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."Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The price was right."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."
"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."
"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."
"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"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."
"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."
"The processing is much faster with this product."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"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."
"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."
"It can be very expensive."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"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."
"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."
"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."
"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 initial setup of the solution is complex."
"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."
"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."
VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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), Wasabi and Microsoft Azure Block Storage. See our VMware vSAN vs. Zadara report.
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