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Dell SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility ) [EOL] vs NetApp Snapshot 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 Snapshot
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Data Replication (2nd)
 

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.
Tanveer Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technical Office at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Snapshots have enabled us to restore critical data quickly and confidently after unexpected changes
The functions or features I have found most valuable in NetApp Snapshot are that it is easy to do and takes very little time. The main benefits that NetApp Snapshot provides for me are that if anything goes wrong, we can go back and restore something. It gives you peace of mind, which saves money, effort, and everything else. I use NetApp's WAFL architecture as it is their way of doing things, how to save the files and everything else. It is built-in. You cannot avoid WAFL when you use NetApp. Regarding the integration of NetApp Snapshot with applications and workloads, we have NetApp Snapshot integrated with our OpenStack platform.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 for this product was top notch."
"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Very good."
"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."
"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."
"NetApp Snapshot's most valuable features are the snapshot capabilities, you can take snaps of shared directories, files, and VMs."
"SnapMirror and Snapshot are both very reliable products."
"NetApp is extremely stable, no doubt about that."
"Compared to the traditional way we did backups, with Snapshot it takes us less time. It has improved my organization by saving us time."
"NetApp's Snapshot is better because there is no performance overhead."
"The consistency of Snapshot is very significant."
"We see that deduplication and compression give us a lot of space, so space efficiency impacts our data management strategy."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Azure, as we are able to easily do Azure backups and restores."
 

Cons

"The main pain point that we experienced is during device creation."
"Our ROI was minimal, because we use it for a cold, disaster recovery method."
"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."
"If you are new to the product, the initial setup might be a bit difficult."
"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)."
"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."
"In general, it’s very stable although some time SRDF don’t behave as expected specially if the link is not stable or saturated."
"NetApp Snapshot usually takes a lot of space on the volume, requiring manual removal. It should be more automated."
"The solution needs to ensure it has higher availability or business continuity."
"Not a perfect ten because there is one point off to give it room for improvement."
"The price could be improved a little bit."
"For improving the product, I would suggest that NetApp update their products more often."
"NetApp Snapshot's price could improve to allow them to capture more market shares."
"Specialized applications like SnapManager for Exchange (SME) are finicky."
"The licensing cost could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price of NetApp Snapshot depends on the use case. They charge by how much data you need, the capability, and for snap licenses."
"As far as their licensing costs, the licensing is paid on a yearly basis. The organization pays for the licensing based on the software and the capacity that they choose."
"The price of the solution is reasonable but could improve. However, if you are in a country that has a poor currency then the price will be considered expensive."
"It's not too expensive."
"If there is a way to save more on the number of snapshots, it should be included in the next release."
"NetApp Snapshot is expensive since you need to buy an additional premium license for it which is an extra cost over the payments made for NetApp...The license works during the entire life cycle of NetApp Snapshot."
"The price of this solution is fair."
"Snapshot is free and comes with the NetApp storage software. It's purely free of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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What method of data replication does NetApp Snapshot use?
Here's a breakdown of how the data replication by NetApp Snapshot works: it's through the snapshot replication method. What does that mean? Well, in simple words, the software creates copies of dat...
What is the storage scale of NetApp Snapshot?
Last time I checked, the NetApp Snapshot data replication software could go up to 255 snapshot copies. I'm not sure how familiar you are with similar software, but that's a pretty good number. It g...
Will NetApp Snapshot recover data in an emergency?
Well yes, the snapshots that NetApp Snapshot creates are your backup. But then there's also their feature for advanced backup. This allows you to copy backups to offline locations and also make arc...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Global Security Provider, SSM Health Care, Bar Harbor Bank & Trust, Shriners, BZWBK, Qatar Islamic Bank, Sudwestrundfunk (SWR)
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Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Dell Technologies, Fivetran and others in Data Replication. Updated: October 2026.
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