NetApp SnapMirror vs. SharePlex vs. Syniti Data Replication

NetApp SnapMirror is a no-brainer when it comes to retaining an offsite backup for disaster recovery purposes. The backbone of the product is the Snapshot technology built into NetApp technology. In my experience, the Snapshot/SnapMirror software has been flawless and very dependable. The only piece that I can see adding in the future is potentially connecting SnapMirror to the cloud as an additional backup destination.

Incentivized

SharePlex really shines when set alongside GoldenGate. The licensing costs of the two products would appear to place them in entirely different ballparks yet they perform nearly identically in practice. SharePlex is suitable for heterogenous replication of one database to another. The list of targets is ever increasing, with support for all major RDBMS vendors as well as support for popular NoSQL and JSON replication. SharePlex is effective when replicating from on-premise to cloud. Whether that's migrating data, creating a high-availability presence in a public or private cloud, or populating a data mart, it does the job quite well.

Incentivized

• Seeding is only required initially
• Replication updates are very swift
• Traffic can be reduced with network compression
• It is well integrated with NetApp's SnapCenter backup tool

Incentivized

• SharePlex is highly configurable and versatile. It can handle virtually any kind of data replication needs.
• SharePlex is very robust. Its message queuing mechanism provides fast data transfer from the source to the target.
• SharePlex software is very stable and mature, and it is highly scalable and reliable.
• SharePlex support is exceptionally good. We are very satisfied with its support engineers.

Incentivized

• Pro: Stability in storage we have had these in place for 3 years and besides a failed disk, there have been no issues.
• Pro: Replication options are pretty good
• Pro: Storage Provisioning as well as a wealth of features that are an additional add-on for competitors
• Cons: Support is lacking in customer service and being proactive of system alerts and errors
• Cons: the Learning curve. Easy to make mistakes using the user interface as it does lack functionality.

Incentivized

• When first introduced the Change Data Capture process was awkward. Each subsequent release has improved the process.
• Sometimes the Shareplex monitoring service in Foglight gets overly aggressive in sending out error notifications and can end up spamming the admins with email alerts for one problem. We have had to tone that down.

Incentivized

Very well versed and a good product to deal with downtime to recover from the failure is pretty good. Also, NetApp's engagement on Incident calls is very professional and humble. I would give a 100% rating to this product as I have been working on this for the past 5 years. It is stable, fast and highly reliable

Incentivized

We depend on it to supply data to our various OLTP and Data Warehouse environments

Incentivized

It just works 99% of the time. Even if there's a network outage, jobs just pick up after the outage is over. The only reason it's not a 10 is the weakness of the GUI interface for configuration. For me, all configuration has to be done at the command line.

Incentivized

It is very usable once you get over the initial setup.

Incentivized

NetApp support has always been great. With the NetApp Auto-support system/web portal, the visibility into your NetApp storage is incredible. There have been times when I've been contacted by them for an issue that I haven't even discovered yet. For example, I received a call 20 minutes after a drive failed in our filer. I hadn't checked my email at that time and therefore didn't see the alert.

Incentivized

Support is very responsive. They take ownership of the problems and see them through to the finish. When a bug is found they work towards developing testing and making the fix available to us to solve the problem.

Incentivized

We chose NetApp's SnapMirror solution primarily because it was already integrated and licensed on our storage platforms. This allowed us to have a very fast implementation time and really allowed us to quickly close the learning gap of our administrators. Not only is NetApp SnapMirror easy to use, but it is also really easy to set up. IBM's product seemed quite difficult to set up and it would have taken our team much more time (which we don't have) to learn that product than NetApp's SnapMirror.

Incentivized

SharePlex support is an award-winning team, which is available for 24 hours, and any time they have solutions with perfect expertise. Besides, SharePlex has supported data migration, with multiple reporting features that ensure there are comprehensive database evaluations. The simplicity of SharePlex installation also gives it a higher mark, is very efficient, and allows companies to understand it easily.

Incentivized

• NetApp SnapMirror has allowed us to recover critical data in a timely manner on multiple occasions.
• We have been able to decrease our RPO objectives.
• We have been able to decrease our DR costs as well.

Incentivized

• Postive: easy to replicate data for non-prod use
• Negative: we spent a lot time due to data out of sync

Incentivized