We performed a comparison between VMware vSAN and Zadara based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"The solution is stable."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."
"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."
"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."
"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."
"The processing is much faster with this product."
"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."
"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."
"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."
"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."
"Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves."
"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."
VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews while Zadara is ranked 22nd in All-Flash Storage with 9 reviews. VMware vSAN is rated 8.4, while Zadara is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zadara writes "We're able to scale up or down almost instantly, and changes are handled efficiently by their managed services team ". VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray, whereas Zadara is most compared with MinIO, Amazon S3, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Wasabi and Microsoft Azure Block Storage. See our VMware vSAN vs. Zadara report.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
