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Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerPath is 15.5%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 20.1%, down from 37.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp ONTAP20.1%
Dell PowerPath15.5%
Other64.4%
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

"This multipathing software has certain features which we normally don't have on native multipathing software, especially in terms of load balancing and the way it captures the IO metrics and boosts the performance of different operating systems."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system."
"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."
"The user interface is good."
"OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product."
"The product is very reliable."
"The solution offers load balancing, which is great, the overall functionality has been really good, the setup is really easy, and we have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"It is able to store a lot of data, and we can manage it with fewer people."
"Vauable features include the ability to manage our data anywhere, multiple consumption modes, and rapid deployment."
"ONTAP has reduced our overall cost of on-premise storage tenfold."
"The ability to do online upgrades in a clustered setup is absolutely crucial, and I extensively use new features such as replication and backups for certain cloud features in the enterprise."
"Overall, for us, it's the stability, it has a solid infrastructure. It's easy to use, easy to rack and configure and start utilizing really quickly. It's been very stable, it works great, and it does everything we would want it to do."
"It is easy to use, it has been stable, we haven't had any problems with it, and getting support from our VAR and the vendor has been good."
"It has been very stable. We haven't had a significant outage."
"The product is stable, easy to deploy and it just works."
 

Cons

"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"The technical support is good but they are not available all the time."
"The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"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."
"While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."
"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."
"NetApp ONTAP has similar areas of improvement as NetApp Private Storage regarding decreasing the error rate, improving the GUI, technical support and stability, and reducing the price."
"For administration, there is no user interface present for NetApp ONTAP, so I have to rely on the ONTAP CLI."
"The way you attach, move, migrate, and access LUNs is complicated, and if you do not know how to do it, it can be a great problem for your IT environment."
"The only thing I don't like is that firmware upgrades require downtime. It would be beneficial if we could do upgrades without as much downtime."
"The price could be lower."
"For me, it is an ideal solution. There isn't any area that needs urgent improvements because the interface is very intuitive, and the solution is robust. However, if the integration with legacy applications was simpler, it would be great."
"There's a feature called multi-tenant approval. Currently, it's one size fits all."
"With NetApp ONTAP, the technology is all there, but its management process needs some simplification."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is a little bit expensive."
"The price of the solution is fair."
"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 solution is expensive."
"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"It has been cost-efficient. Compared to our legacy Dell infrastructure, we have realized cost savings. It is good."
"While it is going to cost a lot of money, their technologies is worth it."
"There are two consumption methods: pay as you go and subscription. Pay as you go... is a little expensive but worth it."
"With other vendors, we need to buy a separate license for a third-party storage, but with NetApp, you don't need to buy a license, as it will come up with the storage."
"We have seen ROI, especially with the deduplication. We have a high ratio of deduplication and are way past 70 percent of our VDI, as we have almost 400TBs on our VDI. We have been able to save at least a quarter of a petabyte of space."
"We have been able to save about 3TB to 5TB of storage. We still need to do more on the compression bit, then provisioning, to save more going forward."
"If you start narrowing down NetApp versus price point, then comparing it to the feature set and take away all the bloat that other companies will try to add on, there is no other option. It comes down to just NetApp."
"ONTAP is expensive, but most storage systems are now-a-days and everything is included with the license - there are no additional fees."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Transportation Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise69
 

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?
I have encountered a couple of issues with data deduplication and compression. If there were an option to set up those items separately, it would make it easier to configure and monitor those aspects.
 

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.