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Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

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

Dell PowerPath
Ranking in Storage Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp ONTAP
Ranking in Storage Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerPath is 15.7%, up from 14.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 20.5%, down from 41.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp ONTAP20.5%
Dell PowerPath15.7%
Other63.8%
Storage Software
 

Featured Reviews

Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
A resilient and reliable solution that has many load-balancing technologies and provides high availability
People who want to buy the solution must create a scorecard of Dell PowerPath against other products. They must run database tests. They must consider factors like pricing, performance, ease of use, visibility, and reliability. They must also run tests to understand which product recovers faster. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
BK
Senior Storage Engineer at Shell
Data management and availability improve operations, but cost and support need attention
For snapshots, there should be something similar to a recycle bin. When someone mistakenly deletes a snapshot, it should be stored for about two days before disappearing from the system. Regarding storage optimization, when purchasing a 10 terabyte disk, after formatting, you can only use approximately 8 terabytes. They should improve this so users can utilize 90% instead of 80% of the disk space. The support response needs improvement, especially for P1 cases. When critical cases are raised, they should ensure they call the customer and follow up properly. Comparing NetApp ONTAP to other solutions such as EMC, the cost of contract renewals and warranties is relatively expensive. They should extend their renewal window beyond the current six months to one year options. A longer warranty period of two years for new systems, controllers, or filers would be beneficial. Overall, they should reduce subscription costs for businesses.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is very reliable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that disaster recovery scenarios are very good and easy to use in Dell PowerPath since it is available in a simplified form."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"The user interface is good."
"In the last four or five years, we have not had any issues."
"The user interface is good."
"OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product."
"It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system."
"There is nothing it can't do."
"If we want to change things in models, such as add, replace, and adjust to another client, it is very easy."
"ONTAP has really reduced our costs because we learned that we could use our storage with fewer machines and drive down data center costs."
"We can scale it better, having multiple clusters at once, and it also saves us time because one of us can log in to check over all of our casinos at once, compared to having to log in one at a time to check a casino and see how its storage is going."
"Our administrative effort is lower; DR is much easier now, as it is essentially just flipping a few switches and we have replicated data up in our DR data center."
"There are specific workloads where some vendors provide better value, but in general, NetApp has done a far better on price than other vendors."
"Snapshot and SnapMirror technologies make it easier to replicate data to disaster recovery scenarios."
"It is very easy to scale, so we started with a four-node cluster and added it to a six-node cluster. We've also done some other modifications in between."
 

Cons

"Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically during any OS upgrade."
"If there is an operating system that is discontinued, PowerPath will now also stop the support for that operating system; for example, in the case of Solaris."
"The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically, during any OS upgrade."
"The technical support is good but they are not available all the time."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"It should be easier to put in tech support cases. They should streamline the online support and chat."
"If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides."
"cDot only scales to 24 notes so scalability should be better, bigger, but we are one of the only customers that are facing this problem."
"The additional features I would like to see in ONTAP, and NetApp in general would probably be the single pane of glass software."
"One of the challenges we have is the ability to tag data with ownership for internal billing and chargeback. We have to utilize some third-party tools for that. It would be good if they were integrated with NetApp ONTAP. Everything else is pretty good."
"However, if the integration with legacy applications was simpler, it would be great."
"I would like to see more integration of the features with the CIFS and SMB Protocols. We also want integration with iSCSI."
"They use a lot of PowerShell for managing things and there are still a few things that you can't do through PowerShell cmdlets that you can do in the native CLI. It would be nice if they got more of those added in."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is affordable, and ten is really expensive. Dell PowerPath is an expensive tool."
"The price of the solution is fair."
"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"We have a wholesale contract with NetApp. We also have NetApp ONTAP On-Demand activation for certain things. We also have some preferential pricing for licenses. The licensing that I see here doesn't apply to other clients in the field. NetApp is expensive, but so are the competitors, making it hard to ascertain precise retail value. However, based on my perspective, NetApp pricing appears competitive."
"We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression."
"It's not an all inclusive model. You have the option to purchase modules to make the entire ecosystem coherent. I would like the option to pay one price and get everything all inclusive, like OnCommand."
"NetApp is streamlined, reducing costs."
"We received a super deal for our new machine, so we were happy with the price."
"ONTAP is expensive, but most storage systems are now-a-days and everything is included with the license - there are no additional fees."
"The price point is very competitive and inexpensive compared to what you receive from other vendors in the market."
"I rate NetApp ONTAP's pricing a seven out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Transportation Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise67
 

Questions from the Community

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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 file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...
What needs improvement with NetApp ONTAP?
File level restoration could be improved. Currently, NetApp ONTAP provides volume level restore, but file level restore is somewhat difficult to execute. If NetApp were to provide an option for fil...
 

Also Known As

PowerPath
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Healthcare Residential Service Company
1&1 IONOS, Acıbadem Healthcare Group, Adder Technologies, Aero Vodochody Aerospace
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerPath vs. NetApp ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.