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."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"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."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"The integration is excellent."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"All the features are working great."
"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"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."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"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."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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, StoneFly VSO NAS and DataCore SANsymphony, 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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