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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros and cons

Vendor: NetApp

4.4 out of 5

63 reviews
95% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers robust features like Snapshots and SnapMirror for data restoration and mirroring, enhancing file storage and accessibility. Integration with cloud environments ensures stability, while FlexClones and deduplication drive cost-efficiency. However, cumbersome navigation, support challenges, and management tool complexities can hinder user experience. Data tiering and disaster recovery need enhancement, such as improved hard data movement and region-based backups, to fully capitalize on automation and API-driven processes.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers valuable Snapshot and FlexClone features for efficient data management and operational recovery.

Its REST-API-driven automation capabilities enhance flexibility and ease the management processes.

The SnapMirror function facilitates seamless data replication between on-premise and cloud environments.

Its scalability and integration with AWS are crucial for efficient data movement and backup.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides comprehensive support that ensures minimal downtime and effective issue resolution.

CONS

Navigation on some configuration parameters is cumbersome, making the learning curve steep.

Support provided by NetApp has room for improvement and often involves routine questions.

Data tiering needs enhancement, such as moving hard data to faster disks.

Key features like syncing between regions within AWS and Azure are desired as native functionalities.

License management, especially for HA environments on Azure, needs to be streamlined.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Pros review quotes

JH

Lead Storage Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2019

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.

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CG

Christian Gruetzner

Service Architecture at All for One Group AG

Jul 18, 2019

NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well.

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PR

Storage Architect at NIH

Oct 29, 2019

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.

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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

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reviewer1380831

Storage Engineer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 2, 2020

One of the most valuable features is its similarity to the physical app, which makes it familiar. It's almost identical to a real NetApp, which means you can run all of the associated NetApp processes and services with it. Otherwise, we would definitely have to deploy some hardware on a site somewhere, which could be a challenge in terms of CapEx.

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AS

Cloud Architect at IBM

Jul 22, 2020

The feature which I like the most is that it has the capabilities that the traditional storage system offers. It provides all the functionality. The deduplication and compression work exactly like ONTAP's traditional storage. So people who have experience with that find it very easy to manage.

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reviewer1376757

Infrastructure Consultant - Storage, Global Infrastructure Services at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 11, 2020

With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically.

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JH

Senior Analyst at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 2, 2020

We're able to use the SnapMirror function and SnapMirror data from our on-prem environment into Azure. That is super-helpful. SnapMirror allows you to take data that exists on one NetApp, on a physical NetApp storage platform, and copy it over to another NetApp storage platform. It's a solid, proven technology, so we don't worry about whether data is getting lost or corrupted during the SnapMirror.

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SG

Shricharan Ganesh

Technical Architect at Hexaware Technologies

Oct 29, 2020

The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high.

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Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 1, 2022

The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after.

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ES

Sr. Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 2, 2019

The FlexClones make all the management easier for us.

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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Cons review quotes

JH

Lead Storage Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2019

Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now.

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CG

Christian Gruetzner

Service Architecture at All for One Group AG

Jul 18, 2019

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.

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PR

Storage Architect at NIH

Oct 29, 2019

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.

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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Free Report: NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.

865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1380831

Storage Engineer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 2, 2020

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.

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AS

Cloud Architect at IBM

Jul 22, 2020

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.

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reviewer1376757

Infrastructure Consultant - Storage, Global Infrastructure Services at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 11, 2020

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

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JH

Senior Analyst at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 2, 2020

When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly.

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SG

Shricharan Ganesh

Technical Architect at Hexaware Technologies

Oct 29, 2020

It definitely needs improvement with respect to clustering and with respect to more collaborative integrations with Azure. Right now, we have very limited functionalities with Azure, except for storage. If CVO could be integrated with Azure that would help. When there is any sort of maintenance happening in the cloud, it disrupts the service in Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

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Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 1, 2022

Cloud Volumes ONTAP's interface could use an overhaul. Sometimes you have to dig around in Cloud Manager a little bit to find certain things. The layout could be more intuitive.

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ES

Sr. Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 2, 2019

The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that...

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Cloud Migration

Public Cloud Storage Services

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Veeam Data Platform vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Commvault Cloud vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Rubrik vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

HPE Zerto Software vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Nasuni vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

N-able Cove Data Protection vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Box vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Google Cloud Storage vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Portworx Enterprise vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Dropbox Business - Enterprise vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

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