NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for AWS comparison

"The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens."

"The ability for our users to restore data from the Snapshots is very valuable."

"Unified Manager, System Manager, and Cloud Manager are all GUI-based. It's easy for somebody who has not been exposed to this for years to pick it up and work with it."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of file storage."

"The most valuable features of this solution are SnapShot, FlexClone, and deduplication."

"Multiprotocol is the most valuable because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data from Linux and from Windows clients. That was our value proposition for CVO, Cloud Volumes ONTAP."

"I like how you can easily pair on-prem with the cloud and the cloud backup feature. I like the whole integration with on-prem and the cloud for SnapMirror relationships."

"The good thing about NetApp is the features that are available on the cloud are also available on-premises."

"The NetApp Cloud Volume Services for AWS has been helping migrate workloads onto the cloud. We did migrate a couple of native applications into AWS using this, and it was helpful."

"The solution could be better when we're connecting to our S3 side of the house. Right now, it doesn't see it, and I'm not sure why."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is, as we know, is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now."

"How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically."

"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."

"I'm very happy with the solution, the only thing that needs improvement is the web services API. It could be a little bit more straightforward. That's my only issue with it. It can get pretty complex."

"One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have."

"When it comes to a critical or a read-write-intensive application, it doesn't provide the performance that some applications require, especially for SAP. The SAP HANA database has a write-latency of less than 2 milliseconds and the CVO solution does not fit there. It could be used for other databases, where the requirements are not so demanding, especially when it comes to write-latency."

"We have customers that are still using IBM mainframes and that very old SNA architecture from IBM. There are questions about how you interconnect the data on the mainframe side... But I don't know if it's worth it for NetApp to invest in developing products to include mainframes for a few customers."

"We'd like the solution to be less expensive and offer lower latency."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase."

"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."

"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."

"Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it."

"Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost."

"The solution's pricing is reasonable."

"Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have."

"If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp."