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 Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."
"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."
"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 processing is much faster with this product."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"The documentation could be better."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"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 initial setup of the solution is complex."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."
"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."
"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."
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) and Wasabi. See our VMware vSAN vs. Zadara report.
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