

StorMagic SvSAN and Azure Local both compete in the enterprise IT solutions category, with SvSAN focusing on cost-effectiveness and simplicity, while Azure Local emphasizes advanced features and integration capabilities. StorMagic seems to have the upper hand in terms of customer service responsiveness and price efficiency, but Azure Local excels in cloud integration and advanced Kubernetes support.
Features: StorMagic SvSAN supports zero-downtime operations with only two nodes and integrates seamlessly with existing hardware, offering a simplified deployment experience. It excels in high availability and is platform agnostic, without hardware-specific requirements. Azure Local offers strong performance with Azure Kubernetes Service and seamless management through Azure Arc, providing a unified cloud experience on-premises and excellent infrastructure optimization capabilities.
Room for Improvement: StorMagic SvSAN could improve its licensing model and enhance data protection features like compression and deduplication, as well as provide centralized configuration management. Azure Local could address deployment complexity and high licensing costs, along with smoother integration with Azure Arc for better cluster management.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorMagic SvSAN offers straightforward on-premises deployment with excellent customer service, characterized by rapid responses and support personnel familiarity. Azure Local's deployment can be complex, especially in hybrid environments. Although it has adequate technical support, it might not match SvSAN's personalized service level.
Pricing and ROI: StorMagic SvSAN is appreciated for cost efficiency, offering predictable and straightforward cost management with pricing based on storage capacity. Azure Local, while competitive in features, incurs higher costs due to licensing complexities. StorMagic provides clear ROI and significant cost savings for budget-conscious environments.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
StorMagic SvSAN helped us save around sixty percent on previous costs.
With StorMagic, we calculate the return on investment to be about two years, compared to other solutions we could have adopted.
StorMagic SvSAN has delivered great benefits in overall cost-efficiency since it is an integral part of our complete solutions for clients.
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
They have more advantages than VMware, especially for containerization, and they provide good support as well.
I rate them at a nine out of ten due to their prompt responses and effective solutions to our issues.
They respond rapidly to support requests and provide assistance beyond their scope.
StorMagic offers exemplary customer and technical support, ensuring excellent service and timely assistance that enhances my clients' experience.
We can simply add more ESX hosts to a cluster and deploy additional controllers without any issues.
StorMagic SvSAN is easy to scale.
Scaling CPU and servers can be costly due to increased licensing fees beyond two nodes.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
After achieving good maturity, it became easier.
StorMagic SvSAN has demonstrated flawless stability over the past six years, with no reported downtime, bugs, or glitches.
Its ability to seamlessly migrate running machines to another host during maintenance ensures uninterrupted operations and a transparent user experience.
The stability of StorMagic SvSAN is excellent.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing.
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors.
It would be beneficial to have a central place for configurations, similar to VMware vCenter.
Ideally, the console should provide plugins or similar configuration options for seamless integration with these tools.
Unauthorized access to the SvSAN server could cause significant damage.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
The pricing model, based on the usable storage capacity, is simple and predictable.
I would rate the cost a one out of ten with ten being the most costly.
Choosing the maximum capacity proved cost-effective, especially compared to alternatives like VMware vSAN, which would have been significantly more expensive based on VCP cores.
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations.
I am able to bring fully functional virtual infrastructure in a matter of two hours with StorMagic SvSAN, compared to other technologies that are very complex.
For our solution in production plants, stability is crucial.
StorMagic engineers were very helpful in setting up the system, remoting into our system to assist, which was very beneficial.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| StorMagic SvSAN | 2.0% |
| Azure Stack HCI | 3.2% |
| Other | 94.8% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.
Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.
What are the key features of Azure Local?Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.
StorMagic SvSAN is simple hyperconverged storage used to eliminate downtime. It provides high availability with two nodes per cluster, and boasts users among thousands of organizations to keep mission-critical applications and data online and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
SvSAN is a lightweight solution that has been designed specifically for small-to-medium-sized businesses and edge computing environments such as retail stores, manufacturing plants and even oil rigs at sea.
SvSAN provides organizations with a simple, 'set and forget' solution that enables lightweight high availability as a virtual SAN (VSAN) with a witness VM that can be local, in the cloud, or as-a-service, and support up to 1,000 2-node clusters. It provides a low barrier to entry with capacity-based licensing and minimal hardware requirements, allowing organizations to use existing equipment. Plus, any IT professional can deploy and manage 1,000 sites as easily as 1, with automation tools and scripts.
SvSAN gives organizations choice and control by allowing configurations of any x86 server models and storage types, even mixed within a cluster, while vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors can be used. It is built to perform, with code that eliminates performance bottlenecks and caching features to boost performance and prevent over-provisioning. SvSAN accommodates future growth and technologies too, with support for containers and VMs, and allows compute and storage to be scaled easily and independently.
SvSAN's additional features help to deliver 100% uptime with synchronous mirroring and no single point of failure, even with poor, unreliable networks, and non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades. Disaster protection is provided with capability for stretched clusters that reduce risk, plus extensive integrations with backup and DR providers and the option to add a third node to clusters. SvSAN also ensures data security with FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption, software RAID options and the elimination of split-brain risk.
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