We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Scale and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It makes our file system sharing a lot easier, even across different continents. We have had file systems shared across different continents with no performance degradation."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms."
"Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for."
"Allows us to share files across multiple environments."
"It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads."
"It is a scalable solution."
"We are using it for monitoring all of our storage."
"The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it."
"It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step."
"Maybe it needs integration with HA."
"They should probably simply the Red Hat implementation portion. This portion was not as straightforward as I would like it to be."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Making it a little easier to add bad file sets would help. There is a transition to how you add storage and how you add a file set, so making that a little smoother would probably be my recommendation."
"We do have some issues where Spectrum Scale does not work as expected. We have seen our Spectrum Scale servers go down unexpectedly, but because we have a cluster, it does not take out the entire organization."
"The main issue that we have now is with the encryption. They want to use more metrics in encryption, which is not working very well."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"They require more media visibility."
IBM Spectrum Scale is ranked 7th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 10 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews. IBM Spectrum Scale is rated 8.4, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Scale writes "A stable solution with valuable profile-sharing features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". IBM Spectrum Scale is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, Portworx Enterprise, VMware vSAN, DDN IME and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and DataCore SANsymphony. See our IBM Spectrum Scale vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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