Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Zadara comparison

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2,063 views|1,377 comparisons
83% willing to recommend
Zadara Logo
731 views|343 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Zadara 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Zadara Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure.""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.""The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory.""Its technical support is excellent."

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"The processing is much faster with this product.""One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service.""Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information.""The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed.""The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use.""Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important.""It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed.""The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

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Cons
"Documentation management could be improved""I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools.""It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution.""More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring.""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."

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"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve.""There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market.""In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve.""The initial setup of the solution is complex.""Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market.""Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves.""Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product.""The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."
  • "Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."
  • More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."
  • "The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."
  • "It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."
  • "The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."
  • "The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."
  • "One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."
  • "If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."
  • More Zadara Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load… more »
    Top Answer:It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution. In comparison, the process is easy for VMware and VSAN.
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use.
    Top Answer:In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve.
    Top Answer:We use services on Zadara for our customers in Brazil.
    Ranking
    Views
    2,063
    Comparisons
    1,377
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    241
    Rating
    7.0
    Views
    731
    Comparisons
    343
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    1,918
    Rating
    9.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    MS Storage Spaces Direct
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way. 

    Zadara Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

    • Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management. 
    • Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution. 
    • Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

      1. 
      Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed. 

      2. 
      Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

      3. 
      Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

      4. Inline compression.
      Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room. 

    Zadara Features

    • Centralized management.  Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location. 
    • File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

    • Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time. 

    Reviews from Real Users

    Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability. 

    Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

    Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

    Sample Customers
    Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt
    Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business71%
    Large Enterprise29%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise54%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business73%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise18%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Zadara
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Zadara and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 7 reviews while Zadara is ranked 10th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 9 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.6, while Zadara is rated 8.8. 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 Zadara writes "We're able to scale up or down almost instantly, and changes are handled efficiently by their managed services team ". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, StarWind Virtual SAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas Zadara is most compared with MinIO, Amazon S3, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Wasabi and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Zadara report.

    See our list of best Software Defined Storage (SDS) vendors.

    We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.