We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and StarWind Virtual Tape Library based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"Updates need improvement."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 11th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 6 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual and VMware vSAN. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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