NetApp FAS Series vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp FAS Series and StarWind Storage Appliance 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.
To learn more, read our detailed NetApp FAS Series vs. StarWind Storage Appliance Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature.""It's an easy product to use that is stable and has good performance.""The storage efficiency provided a maximum savings in our storage utilization.""The file sharing feature is most valuable.""Ability to use mirroring and SnapVault have made backup no longer necessary.""The most valuable feature of the NetApp FAS Series is the snapshot and the FlexClone for Oracle and Microsoft SQL environments. Additionally, the integration can be done with most all on-premise and cloud providers.""The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.""It has integrated snapshot and backup capability."

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"The integration is excellent.""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.""It is very easy to use and very cost effective.""We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location.""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.""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.""The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."

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Cons
"There is room for improvement in deployment and configuration processes.""Replication should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle.""The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper.""Interfacing with the cloud environment could be better. I want to be able to move some cloud volume and integrate it seamlessly with my home on-premise storage. Sometimes I have issues with port permissions. NetApp probably needs to improve more on the integration side from on-premise to the cloud.""NetApp FAS Series could improve by being more secure.""The user interface could be improved to have better graphics and the performance analyzer could be better.""We are not able to connect to the support of NetApp from Sudan. We have to go through many agents for support, which makes it difficult.""The solution could do more than just data."

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"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.""StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage.""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.""The dashboard features are not in the free version.""An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products.""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.""They could improve by providing integration with HP.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It’s difficult for us to get money, so make sure you get everything in order, because there’s no going back and saying “oh, I missed this or that”, so make sure you plan well and well in advance."
  • "it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer."
  • "The process for going to cluster mode is expensive."
  • "Most storage vendors also have software, or licensing bundles, which may offer the required licenses considerably cheaper, but do also maybe offer licenses, which are not needed."
  • "There are products available in market with comparatively lower costs."
  • "Cost effective storage for all performance levels (including all-flash)."
  • "The only area that could be improved is to lower prices for their All Flash FAS."
  • "The price it not low, but comparing features to other vendors, the price can be balanced."
  • More NetApp FAS Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It costs about 50,000 euros."
  • "StarWind by far provides the best bang for the buck."
  • "On the homepage, you can not see the pricing."
  • "The cost is determined by various factors, including the amount of terabyte storage you require, the number of nodes you want to purchase, and the duration of your maintenance agreement"
  • "With StarWind Storage Appliance, the payments made towards the licensing part of the product are on a per-node basis, making it cost-effective for us to use the solution in our company."
  • "We found that the price of StarWind was very good compared to VMware or Nutanix."
  • More StarWind Storage Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
    Top Answer:The price of NetApp FAS Series is the same as Dell's cost, so I don't think there are any comparable elements in the pricing part. The tool is expensive.
    Top Answer: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.
    Top Answer:With StarWind Storage Appliance, the payments made towards the licensing part of the product are on a per-node basis, making it cost-effective for us to use the solution in our company. StarWind… more »
    Top Answer:From an improvement perspective, I can't comment much about StarWind Storage Appliance since we use only two to three nodes in our company, with which I am currently happy. If I use the product at an… more »
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 27 in NAS
    Views
    5,302
    Comparisons
    3,510
    Reviews
    18
    Average Words per Review
    460
    Rating
    8.9
    10th
    out of 27 in NAS
    Views
    543
    Comparisons
    411
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    698
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.

    NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

    The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.

    NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features

    NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:

    • Scalability: NetApp FAS series is easy to scale, allowing organizations to rapidly grow their storage capacity according to demand.
    • Security: Protect and manage your data with various data protection and data management tools, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication.
    • Seamless integration: Integrate with other NetApp products and solutions to ensure a unified data management platform across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
    • Reduced costs: Consolidation of multiple storage boxes greatly reduces the data center footprint. From a management point of view, with NetApp FAS you manage a single storage box instead of multiple storage boxes.

    • Compatibility: Forward and backward compatibility ensures that you don’t have to trade in existing controllers. New controllers can always integrate with previously released controllers.
    • Multi-protocol support: Support for multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.
    • High performance and availability: The solution has high input and output per second performance and ensures that critical data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure.

    • Intuitive interface: The FAS series has a user-friendly interface and management dashboard, making it easy to manage your storage systems. With unified management, you can quickly run a single protocol on your entire system

    • Data cloning and replication: Easily clone databases of any size. Clones occupy a very, very small footprint on the storage until they are severed from the main database. Replications carried out by the system are fast and require very little bandwidth.

    Reviews from Real Users

    NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.

    Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”

    Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”

    For SMB and Enterprises who are looking for high performance primary storage for server virtualization, VDI, database and Big Data scenarios, or inexpensive secondary backup tier, our solution is StarWind Storage Appliance. It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, and associated software into an easily scalable storage platform.

    Additionally, the appliance features an optional gateway to Azure public cloud, which helps to implement an effective Disaster Recovery plan or meet regulatory requirements. StarWind SA scales up by adding individual disks and flash modules, or JBODs, while adding ready controller nodes allows scaling out. 

    StarWind SA targets those, who need high-performance primary storage or secondary storage for backup. In case there is a whole virtualization infrastructure to build from scratch, StarWind HCA will come in handy. Otherwise, if all the required hardware is present, StarWind Virtual SAN will be enough to build a high-performance virtualization setup. 

    Sample Customers
    Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
    Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization59%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm4%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government9%
    University7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise64%
    Large Enterprise27%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise22%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise55%
    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp FAS Series vs. StarWind Storage Appliance
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp FAS Series vs. StarWind Storage Appliance and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    NetApp FAS Series is ranked 2nd in NAS with 96 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. NetApp FAS Series is rated 8.8, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of NetApp FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp AFF, HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and IBM FlashSystem, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, VMware vSAN and StorMagic SvSAN. See our NetApp FAS Series vs. StarWind Storage Appliance report.

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    We monitor all NAS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.