Amazon FSx vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NetApp are both solutions in the Cloud Storage category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.3, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 4.5% mindshare in CS, compared to NetApp’s 12.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Amazon FSx

Read 4 Amazon FSx reviews

378 Views
77 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Read 62 NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP reviews

2,085 Views
554 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Amazon FSx

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon FSx and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon FSx vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

June 2025

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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

Amazon FSx

Ranking in Cloud Storage

14th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (4th), File and Object Storage (16th)

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Ranking in Cloud Storage

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (1st), Cloud Backup (14th), Public Cloud Storage Services (7th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Storage category, the mindshare of Amazon FSx is 4.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is 12.1%, down from 14.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Storage

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan

Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group

Shared storage capabilities provide enterprise value with good reliability

Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS. The auto-scaling feature should be improved, as it currently includes downtime. I need to manually increase the storage, which is not ideal. Integrating FSx with Windows Server is challenging; it's a long process involving Active Directory (AD) setup and synchronization.

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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows customers to manage SAN and NAS data within a single storage solution

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. Multiprotocol support in NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is beneficial because it allows customers to manage SAN and NAS data within a single storage solution. This feature eliminates the need to purchase different types of storage.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."

"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."

"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."

"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."

"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."

"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."

"It gives a solution for storage one place to go across everything. So, the customer is very familiar with NetApp on-prem. It allows them to gain access to the file piece. It helps them with the training aspect of it, so they don't have to relearn something new. They already know this product. They just have to learn some widgets or what it's like in the cloud to operate and deploy it in different ways."

"We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us."

"The ability to see things going back and forth has been quite useful."

"Multiprotocol is the most valuable because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data from Linux and from Windows clients. That was our value proposition for CVO, Cloud Volumes ONTAP."

"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."

"Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise."

"If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros

Cons

"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."

"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."

"From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS."

"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."

"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."

"The cost needs improvement."

"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."

"Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management."

"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."

"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."

"When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."

"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."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."

"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."

"We find the pricing to be favorable due to the educational sector we belong to."

"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."

"The AWS consumer-based pricing model makes it easy for developers to use their credit cards to spin up virtual servers immediately."

"Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it."

"They give us a good price for CVO licenses. It is one of the reasons that we went with the product."

"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..."

"The deal with the seller was acceptable; the pricing is reasonable."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Educational Organization

28%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?

From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS. Sometimes we go with Weka or other solutions due to this need, so it sho...

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What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?

Our customers mainly use Amazon FSx for high-performance computing. Our customers are mainly in the Life Science and Pharma industries. The majority of people are looking at S3 as their destination...

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What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?

There is an ongoing project where my customers are exploring the FSx solution, but not yet for AI-driven projects; they plan to in the future. For those who want to use Amazon FSx, I recommend it a...

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What do you like most about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

The solution's pricing is reasonable.

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What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

NetApp's support could improve.

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure NetApp Files vs Amazon FSx

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 10% of the time

Qumulo vs Amazon FSx

Compared 7% of the time

S3 Drive vs Amazon FSx

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon FSx Competitors

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 4% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Storage

June 2025

Download Amazon FSx product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

June 2025

Download NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP product report

Also Known As

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre

ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO

Overview

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems. With Amazon FSx, you can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. It provides cost-efficient capacity and high levels of reliability, and it integrates with other AWS services so that you can manage and use the file systems in cloud-native ways.

Amazon FSx provides you with two file systems to choose from: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for enterprise workloads and Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-performance workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an efficient storage management solution for managing and storing data in the cloud. It offers seamless integration with cloud providers, advanced data replication capabilities, and high data protection. With reliable performance, it is ideal for industries like healthcare and finance.

NetApp

Sample Customers

Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

June 2025

Free Report: Amazon FSx vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon FSx vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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