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."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"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."
"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."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 7 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 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 solution with an easy initial setup process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". 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, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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