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NetApp Disaster Recovery
Your primary site goes dark. Nobody should be re-mounting datastores by hand — NetApp Disaster Recovery turns the SnapMirror copies on your ONTAP arrays into failover, failback and test plans, for VMware VMs and Kubernetes apps — to a second site, Amazon EVS, VMC on AWS or GCVE.
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Same software. Better outcome — at a lower cost.
How it’s rated
Full scoreboard ↓Quick answer
The NetApp platform family
This page covers NetApp Disaster Recovery — the Console DR service, with SnapMirror async, sync and active sync from ONTAP One. The rest:
Quick facts
30-second orientation- Product
- SaaS orchestration of SnapMirror failover, failback, test failover and migration for VMware and Kubernetes
- Maker
- NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP); CEO George Kurian; FY2026 revenue $6.93 billion
- Status
- Version 4.3.7 (16 September 2026); renamed from BlueXP disaster recovery on 6 October 2025
- Price
- $0.04 per GB a month PAYGO; $0.038 on 12 months, $0.034 on 36; billed per TiB-hour
- Licence
- 30-day trial, then PAYGO via AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Marketplace, or a BYOL file from NetApp sales
- Engine
- SnapMirror async (5-minute floor on FlexVol), sync and active sync — all in ONTAP One, not sold apart
- Targets
- Another ONTAP site; Amazon EVS or VMC on AWS with FSx for ONTAP; GCVE with NetApp Volumes; AVS in private preview
- Needs
- ONTAP 9.10.0+, vCenter 7.0u3+ and a Console agent; standard (SaaS) Console mode only
- India
- Both ONTAP sites can be Indian; FSx for ONTAP runs in Mumbai and Hyderabad; Ingram Micro distributes NetApp
- In India via
- TechBag — SnapMirror sizing, replication-plan design, quote in INR with GST, first test failover
Understand storage-based disaster recovery before you buy it
Most product pages skip this. We start here — so you buy a capability, not a buzzword.
What is orchestrated storage DR?
The array replicates the data; a service turns those copies into ordered failover, tests and failback.
Hand-run SnapMirror and a runbook vs NetApp Disaster Recovery — the honest table
What consolidation actually replaces, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | Hand-run SnapMirror and a runbook | NetApp Disaster Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| Breaking the mirror | An admin breaks each volume by command | One failover action for the whole plan |
| Bringing VMs up | Mount, register and re-IP machines by hand | Mappings, IPs and boot order applied for you |
| Proving it works | A risky weekend cut-over, if ever | A FlexClone test while replication runs on |
| Coming home | Rebuild relationships in reverse, one by one | Reprotect, then fail back from the plan |
| Audit evidence | Screenshots and an email thread | Activity reports and per-user job logs |
| What it is NOT | — | Backup, ransomware detection, or DR off ONTAP |
The cheapest test is the 30-day trial: protect one application’s datastore, run a FlexClone test failover, and time it against your RTO.
The five pieces of the platform
Vendors love diagrams; buyers need to know what they’re actually operating. Here’s the whole platform, demystified.
Console
The service sits in the SaaS NetApp Console, the platform called BlueXP until October 2025. Sites, resource groups, replication plans, jobs, reports and the API live here.
Agent
A lightweight agent in your network talks to vCenter and ONTAP over port 443. For on-prem to on-prem, NetApp says put it at the DR site; one agent per vCenter is supported.
SnapMirror
Scheduled snapshots of each datastore’s volume or LUN cross to the peered DR cluster, incremental forever, keeping deduplication and compression. Existing relationships are reused.
Recovery
On failover the service breaks the mirror, mounts datastores, registers VMs, applies network and IP mappings and starts them in order. Kubernetes apps recover through Trident Protect.
A SaaS console and an agent you host — SnapMirror moves the data array to array, the plan brings the VMs up.
Nine capabilities. Replicate, orchestrate, prove.
NetApp Disaster Recovery wraps ONTAP SnapMirror replication in plans that bring whole applications up at the DR site.
Snapshots on your schedule
Each plan sets an RPO schedule and a retention count; ONTAP supports async updates as often as every 5 minutes on FlexVol volumes.
Sync and active sync in ONTAP
SnapMirror synchronous holds RPO at zero; active sync adds transparent automatic failover for SAN, and for NAS from ONTAP 9.19.1.
Recover from any leg
Since November 2025 a cascading SnapMirror chain can be used, so a third copy at a distant site can become the recovery source.
Ordered failover
Resource groups set VM boot order and delays; subnet, network and IP mappings apply at the target, with vCenter-level automapping since July 2026.
Reshape workloads in transit
Resource transformations (September 2026) alter a workload during failover, and custom scripts quiesce and resume applications around it.
Reprotect, then return
Reprotect reverses the SnapMirror direction and a failback takes VMs home; on GCVE a resync can be deferred past busy hours.
Drills on a FlexClone
A test boots VMs from a FlexClone of the chosen snapshot in an isolated network, with no extra physical capacity on ONTAP and replication still running.
Drills that run themselves
Kubernetes plans can schedule recurring test failovers (June 2026), and the test resources are cleaned up automatically afterwards.
Reports with a named user
Reports cover VMware, Kubernetes or both for any period, and since August 2026 every job records who started it, or marks it “system”.
Watch NetApp Disaster Recovery in action
An INSIGHT 2025 session on VMware protection, recovery into Amazon EVS, a SnapMirror active sync explainer and the 2024 introduction. All from NetApp’s official channel; the older clips use the former BlueXP name.
Protecting virtualized infrastructures with NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery [1221-2]
An INSIGHT 2025 breakout on VMware protection, filmed weeks after the service was renamed from BlueXP disaster recovery.
BlueXP disaster recovery and Amazon EVS
Recovery into Amazon Elastic VMware Service on FSx for ONTAP, recorded under the former BlueXP name, before EVS support reached GA.
SnapMirror active sync business continuity solution
How active sync lets two ONTAP clusters serve the same storage, with a mediator deciding when to fail over; NAS support came later.
Introduction to BlueXP disaster recovery
The 2024 introduction, recorded when the service was still called BlueXP disaster recovery; Kubernetes and GCVE came later.
Want a live, India-context walkthrough for your environment?
Book a guided demo →A mirror is not a recovery plan. NetApp Disaster Recovery turns SnapMirror into one.
Here’s what genuinely sets it apart — and exactly where it stops.
DR built on replication you already own
If your VMware datastores sit on ONTAP, SnapMirror is already licensed through ONTAP One. The service adds what SnapMirror lacks on its own: it maps every VM to its datastore and volume, reuses or creates the relationship, and wraps the lot in a plan you can fail over, test and fail back.
The array does the copying
Replication runs between ONTAP clusters, so deduplication and compression carry across the WAN and nothing replicates at the hypervisor. Test failovers boot from FlexClone copies that consume no extra physical capacity. NetApp argues hypervisor-level replicators lose those savings; size both before you decide.
VMs and containers in one plan view
Kubernetes workloads, OpenShift Virtualization included, went GA on 16 September 2026 over the same SnapMirror transport, and the dashboard and reports show VMware and Kubernetes protection together. Price is public too: $0.04 per GB a month, falling to $0.034 on a 36-month term.
Where it stops
Both ends must be ONTAP: on-prem arrays, FSx for ONTAP, Cloud Volumes ONTAP or Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. Only VMware on NFS or VMFS and Kubernetes are listed, so no Hyper-V, physical servers or vSAN. It runs only in the SaaS Console, not air-gapped, and it detects no ransomware.
The numbers behind the platform
What your NetApp Disaster Recovery rollout looks like
Map VMs to volumes
List the applications that need a DR site, the datastores and ONTAP volumes under them, and which already have SnapMirror.
Peer the clusters
Peer source and DR clusters and SVMs, confirm ONTAP 9.10.0+ and vCenter 7.0u3+, and deploy the Console agent at the DR site.
Build the first plan
Start the 30-day trial, group one application’s VMs, set boot order, network and IP mappings, and pick the RPO schedule.
Test, then fail over
Run a FlexClone test failover, then a planned migration to the DR site and back, timing each step against the RTO target.
License and widen
Choose PAYGO or a 12- or 36-month term on measured capacity, add the remaining groups, and schedule regular drills.
The review scoreboard
Modelled on Gartner Peer Insights structure. *Counts and breakdowns are illustrative pending verified review collection.
Quick poll — what’s driving your evaluation?
Talk to an advisor“We already mirrored every datastore to our Pune site. The plans finally gave us a failover we could run without a war room.”
“Quarterly drills used to take a weekend. The FlexClone test boots our ERP VMs in an isolated network on a weekday afternoon.”
“Network mapping at the vCenter level saved us redoing IP rules in eleven plans after the DR subnet changed.”
“Billing on used source capacity was easy to forecast, but check whole volumes count, not only the VMs in a plan.”
“Our OpenShift apps and vSphere VMs now sit in one report for the auditor, with the user who ran each job.”
“It works only in the SaaS Console, so our air-gapped core banking estate stays on scripted SnapMirror runbooks.”
Where everyone sits — the grids
Analyst firms bury this view behind paywalls, and G2 retired its Grid. So here’s TechBag’s synthesis of the disaster recovery market — tap any vendor to see why it sits where it does.
TechBag Disaster Recovery Grid
Execution strength vs product vision — the classic market map, minus the paywall.
$0.04 per GB a month of used source capacity, PAYGO.
Source Flexibility × Data-Loss Floor
The grid nobody publishes — how many storage platforms, hypervisors and workload types a product can protect vs how close to zero data loss its stack can go.
ONTAP only, VMware and Kubernetes; 5-minute async, zero RPO via ONTAP sync.
Positions are TechBag’s illustrative synthesis of public review-platform data and vendor documentation — not a reproduction of any analyst graphic. Verify before relying on it.
NetApp Disaster Recovery vs the DR orchestration field
Against VMware Live Recovery, HPE Zerto Software, Veeam Data Platform, Azure Site Recovery and Nutanix Disaster Recovery — on workloads, RPO, orchestration, price, limits, ransomware, support and India.
| Dimension | NetApp Disaster Recovery | VMware Live Recovery | HPE Zerto Software | Veeam Data Platform | Azure Site Recovery | Nutanix Disaster Recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | SaaS DR for ONTAP | vSphere DR stack | Journaling DR for VMs | Backup suite with CDP | Managed DR into Azure | DR inside NCI |
| Deployment | SaaS + your agent | Appliance per site | Appliances everywhere | Self-hosted | Vault + local appliance | Prism, both ends Nutanix |
| Workloads covered | VMware + Kubernetes | vSphere VMs only | VMware and clouds | Six hypervisors + agents | VMs and physical | Nutanix only |
| Replication and RPO | 5 min async; 0 in ONTAP | 1 min–24 h by licence | Seconds, 30-day journal | Seconds via CDP | Points every 5 minutes | NearSync to zero |
| Orchestration, failback | Plans, tests, reprotect | Plans in vCenter | Recovery Plans | Runbooks in Premium | 100-machine plans | Prism recovery plans |
| Pricing model | Per GB of used capacity | ACC per core, or SRM | Per protected VM | Per workload (VUL) | Per instance, monthly | NCI tier or add-on |
| Published entry price | $0.04/GB/month | No list price | No per-VM price | ~$350–450 reported | $25/instance/month | Quote only |
| Included vs add-on | Engine free, DR paid | Clean room needs ACC | Vault recovery in ARE | CDP in all editions | Target costs extra | In Ultimate only |
| Scale limits | No VM ceiling published | 5,000 VMs per server | 30-day journal ceiling | 168-hour CDP window | 15-day points, 100/plan | Sync needs < 5 ms |
| Ransomware defence | Older snapshot, no scan | Vault and clean room | Encryption alerts | Immutable, YARA scans | Copies the damage | Earlier recovery points |
| India DR site | Two ONTAP sites you pick | Your vSphere sites | Wherever you target | Your site or Vault India | Four Indian regions | Your second cluster |
| Support | Console cases, NSS link | Sev 1 in 30 minutes | HPE Tech Care | 24/7, 1-hour Sev 1 | Paid plan from $29 | 1-hour P1, 30 min MC |
| Lock-in and exit | ONTAP at both ends | vSphere, VCF for ACC | Moves across platforms | Licence moves with VM | Azure is the target | Nutanix at both ends |
| Best fit | ONTAP-backed VMware | VCF with a 2nd site | Seconds on any storage | DR on the backup licence | Rent an Azure region | Nutanix HCI estates |
Which approach fits you?
Honest fit signals — because the fastest way to lose your trust is to pretend one product wins every scenario.
Choose NetApp Disaster Recovery if…
- ✓Your VMware datastores or Kubernetes volumes already sit on ONTAP, so SnapMirror is licensed and only the orchestration is missing
- ✓You want failover, failback and FlexClone test drills priced per GB at a published rate rather than per VM on quote
- ✓Your DR site is a second ONTAP array, FSx for ONTAP under Amazon EVS or VMC, or Google Cloud NetApp Volumes under GCVE
Compare alternatives if…
- ✓Part of the estate is Hyper-V, physical or on non-ONTAP storage — Veeam, Zerto or Azure Site Recovery reach further
- ✓You need RPOs of seconds from a journal rather than 5-minute snapshots — Zerto and Veeam CDP do this
- ✓The DR control plane must run air-gapped or on your own premises — VMware Live Recovery and Veeam are self-hosted
Do not expect…
- ✓Ransomware detection — that is NetApp Ransomware Resilience, priced separately
- ✓DR for anything off ONTAP, or for Hyper-V, physical servers or vSAN
- ✓A Gartner backup or DR placement — NetApp’s Leader rating is for Enterprise Storage Platforms
NetApp Disaster Recovery is one of 27 disaster recovery products TechBag carries. The Disaster Recovery guide narrows them to a shortlist and shows the reasoning. →
What does hand-run DR cost you?
Drag the sliders (VMs you protect; infrastructure staff-hour cost). Estimates model the staff time spent breaking mirrors, mounting datastores, re-registering and re-addressing VMs and running DR drills by hand, at an assumed 1.5 hours per VM a year, with 70% of it removed by replication plans and test failovers. Both figures are assumptions. Illustrative.
Loaded cost = salary + overheads per productive hour. Illustrative only — your TechBag quote models your actual environment and modules.
Three ways to consume it
Published: NetApp lists Disaster Recovery at $0.04 per GB a month pay-as-you-go through the AWS, Azure or Google Cloud marketplaces, $0.038 on a 12-month and $0.034 on a 36-month subscription (BYOL or marketplace), metered on used capacity of the protected source volumes and billed per TiB-hour; volume and term breaks are available. A 30-day trial at unlimited capacity comes first. SnapMirror carries no separate price: it is part of ONTAP One. NetApp prints no rupee price. TechBag measures your protected capacity, then quotes in INR with GST.
Pay-as-you-go
Best for pilots and changing estates
- $0.04 per GB a month of used source capacity
- Via AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Marketplace
- No term; 30-day free trial first
+ Platform add-ons
Best for a broader rollout
- Scoped to your estate
- Add-on modules as needed
- Phased, right-sized deployment
12- or 36-month term
Best for a settled DR estate
- $0.038 (12 months) or $0.034 (36 months) per GB
- BYOL licence file or marketplace contract
- Volume and term breaks available
Buy it for less — TechBag pricing beats list
Whatever the list prices above, TechBag negotiates a significantly better deal — with GST-compliant INR invoicing and local support. Ask us for your discounted quote.
Get an India-ready quote
Tell us your requirements and current tools — we’ll model it against what you spend today.
The 8 questions to ask every vendor
Take this into your next vendor call — including ours.
Is every workload you need to protect on ONTAP — arrays, FSx for ONTAP, Cloud Volumes ONTAP or NetApp Volumes?
Are they VMware VMs on NFS or VMFS datastores, or Kubernetes apps? Hyper-V, physical and vSAN are not listed.
Do both arrays run ONTAP One? ONTAP Base cannot add SnapMirror; older systems upgrade to One for a fee.
Is 5 minutes enough, or do some apps need sync or active sync, with the inter-site latency that implies?
Can your security policy accept a SaaS control plane? The service does not run in restricted or private mode.
Where will the target run: a second Indian data centre, FSx for ONTAP in Mumbai or Hyderabad, or GCVE?
Has the used capacity of every protected volume been measured? Whole volumes are billed, not just the planned VMs.
Who runs test failovers, how often, and who signs the report your auditors or regulators will ask to see?
Questions buyers ask
Ready to evaluate NetApp Disaster Recovery?
Map your VMs to ONTAP volumes and measure the capacity first, or let a TechBag advisor design the replication plans, check ONTAP One licensing and quote in INR.
Stats, ratings, review counts and pricing are illustrative and sourced from public materials; verify before purchase.