HPE StoreVirtual and StarWind Virtual SAN are competitive offerings in the storage solutions market. HPE StoreVirtual holds an advantage with its robust integration capabilities for compute, storage, and networking, making it a unified solution appealing for those within the HP ecosystem. StarWind Virtual SAN stands out with its cost-effective model, high availability feature, and the flexibility of hardware use, providing a compelling choice for users seeking affordability and simplicity.
Features: HPE StoreVirtual provides revolutionary platform integration, supporting VMware, Microsoft, and HP hardware, making the integration process seamless for users who want a single platform for various IT needs. It allows sophisticated management of storage through network RAID technology, providing options like RAID 10 to ensure data redundancy. Users appreciate the unified point of contact for support, reducing complexity in issue resolution. StarWind Virtual SAN's remarkable features include active-active high availability, allowing continuous uptime even when a node fails. Its synchronized virtualization enhances hardware flexibility while maintaining performance. The Virtual SAN software turns commodity hardware into high-performing shared storage, optimizing costs.
Room for Improvement: HPE StoreVirtual users call attention to complex licensing models, lack of SSD support, and looming end-of-life challenges, urging the need for a fresh integration strategy. Issues also arise with its management interfaces and stability compared to conventional SANs. For StarWind Virtual SAN, users suggest improvements in documentation clarity and wish for better disaster recovery features and licensing transparency to ease the setup and operational process.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE StoreVirtual offers simplicity in on-premises deployment but receives mixed reviews due to slow response times despite having proactive customer service. StarWind Virtual SAN is lauded for its flexible deployment options, including both private and public cloud setups, and enjoys a reputation for excellent customer service with a dedicated support team that users find exceedingly knowledgeable and proactive.
Pricing and ROI: HPE StoreVirtual's pricing is variable, influenced by scaling needs and additional licensing for advanced features, stressing the importance of assessing true capacity requirements to manage costs. In contrast, StarWind Virtual SAN provides a straightforward node-based licensing model, deemed highly cost-efficient by SMBs due to its simple setup and absence of hidden fees. Both offer significant ROIs, though StarWind is noted for delivering more predictable cost efficiencies.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.
Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.
They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly who will be able to connect, verify your setup, run its parameters, and see exactly what's working and what is not, and adjust it, and they really help you with that.
The customer support from StarWind Virtual SAN is great, as the people are knowledgeable and have great knowledge about the product and the functionality we require in the system.
If we want to expand our storage or add disks, it is easy to add them, configure the RAID, and then deploy it.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
When you move from a two-node cluster to a three-node cluster, you have to completely redo the way that they are connected to each other with iSCSI.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.
I ran it on a two-node Hyper-V cluster setup, and I didn't experience any unexpected crashes or major issues.
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.
This is a great product and good support even you are using free version!
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| StarWind Virtual SAN | 5.5% |
| HPE StoreVirtual | 2.5% |
| Other | 92.0% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 19 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 19 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 165 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 54 |
| Large Enterprise | 34 |
HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.
StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.
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