HPE StoreVirtual vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #20, while StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.2. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 2.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE StoreVirtual vs. StarWind Virtual SAN Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

December 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

6.6

Pure Storage FlashBlade reduces total cost of ownership by enhancing efficiency, enabling fast restorations, and supporting diverse use cases.

Sentiment score

5.9

Users report significant ROI from HPE StoreVirtual, with benefits including reliability, cost-effectiveness, and challenges like licensing issues.

Sentiment score

6.9

StarWind Virtual SAN offers cost-effective, flexible storage solutions reducing operational costs, downtime, and hardware needs, with rapid ROI.

It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

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.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.6

Pure Storage FlashBlade's support is generally praised for responsiveness, despite occasional delays and communication issues, maintaining a favorable reputation.

Sentiment score

7.0

HPE StoreVirtual offers excellent customer service, despite occasional delays, with knowledgeable staff and effective issue resolution globally.

Sentiment score

7.8

StarWind Virtual SAN offers exceptional support with timely responses, expert staff, and 24/7 proactive monitoring for optimal performance.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

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.

Jccerong Heron

System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

8.6

Pure Storage FlashBlade excels in scalability, with seamless expansion, downtime-free growth, and praised support across various sectors.

Sentiment score

7.2

HPE StoreVirtual is praised for scalability, flexibility, and effective performance but has mixed reviews on cost per rack.

Sentiment score

7.6

StarWind Virtual SAN impresses users with seamless scalability, allowing effortless upgrades and configurations without downtime, supporting various setups.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

If we want to expand our storage or add disks, it is easy to add them, configure the RAID, and then deploy it.

Christian Nissia

IT Support Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

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.

Tyler Lejeune

Manager of Systems Administration at Monster Digital

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.1

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers exceptional reliability and impressive stability, featuring 99.999% uptime, seamless upgrades, and high performance.

Sentiment score

7.4

HPE StoreVirtual is praised for its stability, exceptional reliability, and effective resolution of minor technical and hardware issues.

Sentiment score

8.4

StarWind Virtual SAN offers stable, reliable performance with minimal issues, seamless updates, and efficient VM migrations, even during failures.

In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

I ran it on a two-node Hyper-V cluster setup, and I didn't experience any unexpected crashes or major issues.

Daniel Philot

Hosting Operations Senior Analyst at Equinix Brasil

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Room For Improvement

Users recommend better pricing, cloud integration, support, documentation, and analytics for Pure Storage FlashBlade, improving efficiency and compatibility.

HPE StoreVirtual requires enhancements in latency, stability, interface, scalability, and support for newer VMware, with simpler management and maintenance.

StarWind Virtual SAN needs better documentation, automation, integration, setup simplification, monitoring, and feature enhancements like deduplication and encryption.

Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

Its configuration should be easier.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade is costly but valued for performance, reliability, and reduced administrative overhead, justifying its premium price.

HPE StoreVirtual offers initial high setup costs but becomes cost-effective with scale, featuring simple licensing and free VSA for up to 1TB.

StarWind Virtual SAN is competitively priced, simple to license, easy to implement, and offers excellent value with flexible options.

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

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

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

This is a great product and good support even you are using free version!

Jose Escario

Infrastructure Manager at Beacon Fronline Solutions Inc

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade excels with ease of use, fast performance, scalability, seamless integration, and efficient storage features.

HPE StoreVirtual provides high availability, easy scalability, and efficient management, ideal for resilient, cost-effective storage across multiple hypervisors.

StarWind Virtual SAN offers cost-effective, high performance solutions with easy management, excellent support, and seamless integration for various platforms.

We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the HPE StoreVirtual report

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 2.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 5.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN	5.5%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.3%
HPE StoreVirtual	2.2%
Other	89.0%

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

Vebjorn Nergaard

Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

Reliable with helpful support and good replication

The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

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Jccerong Heron

System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs

The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Media Company

11%

Performing Arts

10%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	165
Midsize Enterprise	54
Large Enterprise	34

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?

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

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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...

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What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very good. We were able to get the software at a good cost....

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The only thing that I would say about documentation is there are some aspects of the documentation that are a little ...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

DataCore SANsymphony vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 23% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 13% of the time

More HPE StoreVirtual Competitors

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 12% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 10% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

December 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

December 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

December 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

StarWind SAN & NAS

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

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.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

December 2025

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