We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We are happy with the support that IBM provides us."
"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"We acquire companies (and things), so we end up with odd hardware. We bring it behind the SVC and it allows us to migrate stuff off of it seamlessly. SVC can also cover up a host of defects of the underlying storage."
"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 183 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VMware vSAN, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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