We performed a comparison between StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN 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."The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"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."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"The ease of use is great."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"Only the stretched cluster requires a minor improvement."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
StorMagic SvSAN is ranked 13th in HCI with 9 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StorMagic SvSAN is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StorMagic SvSAN writes "The best choice for performance and price". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StorMagic SvSAN is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, DataCore SANsymphony, LINBIT SDS, Veeam Backup & Replication and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell Unity XT. See our StorMagic SvSAN vs. VMware vSAN report.
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