StarWind Virtual SAN Other Solutions Considered

kasala - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at River Run Computers, Inc.

We did. We evaluated a number of solutions which I won't name here. StarWind came out on top.

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MG
Network Operations Manager at LocalTel Yellow Pages

We looked into:

  • Open-E
  • HPE
  • VMware
  • Microsoft
View full review »
JG
IT Supervisor at Area Agency on Aging Region 9, Inc.

We did also evaluate VMware, Nutanix, and Scale.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind Virtual SAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Spencer Lines - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Systems Manager at HALL'S CONSTRUCTION CORPORATION

We did eliminate several other solutions. That said, it has been too long to remember which ones. I remember worrying that StarWind's performance was going to be one of those too-good-to-be-true situations. It wasn't. The hype lived up to the performance and reliability.

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NG
Field Engineering Lead at Superior Support Resources, Inc.

We also evaluated Open-E, StorMagic, NetAPP, and EMC.

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BH
Director Of Information Technology at Cass County Government

We have gone through the gamut of technologies and examined Linbit, Ceph, non-clustered ZFS, cluster ZFS, HPE Nimble, Pure, and more.

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Seth Weber - PeerSpot reviewer
Network & Systems Administrator at Clarion Forest VNA

We looked at our native Hypervisor's vSAN product, however, it required three nodes (or two with one witness node) and just wasn't feasible for our setup as an SMB.

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Wires382 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at WYATT EARLY HARRIS WHEELER LLP

We evaluated NetApp, Dell, SAN, and NAS solutions. All were way too costly.

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Luca Bertellini - PeerSpot reviewer
Cardio Solution Architect EMEA at General Electric

We also evaluated StorMagic, VMware vSAN, and Datacore.

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DR
Director of IT at BLDD ARCHITECTS INC

I thought about another SAN but just didn't want to go down that road. The cost to upgrade my VMware licenses to get vSAN from them just didn't seem worth it. 

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Eren Cakmak - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at Kemmler Kemmler GmbH

Yes, we evaluated StorMagic before deciding on StarWind.

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TW
Project Engineer at ACTA inc.

We looked at VMware vSAN.

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A Mizuno - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at The Children's Foundation

We did not evaluate other options.

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AL
Owner at Integral IT Services

We did not evaluate other options as the other options were prohibitively expensive.

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MIT - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Administrator at Ludwig Meyer GmbH & Co. KG

We looked into VMware and others. They usually had a way higher cost or worse performance or worse GUI/documentation, or all of those things together.

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reviewer298561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology & Product Director at Precise Imaging

I previously evaluated VMware.

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zeeshan ahmed9211 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager SOC at Askari

I was not a part of the evaluation team.

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Max Polanc - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at Protect Fundus d.o.o.

We only evaluated StarWind.

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Jacob Egan - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at White Oak Management

We looked into a few other shared storage solutions, such as Dell and Nutanix.

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JC
Network And Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I did evaluate VMware vSAN.

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Laurence Brazil - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at STFC

We looked at VMware vSAN.

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CK
System Administrator at Wilson Logistics

We considered storage spaces direct, however, didn't ever implement it on our new two-node cluster.

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NisarAhmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelance Technology Writer at TechnologyAdvice

I evaluated other options and found StarWind Virtual SAN is a reliable and cost-effective solution.

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AB
Works

Before deciding on the solution offered by StarWind, we also analyzed HPE LeftHand SAN Solutions, however, this was significantly more expensive.

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DH
Web Services and Systems Development at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

We looked at Dell/EMC and HPE solutions and they were all extremely expensive.

A sales rep was quick to get me in touch with an engineer who patiently walked me through my endless questions of compatibility and setup. They even assisted with recommendations for host hard drives: both HDD and SSD options.

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Leone Athayde Salarini - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology infrastructure analyst at Centro Universitário São Camilo - ES

I did not evaluate other options. 

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Raul Faria - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Axanet GmbH

We did not evaluate other options. We used other software from StarWind beforehand and were convinced of the quality of their products, so the first thing we looked into was StarWind's solution to our problems.

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JM
Information Systems Security Officer at Graham Corp

We had experience with HPE Simplivity and VMware vSAN.

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TO
Manager, Network at Burnham Holdings Inc

I looked at a few HCI (Dell, vxRail, and Nutanix) and the VMware vSAN solution.  It was cost-prohibitive for me

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Adam Charlton - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Slimming World

I did look at purchasing EqualLogic, however, the cost of that hardware would be far greater than StarWind's

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DM
Works with 11-50 employees

We evaluated Dell and Nutanix.

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SB
Global IS Admin at Benshaw, Inc.

We looked at Dell and Nutanix.

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reviewer189641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systemadministratör at Hantverksdata Sverige AB

We did check for options, but as we are running Hyper-V natively, there were not a lot of options as we didn't have the budget to go for an expensive hardware solution, and Microsoft does not provide a solution to this problem in the same way that VMWare for example does.

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reviewer0295725 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at Euro Garages Limited

We did not evaluate other options.

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MB
Network Administrator at Armitage Technology Group Inc.

We did not evaluate other options.

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Laraib Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Operation Center Analyst at ASAL Innovation PVT LTD

We have evaluated a few options previously. However, I can't recall the names. That process was handled a year ago.

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AR
Partner at Arbeit

We previously evaluated FreeNAS.

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EH
NOC Operator at SEDOC

We did not evaluate other products before StarWind vSan.

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BR
Information Technology Supervisor at Northwest Medical Center-Winfield

We evaluated multiple options, including a software-only Nutanix solution and the VMware vSAN. These were both very expensive and had a very strict hardware compatibility list, which caused the project's budget to swell exponentially. We also looked at some open-source options such as ESOS and GlusterFS, however,  these required many hours of setup and there wasn't a real enterprise support option for either.

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TF
Sr. IT Systems Engineer at Weidner Property Management LLC

We looked at VMware vSAN.

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GF
Chief Technology Expert at Rapid Response Networks

We did look at Dell and VMware SAN products as well. 

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FO
New Business and New Products Manager at dualBASE

We also evaluated VMware vSAN.

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jioller - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant and Content Manager at Jotelulu

We looked into VMware, Hyper-V, and some other options.

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KH
Senior Network Engineer at Accel Entertainment Inc

We briefly researched Dell and Microsoft options, but those were physical SAN solutions, not vSAN.

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Tomáš Bauer - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at RTVS

We took into consideration VMware vSAN or Veeam. However, we chose StarWind Virtual SAN.

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RK
Chief Information Officer at Scott County Hospital, Scott City, KS

I was not around when the decision to use StarWind came about. I don't know if there are other 3rd party vendors like StarWind. 

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Indeep G - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at Prism Economics & Analysis

We evaluated the physical tape library, however, it was too costly.

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Tayre José Rivas Salas - PeerSpot reviewer
TI support analyst at Invermedia

I used VMware and HyperV before, however, a colleague used StarWind Virtual SAN and he taught me how to use it and I liked the tool.

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SN
Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Services at Northgate High School

We looked at other solutions from HP, Barracuda, Netapp, and Azure HCI.

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RT
System Admin | Network Engineer | Project Lead at R.K. Black, Inc

We evaluated several solutions, including SCALE, Dell EMC, Dell MD Storage Arrays, HPE 3PAR, and others.

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AC
Integration Engineer at Insight

We looked into various hardware and software offerings from Nutanix, NetApp, and HPE. StarWind fills the void when the budget does not allow for the expensive hardware, and we have older systems we can repurpose.

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Christiaan Engelbrecht - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Lancet Laboratories

For storage, I have explored Open NAS (Linux) and Windows NFS 3.0.

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Kevin Kastberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Consultant at Brightkast

We looked into TrueNAS and Windows storage spaces.

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Christopher Morley - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and Consultant at Unified Microsystems

No, we found the price point compelling, which led to immediately trying StarWinds versus traditional SAN costs from DELL and HP, etc.

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BW
Director Of Technical Services at D-J Engineering Group Inc.

Yes, we looked at Dell PowerVault, HPE Lefthand, and Lenovo NAS.

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Jethro Morais - PeerSpot reviewer
Sys Admin at FDC - Fundação Dom Cabral

I did not evaluate other options. 

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SH
Automation Engineer at Wunderlich-Malec Engineering

For the application, I compared it to a regular vSphere SAN. However, I did not compare it to other Hyper-Converged solutions. At the time, it was pretty clear that they had a long track record and a good reputation which aided in deciding on them as a solution.

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RE
IT Infrastructure Manager at Highbridge Caravan Centre

We did look into a Netapp upgrade.

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BH
Director Of Information Technology at Cass County Government

We looked at Truenas. 

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CM
I.T. Director at MBI

We considered VMware's native vSAN technology and may have gone with it if I hadn't found StarWind while searching for alternatives.

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АС
Deputy Director at a government with 11-50 employees

We evaluated free options including FreeNAS and Ceph. Our experience was that FreeNAS has low performance and reliability, and Ceph was complex to deploy.

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RG
Network Specialist at Nexans aeA

Yes, we used HPE StoreVirtual, we moved to StarWind to reduce costs. We tried VMware VSAN and the cost was too elevated for our requirements.

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LP
Head of Information Technology at Head of Information Technology

We did look at other hardware solutions.

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reviewer1495242 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Daifuku America

We did not evaluate other options.

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BS
Network Administrator at MUM Industries

I did explore VMware's native VSAN solution. However, its biggest limitation is it requires three nodes. We have two very heavy duty host servers and getting a third one would have been costly. Each server is roughly around $25,000 USD. Therefore, getting a third one, so we could run a VSAN using VMware, was a bit prohibitive. This is why I went to StarWind in the first place.

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SS
Area Sales Manager at ABPL

We have evaluated VMware and found the cost was a bit high compared to StarWind Virtual SAN.

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AS
Chief Technology Officer at American Data Technology, Inc.

We looked at big-name solutions such as NetApp, Cisco, and others.

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PeerSpot User - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 11-50 employees

Yes, we had a look at Lenovo XClarity as well as Nutanix AOS and VMWare vSAN.

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FS
Company Owner at a insurance company with 11-50 employees

We evaluated Microsoft S2D before choosing this product.

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Mart Vernik - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Archive System Administrator at Rahvusarhiiv

VMware vSAN financial aspects give StarWind an advantage.

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BD
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

We also looked at Microsoft and Dell.

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JJ
Regional Service Team Manager at ATA Technologies

While each of my co-workers on this project researched their own solutions to this project, I only brought the idea of StarWind's vSAN to the table.

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JG
IT Supervisor at Area Agency on Aging Region 9, Inc.

Maxta, Nutanix, VMware, KVM.

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CG
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees

We looked at VMware vSAN and a generic server plus SAN solution.

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reviewer1423983 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at WARREN COMMUNITY HOSPITAL INC

I evaluated VMware vSAN.

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T.
Technology Solutions, Support & Training at UNISONMEDIA Group, Inc.

I have looked at Nutanix and VMware.

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MH
Owner at Split Digital LLC

We looked at StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN and StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

With converged storage, we studied a lot of solutions and went into them all. We looked at Microsoft's solution for converged storage along with some of the other ones. StarWind had better pricing and deployment strategy. It also didn't have as many hardware requirements, which allowed us to spend some extra money on things that we really wanted, like 40GB network cards.

We read everything we could find when evaluating the solution. When you are doing something this critical with so many users who will be working on it all the time, you can't afford to tinker with it. We not only went and read all the reviews on StarWind, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and VMware vSAN, but we put them in some trials and tested everything on our test network. StarWind was the one that we ultimately decided would fulfill our requirements. Happily, it has lived up to our expectations.

Of course, the support was a huge bonus. You don't know that until after you have put your money in, but once we had purchased it, we found out how good the support was all the way around.

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PS
Senior Cloud Services Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I tried to use things like FreeNAS/TrueNAS. However, it just wasn't quite right for my needs, whereas StarWinds vSAN worked as expected.

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BF
Security and Systems Engineer at New Creation Consulting

We tested out Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and priced out other competing traditional SAN options.

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reviewer1351425 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO - Partner at SabreTech Consulting LLC

We had thought about proprietary SANs, but those didn't fit our requirements for cost and flexibility. 

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BB
Works at GOSHEN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS

We looked at EMC and HP, but both were also much more expensive than a system we could build ourselves based on the StarWind software.

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EK
Works

Before choosing this solution we evaluated HPE SimpliVity, Scale Computing, and Dell EMC.

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JM
Director of Technology at FAFCO, Inc.

Yes, we looked at Nutanix and several traditional dedicated SANs.

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FE
Technischer IT-Berater at ITC GmbH

Due to budget constraints, Ceph has been evaluated as an alternative. We also took a look at Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN.

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Arcwell R. Hernandez - PeerSpot reviewer
Director/Solutions Architect at TechOps Trinidad & Tobago LTD

We did evaluate VMware.

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PL
Senior Technical Architect at HSData LTD

We initially looked at several external shared storage solutions and found them to be cost-prohibitive. We then evaluated vSAN solutions from HPE (this was discontinued) and the native solution from VMware. The native solution from VMware had fewer moving parts than the StarWind vSAN solution, but was more expensive and didn't provide the required level of flexibility that we needed regarding mixed HDD/SDD storage.

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LF
Enterprise Cloud Manager at Exponential-e

No other options were considered. This as hardware had already been purchased.

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MC
CEO, Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We evaluated VMware vSAN and StorMagic.

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SS
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees

We evaluated HP SAN, Nutanix, and Dell Storage.

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reviewer1560054 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

I did preliminary pricing on HP, Dell & Nimble, but the costs associated with hardware were going to present a challenge to our school at this point.

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reviewer1465917 - PeerSpot reviewer
Corporate Technology Manager at MTE LOGISTIX INC.

StarWind came highly recommended and rightly so.

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GP
CEO at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

We did look at DataCore.

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reviewer1493754 - PeerSpot reviewer
Informatics Analyst III at University of Alabama at Birmingham

I didn't evaluate any other options, as I'm not aware of another software that does this.

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Andrey Naumov - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Craft Group

We also considered the option of VMware vSAN, but it is very expensive.

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AC
SAO Dept. Head at LLC BIT

I had read an article about Intel X520 network cards performance testing with StarWind vSAN, and we chose it. No other options were evaluated.

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JJ
Solutions Architect at ITsavvy

We've also looked into VMware. 

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LW
Technical Helpdesk Manager at PurpleJelly Ltd

I can't recall seeing anything else that caught my eye.

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CV
Operations Manager at Lipman Insurance Administrators Inc.

Dell EMC, Nimble, 3PAR.

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GD
Virtualized Solutions Engineer at Quanti solutions

We looked into Qnap and Synology.

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PL
Application Engineer at Rakuten

We did ook at VMware vSAN.

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reviewer1378515 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at Sheremetevo Security

We immediately chose Starwind because our system administrator had experience with this product in the past.

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MH
IT Manager at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

We looked into Tegile and Tintri, about two years prior. We've also looked at some Dell EMC solutions. We were able to go with any hardware vendor we wanted to and the reviews for the software solution showed that it was highly recommended.

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NC
Technical Department Manager at ACS SA

We did not evaluate other options. We have only classic storage and filers.

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reviewer1185738 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

We evaluated Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

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it_user1146222 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Tech/ Network Admin at Society of St James

I have read about different solutions, especially VMware vSAN. In comparing these two, it is easy to choose StarWind for a company the size of mind, with needs that StarWind can easily cover.

I have done some research on that subject and everything directed me to StarWind VSAN. Now, I can clearly state that I do not regret my decision.

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AK
Head of Local Area Network Department at JSC Ufanet

We did not evaluate other products because this option was the only one available at our cost point.

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GrzegorzEBX - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at ElectronicsBox.com.pl

I didn't. StarWind was the first solution I found, and after the first tests, I stopped looking at other solutions.

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AM
Works at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We evaluated solutions by HPE, EMC, and NetApp.

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reviewer1145355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works with 201-500 employees

The timeline to get the storage was extremely limited so I didn't have time to do evaluation testing.

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НФ
Works at Cloud4y.ru #1 корпоративный облачный провайдер

We evaluated other options prior to this, but we didn't like them.

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AH
IT Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

We didn't evaluate any other vendors. In our price range, this was the only vendor.

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Rami.chiha - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems & Storage Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

We evaluated the following other options:

  • Using traditional architecture by buying external storage and connecting it to the three existing nodes 
  • Using a VMware solution. However, this will lead to losing the Microsoft licenses, and VMware costs more than StarWind Virtual SAN
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AA
Director of Technical Sales at SSTL Group

I was directly recommended by the manufacturer.

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MP
Engineer at Peoples' Friendship University of Russia

As an alternative to StarWind vSAN for Hyper-V, I considered Microsoft S2D, but I had to abandon it due to the fact that it does not support hardware RAID.

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reviewer1253883 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Before we purchased StarWind, we evaluated several software solutions and a couple of hardware solutions. In the case of the software solutions, StarWind was the clear winner in performance and ease of use. In comparison to the hardware solutions, it was a lot more economical.

We fully evaluated Open-E and StarWind. StarWind was both easier to set up and manage, and it also outperformed Open-E.

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reviewer1244424 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Systems and Security at a wellness & fitness company with 11-50 employees

I did not evaluate other products before choosing this one.

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RI
Director of IT and Corporate Security at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We evaluated other solutions including SimpliVity and VMware vSAN, but StarWind Virtual SAN was on top (best choice). This was not just because it fit our budget, but for their pre and after sales support.

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reviewer903849 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

We were unable to evaluate other options because the dedicated SAN systems that provided the same level of redundancy were out of our price range.

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KL
Specialist in the center of security at PERN S.A.

No other options were evaluated.

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DG
Information Systems Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees

We looked into Nutanix, as well as Red Hat's solution, but StarWind seemed to be the best setup for us, the best fit for our environment.

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LZ
VMware Administrator, VMware vExpert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
LeonKan - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtual Cloud Admin at IST

We evaluated VMware vSAN and HPE StoreVirtual VSA.

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reviewer1157808 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

We looked at Nimble, HPE VSA, and Tegile storage.

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reviewer1068294 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

We evaluated VMware before settling on this product.

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TT
Regional IT Manager at SABIS

We chose this product based on its good reviews.

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reviewer1100463 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a retailer with 51-200 employees

We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective.

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it_user910362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a consumer goods company with 51-200 employees

I looked at a number of other options including EMC, NetApp, Dell, HPE, etc.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind Virtual SAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.