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CA Allocate DASD Space and Placement vs NetApp OnCommand Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

CA Allocate DASD Space and ...
Ranking in Storage Management
11th
Average Rating
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp OnCommand Insight
Ranking in Storage Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Storage Management category, the mindshare of CA Allocate DASD Space and Placement is 3.3%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp OnCommand Insight is 8.3%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp OnCommand Insight8.3%
CA Allocate DASD Space and Placement3.3%
Other88.4%
Storage Management
 

Featured Reviews

it_user354057 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mainframe Storage Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's a space recovery product that helps us fix problems before they happen so we work on them after running a job, but I don't want to have to touch a file to make changes or updates.
One of the biggest benefits of CA Allocate is in the cost. We initially went with BMC MainView, which is a great product and a little more user friendly than CA Allocate. But because of our good relationship with CA, we were able to mimic everything we had with BMC. Any issues we had doing that, CA collected them right away to help us. As a space recovery product, CA Allocate helps us fix problems before they happen and then we work on them after we run a job. If somebody does not put the right space parameter, we let the job run and then we fix it after. If somebody does not optimize a data set, we run our reports after talking to these people without ever having an event waste CPU cycles.
Anuj_Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Team Lead at Kyndryl
Gives an end-to-end view of your environment and has a very good interface for report creation and customization
NetApp OnCommand Insight is a pretty good tool, and the only concern I have with it is the price. Its price is quite high and could be improved because the licensing feature of this particular tool is on a per GB basis instead of the price being for the complete tool itself. The more you discover, the more you need to pay, and this makes NetApp OnCommand Insight more costly when compared to other tools which are available in the market. My company doesn't have a cloud environment, so all storage is on-premises. I'm not aware of the integration of NetApp OnCommand Insight with the cloud environment, but the tool fits all the marks in terms of what I require and need. It checks all columns for me, so at the moment, nothing comes to mind in terms of additional features I'd like to see from the tool in the future.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As a space recovery product, CA Allocate helps us fix problems before they happen and then we work on them after we run a job."
"I would say that if you've got a large virtual environment with a NetApp storage - OCI is written by NetApp - it would almost be silly to look elsewhere."
"It gives us the ability to report on all our storage environment, monitor, visualize, and pinpoint problems, focus on and project usage growth, monitor and measure performance of all the stores, and use it for capacity planning, forecasting, and comparing performance over several years and across different vendors."
"Performance monitoring of hundreds of switches and being able to see results in one dashboard."
"It is uniquely valuable because it lets you see everything from the storage to our virtual or VM environment."
"It gives us a better view of into what is happening with the environment, like performance issues or predicting problems."
"It's uniquely valuable, because it's really at the top of its class."
"For the reporting side, the data warehouse side, if you're good with that, it can get really detailed reports that are good for showing people, at any level of the company."
"OnCommand Insight's most valuable feature is the ability to see applications, as you can tag applications in all the different elements of an application and have it in a single view so you can see bullies and victims and get to the root cause of problems in the environment you would otherwise be unaware of."
 

Cons

"Allocate is a good product, but it's not there yet in terms of that."
"We suffer a little bit from stability. At each batching cycle, we find some services that need to be restarted."
"The initial setup is complex. There is a lot of stuff to set up. I had to teach my guys a lot of things, so there was a lot of learning."
"I felt like it was complex. They said it was simple but, they have a guy who will come out and help you through the process."
"I'd like it to be more stable, simpler, and get Java out of it."
"Fairly straightforward, but after that, it's very complex to use and to learn and understand."
"It is very hard to implement. It takes a long time to learn."
"A little bit more information from technical support would give us a little bit more insight."
"It would be helpful if it were easier to create queries. It's not very intuitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The cost: It is expensive as a solution. You need to be an expert to get anything out of it and we don't have that kind of expertise."
"Pricing by terabytes, not the end of the world, and that's okay. Stop if I want this, I have to buy that. Just release it as a single product."
"We like that it is one license and everything is bundled in together."
"For me, it is always too much. Licensing is on TBs, and I think, nowadays that is outmoded."
"We just made a major investment back in May of this year, so we'll have it for another four and a half or five years easily. Thus, we have a five year bumper to bumper agreement."
"The company has saved money by narrowing down issues faster using servers and performance."
"Pricing for NetApp OnCommand Insight could be cheaper. On a scale of one to five, I would rate its price a four."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
16%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise31
 

Also Known As

BrightStor DASD Space and Placement
OCI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tieto
Société Générale, TechnologyOne
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Dell Technologies, IBM and others in Storage Management. Updated: July 2026.
906,852 professionals have used our research since 2012.