We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and StorMagic SvSAN 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."This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The price was right."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"It's quite easy to install."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews while StorMagic SvSAN is ranked 8th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 9 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while StorMagic SvSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StorMagic SvSAN writes "The best choice for performance and price". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas StorMagic SvSAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, DataCore SANsymphony, LINBIT SDS and StarWind Storage Appliance. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StorMagic SvSAN report.
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