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Dell SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility ) [EOL] vs NetApp SnapMirror comparison

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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

Dell SRDF (Symmetrix Remote...
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp SnapMirror
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Data Replication (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1564485 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Stable with great features and excellent support
I cannot recall us requesting any changes or new features. It does what we need it to do for the most part. If you are new to the product, the initial setup might be a bit difficult. There could be some new management or monitoring tools added to the solution. Those need a separate license. It would be nice if they were on the basic configuration.
LeeLee2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Infrastructure Engineer at Gigabit Technologies Pvt Ltd
Reliable replication has transformed disaster recovery and supports realistic dev-test environments
The best feature NetApp SnapMirror offers is block-level incremental replication, which is the foundation of everything. After the initial baseline transfer, only the changed blocks move across the wire, not entire files or volumes. In a busy storage environment, that is the difference between replication that fits in your backup window and replication that hammers your network all day. NetApp SnapMirror has positively impacted our organization by taking us from a theoretical DR capability, meaning we had a secondary site but had never fully tested a failover, to a validated, tested, documented DR process that we run quarterly, which is a fundamental change in our risk posture. Management can now say with confidence that if the primary site goes down, we recover within two hours with zero data loss on critical systems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Very good."
"Customer service for this product was top notch."
"The feature of taking snapshots from the replicated volumes has allowed us to use them for DR testing to validate the application consistent point of recovery."
"We've found the support to be very good overall."
"The SRDF solution has improved our disaster recovery RPO to near zero or less than 15 minutes with RTO getting drastically reduced."
"Customer Service: Top notch. Technical Support: Excellent."
"In all the companies in which I have used the product the ease of Disaster Recovery was implemented in such a manner that the risk of a site disaster was mitigated in an efficient way, and it made the migrations of complete data centers to other new data centers at other locations a piece of cake."
"We have migrated data from old and expiring Netapp hardware using Snapmirror, thereby allowing us to decommission the old hardware and save power, maintenance, and cost."
"The tool seamlessly moves data over the network without putting pressure on the network."
"The most valuable feature is the snap shot."
"My understanding is that the technical support is good, but we don't need much support because it's working fine."
"Having real-time replication gives us the capability to recover from any data loss as quickly as possible."
"It's a stable solution; it just works."
"The performance and stability are valuable features. It seems to fulfill all the requirements."
"NetApp SnapMirror's compatibility with NetApp products has helped my storage management efforts immensely, as it is part of ONTAP and all architectures based on ONTAP, including ONTAP 8 and 9."
 

Cons

"SRDF compared with EMC Recover Point has less capabilities, for ex. CDP (local or remote) is missing, only EMC assets compatibility, as a TCO is more expensive than implementing IBM SVC or EMC VPLEX virtualization and replication (more supported assets)."
"If you are new to the product, the initial setup might be a bit difficult."
"In general, it’s very stable although some time SRDF don’t behave as expected specially if the link is not stable or saturated."
"As of late I have seen the replication drop but this was not due to the SRDF, it was due to the high rate of IO changes on the OS side."
"The main pain point that we experienced is during device creation."
"The main pain point that we experienced is during device creation. For every newly provisioned volume, creating replication relationships between production and DR site, creating snapshots for third copy at DR site, and configuring them in appropriate replication groups and device groups means that there are lot of steps involved and a lot of room for error. There has to be a lot of checks and balances which need to be incorporated to make sure that the solution is set up correctly."
"Our ROI was minimal, because we use it for a cold, disaster recovery method."
"If they can make the application free like other vendors or include it in all the packages, it would be great."
"The solution's dashboard and reporting could be improved."
"We have to do manual verifications about the subscriptions often."
"Stability needs improvement."
"At the moment, we are not using the synchronous mirror, but we can implement the synchronous mirror. The only thing is that it needs another license. This is the same issue we have with business continuity. It needs another license to be implemented. You need too many separate licenses for the features. They should add some of the aspects of the premium bundle into the basic bundle. Sometimes our customers choose other replication services because of the initial cost of the licenses."
"The user interface could be simplified. They might want to have fewer options on it, to make it less complicated. There are a lot of options we never use ourselves. They're often very specialized and don't apply to us."
"This process can get out of control sometimes and cause excessive disk utilization."
"We must be able to integrate Flash Pool with SnapMirror."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's a highly cost-effective solution"
"The cost is low compared to different vendors."
"The pricing could be improved."
"It's part of the NetApp Firewall, so it's free."
"The product price is reasonable."
"The solution has monthly and yearly licensing options."
"The pricing can be improved."
"SnapMirror is extremely expensive. We had a hard time adjusting to our budget. If rated on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most expensive, I would definitely rate it ten out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp SnapMirror?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that NetApp SnapMirror is licensed as part of the ONTAP Data Protection bundle, which covers both NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault. For or...
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapMirror?
NetApp SnapMirror can be improved as the initial configuration is not simple; if you are new to NetApp and ONTAP, NetApp SnapMirror concepts take time to get right. Peering clusters, peering SVMs, ...
What is your primary use case for NetApp SnapMirror?
My main use case for NetApp SnapMirror is disaster recovery replication, primarily, as we have two data centers and NetApp SnapMirror keeps our critical data synchronized between them continuously....
 

Also Known As

No data available
SnapMirror
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Global Security Provider, SSM Health Care, Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, Shriners, BZWBK, Qatar Islamic Bank, Sudwestrundfunk (SWR)
University at Albany, City of Houston, Yahoo Japan, Washington Employment Security Department, DG Khan Cement Co. Ltd., AmTrust Financial Services, Sheridan College
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Fivetran, Dell Technologies and others in Data Replication. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.