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."It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"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."
"The integration is excellent."
"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."
"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."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"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."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"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."
"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."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"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."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
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, 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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