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."Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"The solution is stable."
"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 most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"The processing is much faster with this product."
"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."
"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."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"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."
"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."
"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."
"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."
"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."
"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 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.
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