We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct 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."The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 7 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.6, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable solution with an easy initial setup process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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