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."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."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"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."
"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."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"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."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"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."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"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."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The server files are larger than before."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd 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, StoneFly VSO NAS and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our StarWind Storage Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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