FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Formation Data Systems and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Formation Data Systems is ranked #30, while StarWind is ranked #12 with an average rating of 10.0. Formation Data Systems holds a 1.1% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS).

To learn more, read our detailed Software Defined Storage (SDS) Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

January 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

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

As of February 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.4%
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance	2.4%
FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform	1.1%
Other	93.1%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

Read full review

Use FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform?

Leave a review

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.

Read full review

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

No data available

Educational Organization

16%

Marketing Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	8

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...

See all answers

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

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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 18% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform

Compared 65% of the time

FalconStor FreeStor vs FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform

Compared 35% of the time

More FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform Competitors

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

Scale Computing Platform vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Local vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 8% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 7% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 7% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

January 2026

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

January 2026

FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform report

Download FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

January 2026

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

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

FormationOne is a Dynamic Storage Platform that delivers hyper-scale storage capacity, with excellent cost savings, agility and elasticity. Automation, self-service and API level integration deliver multi-tenant private cloud capabilities for your data center, running on your choice of industry-standard hardware. FormationOne runs on x86 server nodes that virtualize all the elements of enterprise data storage with a loosely-coupled, fully-distributed architecture. FormationOne includes key differentiated capabilities including QoS performance control and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) integrated with Copy Data Management that maximize performance, improve controls, and lower your TCO. FormationOne provides remote replication and data mobility with SafeGuard for replicating between Formation Cloud Domains as well as replication into AWS S3 or Glacier for Cloud DR, Backup, Archive and tiering.

Formation Data Systems

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

Reference here: www.formationds.com

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

January 2026

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Nutanix, Red Hat and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: January 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.

We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.