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Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 17, 2024

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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Migration
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Azure NetApp Files
Ranking in Cloud Migration
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (7th), Public Cloud Storage Services (8th)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Ranking in Cloud Migration
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (1st), Cloud Backup (9th), Public Cloud Storage Services (5th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure NetApp Files is 15.7%, down from 18.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is 15.2%, down from 19.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
We can expand our storage on-the-fly without the need to reprovision
Ease of provisioning: It's very easy to consume the product. We are not doing this manually. We are doing this programmatically, but it's very easy and seamless for us to consume it. It's like any other Azure component. It's very good and well-integrated into the ecosystem of Azure. There is tight integration. We didn't need to learn anything new. It feels like we know everything already, although under the hood, the product is something totally different. However, it seemed very easy for us. It's elastic, so it scales with our demands. We can start small, then with the addition of customer loads, we can expand on-the-fly without the need to reprovision something. The performance is quite good, so it's almost on par with the make of SSD storage. It provides a quick, scalable storage solution. We were looking for a supported solution. We didn't want to experiment. We didn't want to look for open source, though we did look into open source initially before we bumped into NetApp. We figured out that adding yet another unknown into our system was not going to bring us benefit. It would be another problem that we would need to tackle. So, we said, "Okay, let's look for a supported solution," and NetApp was one of them. Then, we turned to NetApp.
Pramod-Talekar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent."
"Azure NetApp Files has been stable."
"I think the easiest part is, when you do a comparison, it is the throughput versus the cost. And it's much easier to set up."
"The most valuable feature is that the sixty-terabyte database snapshot can be done in less than two to three minutes."
"This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."
"One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities."
"Its security and ease of use are most valuable."
"Since we have NetApp's internally, we use the SnapMirror predominantly for this process in the cloud which is beneficial."
"If you have a fair amount of experience with NetApp, you can work on it very easily."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of file storage."
"NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well."
"Its scalability is very good."
"The most valuable features of this solution are SnapShot, FlexClone, and deduplication."
"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."
"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."
"It is much easier to control data since we can run queries across all our platforms with just one solution. Not only that, we can also monitor all the platforms with Active IQ, where we can see all the alerts, messages, and space consumption through a single application. This is regardless if the data is on-prem or AWS. It is much more efficient."
 

Cons

"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"The solution needs to improve it's ABS environment."
"I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region."
"We would like to see more paired regions for the replication."
"This solution would be improved with more innovation."
"The main hurdle in promoting this solution is the price. Its price definitely requires an improvement. It is more expensive than other options, so customers go for a cheaper option."
"We would like for the files which are coming in that we can version them. So, if a file is accidentally deleted, there should have a recycle bin option where we can go back, and at least once, clean it up."
"The main area for improvement is in the support ticket system. Since it's a SaaS platform, support tickets are managed by Microsoft or NetApp backend. This can sometimes lead to cross-functional challenges for organizations."
"Azure NetApp Files is expensive."
"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."
"I would like to see better integration with Active IQ."
"Only AWS and Azure public clouds are currently available from China, and I would like to see support for Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud)."
"The dashboard is a little bit clunky. I like to see it a little bit more on the simplistic side. I would like to be able to create my own widgets and customize what I want to see a little bit more versus what is currently there. That would be helpful so that when I log in, I go straight to my widget or my board without going to multiple places to get to what I need to find or build."
"Something we would like to see is the ability to better manage the setup and tie it to our configuration management database. We manage our whole IT infrastructure out of that database."
"Not a perfect ten because it's not very efficient with upgrades and management."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end."
"It is expensive, especially with NetApp Ultra Storage."
"It is expensive in small environments, which could be better. The reason is the four terabyte minimum. A one terabyte minimum would be better."
"The pricing depends on your scaling and consumption."
"This solution is very expensive compared to the alternatives."
"NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties which customers like us are willing to pay. Could it be cheaper? Yes, but if you combine fully supported, fully managed, easily provisioned, scalable, and quick all in one product, it's a good selling point. You can ask a lot of money for all these. If you have a use case like we do, it's a perfect match. It's like the Porsche of storage solutions in the cloud. It is totally worth the cost."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The performance has improved by about 30 percent."
"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."
"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."
"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."
"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."
"Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration."
"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."
"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."
"They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
33%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Educational Organization
55%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the fi...
What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?
The availability is good, meaning downtime or network issues rarely occur. The system also offers flexibility, allowi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?
The solution's competitors like Oracle or Amazon are not cheap either. I think we're paying two million dollars for A...
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 licen...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
NetApp ANF, ANF
ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
SAP, Restaurant Magic
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 Azure NetApp Files vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
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