Now, with a centralized system, we're able to manage all systems remotely, and all agents remotely, and update them remotely. That's a huge benefit for us."

"The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place."

"The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters."

"The reporting feature has been particularly beneficial to upper management... When you do manual backups, you do not get the benefit of seeing successes and failures and how often you have to do restores. With SnapCenter, you get all of that."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"The most valuable feature for our customers is the restore functionality."

"The replication feature needs improvement in future releases."

"What I did witness lately are issues with some Microsoft KBs, the updates. But it happened only once, and not on a major platform, it was on a small one."

"SnapCenter could improve its integration with other backup solutions, such as Veeam."

"Plugins should be developed in shorter times. Performance generally could be a little bit faster."

"We would like to see more granular repording and reporting in bigger sets available in SnapCenter."

"I have an issue with SnapCenter because sometimes a VM cannot be backed up... The way SnapCenter works is that it makes a backup of all the VMs and then it removes all the old backups. If one VM cannot be backed up for some reason, it has already created a new backup for all the VMs but it cannot remove the old backups. It ends up creating so many backups in VMware and it will cause a performance problem if the condition is not fixed."

"It needs to support vSphere 6.7."

"My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60... They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times."

"The anonymization feature can be improved."

"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."

"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."

"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."

"The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles."

"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."

"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."

"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."

"The product is inexpensive."