We performed a comparison between Pivot3 and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"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."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"The integration is excellent."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
Earn 20 points
Pivot3 is ranked 25th in HCI while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Pivot3 is rated 8.6, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Pivot3 writes "One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Pivot3 is most compared with VMware vSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StorMagic SvSAN, DataCore SANsymphony and StoneFly VSO NAS.
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