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Maxta Hyperconvergence Software vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (4th)
Maxta Hyperconvergence Soft...
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
HCI (35th)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (14th), All-Flash Storage (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

HCI
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Hosni - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 24, 2024
Provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor
You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost-effective point. Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems, it has always done exactly what it set out to do. It provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V. It's simple and easy to use, The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation.
LC
Feb 20, 2020
Has the ability to have a single-pane-of-glass using the VMware interface but it needs better support
The product helped improve the way our organization functions starting with our hiring practices. We do not have to have a storage engineer or other engineering specialists. So, for example, I had a budget to get someone for a security engineer position of $120,000 a year. In the end, after talking to several local people in my industry, they just told me that security guys will come in and then somebody will offer them $5,000 more and they will just go where the money is. So I went with a third party called the Arctic Wolf Networks to do all my monitoring of my Office 365 environments, all of our servers, collect all the logs, and get all the services I needed from one source that would be consistent. This way, I can hire just general networking engineers and they can run everything. I do not have to have special employees and the benefits of that flexibility are pretty great. With the solution, you can swap out a drive for a larger capacity drive. You can lose a couple of drives and everything still runs. You can lose the server and it is self-healing and you can schedule maintenance around events. But I do not have to have staffing 24-hours a day because we do not have outages. That is probably the biggest thing. Meanwhile, in another part of the network that I am currently taking over from the global holding company, they have outages all the time. Sometimes it is due to a network failure or sometimes it is just poor engineering practices and standards. Over there we just set up to large servers and a couple of data centers using the VxRail system, which is like vSAN, so it is pretty similar stuff to our current setups but just uses other products.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 30, 2023
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The single-pane-of-glass VMware interface makes configuration and management easy so you do not need IT specialists."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"The integration is excellent."
"StarWind Storage Appliance is simpler and more effective than using Microsoft products. We chose it because it can be easily integrated with Microsoft."
 

Cons

"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"A new company took over the product and now the support for Maxta has gone way downhill."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
"We are happy with the price."
"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
"StarWind is best price/performance for SMB."
"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."
"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
Information not available
"On the homepage, you can not see the pricing."
"It costs about 50,000 euros."
"We found that the price of StarWind was very good compared to VMware or Nutanix."
"I rate StarWind Storage Appliance's pricing an eight out of ten."
"StarWind by far provides the best bang for the buck."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, the payments made towards the licensing part of the product are on a per-node basis, making it cost-effective for us to use the solution in our company."
"The cost is determined by various factors, including the amount of terabyte storage you require, the number of nodes you want to purchase, and the duration of your maintenance agreement"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
No data available
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
If you are comfortable with the solution and you feel that you don't need support, you can begin with the free licenc...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
Areas for improvement in StarWind Virtual SAN include simplifying the setup process, especially for users with limite...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical ...
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
 

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Information Not Available
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
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