We performed a comparison between StarWind Storage Appliance and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"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."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"The integration is excellent."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"The solution is stable."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"Lacks an integrated backup solution."
"The updating process could be easier."
"I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short. Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware."
"It can be very expensive."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."
StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StorMagic SvSAN, DataCore SANsymphony and StoneFly VSO NAS, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex. See our StarWind Storage Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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