We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct 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."The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"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."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 8th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 2 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 105 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.6, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable software storage solution that offers performance, reliability, and affordability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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