We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN and SwiftStack 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."The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"The price was right."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"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."
"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."
"The general consensus on what we've done is that the restores coming back from it have been faster than they were from our prior vendor. Ingest speeds are fine. The restore speeds have improved."
"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."
"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."
"The performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."
"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."
"SwiftStack is also quite flexible when it comes to hardware. It depends, of course, on the use case and the kind of hardware you want to buy. But you have quite a bit of choice in hardware. The SwiftStack software itself does not impose anything on you."
"The graphs are most valuable. They have a lot of graphs and reports that you can run to see what's happening in the background to configure OpenStack Swift."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"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."
"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."
"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."
"It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st."
"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."
Earn 20 points
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 17th in File and Object Storage. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Dell ECS, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Cloudian HyperStore and Scality RING. See our StarWind Virtual SAN vs. SwiftStack report.
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