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."This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"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."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"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."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"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."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"The integration is excellent."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"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 Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"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."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"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."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"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."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
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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