Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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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:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.3%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual Tape Library is 1.9%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct	7.3%
StarWind Virtual Tape Library	1.9%
Other	86.7%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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KellyVon Der Heyden

Sales Director at CLOUD READY SOLUTIONS

Scalable solution with a good technical support team

We use the solution for data backups and ransomware protection The solution is compatible with cloud storage platforms, such as Amazon S3. Also, it efficiently reduces the storage cost for archiving. The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough. We have been…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"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."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."

"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."

"The solution made our backups way more reliable."

"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."

"It is a stable solution."

Cons

"The speed could be improved."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"I would like to see better integration."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"Documentation management could be improved"

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

"There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems."

"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 Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."

"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."

"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."

"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"The price is a little high."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"The price could be cheaper."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."

"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

No data available

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...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recomme...

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Compared 56% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 8% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 27% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 23% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 19% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 16% of the time

FalconStor FreeStor vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 15% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Download StarWind Virtual Tape Library product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Storage Spaces Direct

No data available

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

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

For SMB and Enterprises, who either look to get rid of backup tapes completely, or are willing to accelerate backup process and add an extra level of protection, our solution is StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It is an appliance that eliminates the need in physical tape and “pretends” to be a supported tape drive or autoloader, keeping all data on inexpensive, fast and high-capacity spinning disks.

Even with explosive data growth, StarWind VTL fits the backup into backup window by accelerating it, so the process does not overlap with production time. Optionally, it creates additional copy of backup data for better safety. It is also available in a software-only form, as part of StarWind VSAN functionality.

StarWind VTL targets those, who need to replace existing tape backup infrastructure or accelerate it if regulatory requirements prohibit replacement. In case the goal is just virtualizing tape backup or creating a stretched backup infrastructure, StarWind Tape Redirector will come in handy.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library