Cloudian HyperStore vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

The compared Cloudian and StarWind solutions aren't in the same category. Cloudian is ranked #11 in FaOS , with an average rating of 9.3, and holds a 3.2% mindshare in the category. StarWind is ranked #11 in SDS , with an average rating of 10.0, and holds a 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Cloudian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudian HyperStore and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudian HyperStore vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudian HyperStore vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

File and Object Storage

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Kiran Rajanna

Senior Solutions Architect and Cloud Security Consultant at Cgi Deutschland KG

A seamless solution offering data encryption, quality service, and security encryption

Cloudian HyperStore needs to incorporate AI and predictive analysis. It would be helpful if the solution could analyze and predict how to manage data better. The end users should not have access to protected documents. They should be able to drop the documents. The capacity management dashboard can be better. We also want two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator as MFA. Hence, the user would access the console not just by logging in with a password and username but with third-party applications as well.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"Considering a customer's need for a cost-effective solution, Cloudian HyperStore fits well for data protection scenarios."

"The most valuable features are its scalability and Amazon S3 compatibility because we can move back and forth with a hybrid cloud."

"The cost was the main reason we chose to use this solution."

"The tool has S3 capability. Its scalability is excellent. From a security and encryption perspective, the solution supports SSL encryption. It is a seamless solution offering data encryption, quality service, and security encryption."

"It is very durable and that is particularly important."

"Cloudian HyperStore is one hundred percent stable."

"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."

"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."

"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."

"The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."

"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."

"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"The speed could be improved."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Cloudian HyperStore needs to incorporate AI and predictive analysis. It would be helpful if the solution could analyze and predict how to manage data better. The end users should not have access to protected documents. They should be able to drop the documents. The capacity management dashboard can be better. We also want two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator as MFA. Hence, the user would access the console not just by logging in with a password and username but with third-party applications as well."

"As it is an S3 solution with the same protocol as the one we have with AWS, having better integration with AWS will be beneficial."

"It is a cloud-based environment and at times, it is not very simple to use."

"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."

"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."

"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."

"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."

"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."

"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."

"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."

"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Our fees are approximately half a dollar per gigabyte."

"The solution is cheap."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Non Profit

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudian HyperStore?

The tool has S3 capability. Its scalability is excellent. From a security and encryption perspective, the solution su...

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What needs improvement with Cloudian HyperStore?

One potential improvement would be offering an open-source or community edition of the product. This would allow team...

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What is your primary use case for Cloudian HyperStore?

Our primary use case for Cloudian HyperStore is as a reliable, scalable solution for backup and long-term archive of ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

MinIO vs Cloudian HyperStore

Compared 27% of the time

Scality RING vs Cloudian HyperStore

Compared 21% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Cloudian HyperStore

Compared 12% of the time

Dell ECS vs Cloudian HyperStore

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Cloudian HyperStore

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudian HyperStore Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 27% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 18% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

August 2025

Download Cloudian HyperStore product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

No data available

HyperStore, Cloudian HyperStore Object Storage, HyperStore Object Storage

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Cloudian HyperStore lets you start small and grow to hundreds of petabytes on-premises simply by adding nodes. Leverage the proven interoperability of the industry’s only 100% native S3 API.

Cloudian

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

NTT Communications, Casale, Kumo

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Cloudian HyperStore vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

Free Report: Cloudian HyperStore vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudian HyperStore vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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