NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs VMware Live Recovery comparison

"The main benefit we get from this product is the ability to deploy it anywhere we want, whether that's on-prem, a remote physical location, or in the cloud. It doesn't matter from an operational perspective where it is. The command line and operating system are the same."

"The most valuable feature is its exceptional performance and storage efficiency."

"It makes sure we have control of the data and that we know what it's being used for. The main thing for us is that we need to know what applications are consuming it and responsible for it. The solution helps us do that."

"Its scalability is very good."

"The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are good. Snapshot copies are pretty much the write-in time data backups. Obviously, critical data is snapshotted a lot more frequently, and even clients and end users find it easier to restore whatever they need if it's file-based, statical, etc."

"We are definitely in the process of reducing our footprint on our secondary data center and all those snapshots technically reduce tape backup. That's from the protection perspective, but as far as files, it's much easier to use and manage and it's faster, too."

"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."

"Its features help us to have a backup of our volumes using the native technology of NetApp ONTAP. That way, we don't have to invest in other solutions for our backup requirement. Also, it helps us to replicate the data to another geographic location so that helps us to save on the costs of backup products."

"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."

"SRM's best feature is automation."

"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."

"The community provides good knowledge, so I can get answers if I have special inquiries."

"Its capability to schedule, write and configure the recovery and scheduled steps, such that you don't have to come in and start manually trying to recover the entire machine. You just push a button to recover the VMware and everything is done."

"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the integration part, along with the subsequent hardware."

"I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest."

"I rate the scalability a five out of ten."

"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."

"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."

"The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases."

"The cost needs improvement."

"I would like to see better integration with Active IQ."

"There is room for improvement with the capacity. There's a very hard limit to how many disks you can have and how much space you can have. That is something they should work to fix, because it's limiting. Right now, the limit is about 360 terabytes or 36 disks."

"If they could include clustering together multiple physical Cloud Volumes ONTAP devices as an option, that could be helpful."

"There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases."

"For cloud-based solutions, the cost seems quite pricey, so we stick to on-premises deployment."

"In my view, if VMware comes up with an appliance-based solution like vCenter Server (which was also Windows-based), it will be much easier for deployment. I"

"The solution is on the expensive side."

"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."

"The licensing area needs improvement as the cost per virtual machine is high. If they offered discounts or minimized their prices, it would be more beneficial."

"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."

"The infrastructure of the solution needs to be more software-based"

"The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing."

"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."

"Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two."

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

"They have a very good price which keeps our customers happy."

"The solution's pricing is reasonable."

"It is expensive. There are no costs in addition to their standard licensing fees."

"If we wanted to use the AWS solution, we would have to manage two or three different platforms and pay more money than what we should have to pay, as some of the features don't even exist. If we wanted to, we could use AWS cloning, but it is useless because it uses more space, is more expensive, and takes more time."

"VMware SRM is quite expensive."

"It is reasonably priced, and its cost hasn't been a significant factor in our implementation."

"Mature products like VMware SRM often have higher costs."

"After Broadcom acquired the solution, the licensing cost increased drastically"

"I would say VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is very expensive in comparison with other available virtualization solutions."

"VMware SRM is a little bit pricey."

"The cost of SRM is a little bit high, especially for smaller companies."

"It is an expensive platform. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten."