NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

NetApp and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Additionally, 95% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP 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.

To learn more, read our detailed NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

May 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows customers to manage SAN and NAS data within a single storage solution

The tool's most valuable features are the SnapLock and SnapMirror features. If something goes wrong with the data, we can restore it. This isn't a mirror; we store data in different locations. If there's an issue on the primary site, we can retrieve data from the secondary site. Multiprotocol support in NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is beneficial because it allows customers to manage SAN and NAS data within a single storage solution. This feature eliminates the need to purchase different types of storage.

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Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support

The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

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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

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"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 tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It offers ease of use and a comprehensive suite of applications, including features like SnapMirror, SnapVault, and unified snapshot management, all bundled into a single product."

"The feature which I like the most is that it has the capabilities that the traditional storage system offers. It provides all the functionality. The deduplication and compression work exactly like ONTAP's traditional storage. So people who have experience with that find it very easy to manage."

"The fast recovery time objective with the ability to bring the environment back to production in case something happens."

"With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically."

"The Cloud Manager application that's on the NetApp cloud site is easy to use. You can set up and schedule replications from there, so you don't have to go into the ONTAP system. Another feature we've recently started using is the scheduled power off. We started with one client and have been slowly implementing it with others. We can cut costs by not having the VM run all the time. It's only on when it's doing replication, but it powers off after."

"It is much easier to control data since we can run queries across all our platforms with just one solution. Not only that, we can also monitor all the platforms with Active IQ, where we can see all the alerts, messages, and space consumption through a single application. This is regardless if the data is on-prem or AWS. It is much more efficient."

"NetApp's Integration with AWS has helped us because we had a tough time transferring data when we used an ONTAP competitor as our storage partner. They don't have integration with AWS tools, so we had to figure it out on our own. ONTAP has built-in integration and allows us to replicate a copy to our second data center."

"The initial setup was straightforward. We started with a small pilot and we then moved to production with no downtime at all."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros

"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."

"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."

"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."

"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."

"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."

"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."

"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."

"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

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

"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"It would be nice if you could store file-based in the same box with the same technology."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Their support and development teams can collaborate better to resolve an issue."

"The automated deployment was a bit complex using the public APIs. When we had to deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP on a regular basis using automation, It could be a bit of a challenge."

"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP needs to have customizable pricing options such as 10 TB increments. They seem to have only two options: 10 TB or 250 TB."

"NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance."

"One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have."

"It would be fantastic if NetApp could offer a solution that's as user-friendly as Google Drive for seamless cloud storage integration."

"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."

"When Azure does their maintenance, they do maintenance on one node at a time. With the two nodes of the CVO, it can automatically fail over from one node to the node that is staying up. And when the first node comes back online, it will fail back to the first node. We have had issues with everything failing back 100 percent correctly."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP cons

"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."

"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."

"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."

"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."

"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."

"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."

"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."

"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The product is very expensive."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"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."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"It is not a cheap solution because we need to pay for the license and pay for Azure resources as well."

"Cloud is cloud. It's still expensive. Any good solution comes with a price tag. That's where we are looking to see how well we can manage our data in the cloud by trying to optimize the costs."

"Some flexibility around the licensing model would help. The product is licensed based on capacity. Basically, the largest capacity license that you can buy is 368 terabytes. At this point, NetApp is addressing some people's concerns around this."

"If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp."

"Our licensing is based on a yearly subscription. That is an additional cost, but because of the storage efficiencies that the NetApp gives, even with the additional cost of the NetApp license, you still end up saving money versus straight Azure native for storage. It's definitely worth it."

"Make sure you investigate what your requirements are going to cost you using the native cloud solutions versus what NetApp is going to cost you, to make sure you have a business case to go with NetApp."

"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."

"We purchased the product directly from NetApp."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pricing and cost advice

"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."

"The licensing is straightforward, with free and trial versions available."

"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."

"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"

"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."

"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."

"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."

"We are happy with the price."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

22%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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...

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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...

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What do you like most about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the licen...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

The solution's pricing is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

NetApp's support could improve.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

I have had no setup costs and no challenges with setup and installation for StarWind Virtual SAN. The costs are accep...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

There are times when the feedback in the event of an impending issue or an actual failure can be limited. The remedia...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 9% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 6% of the time

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VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 25% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 15% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 10% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

June 2025

Download NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO

StarWind SAN & NAS

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

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an efficient storage management solution for managing and storing data in the cloud. It offers seamless integration with cloud providers, advanced data replication capabilities, and high data protection. With reliable performance, it is ideal for industries like healthcare and finance.

NetApp

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

1. Accenture 2. Acer 3. Adidas 4. Aetna 5. AIG 6. Apple 7. Bank of America 8. Barclays 9. Bayer 10. Berkshire Hathaway 11. BNP Paribas 12. Cisco 13. Coca-Cola 14. Comcast 15.ConocoPhillips 16. CVS Health 17. Dell 18. Deutsche Bank 19. eBay 20. Eli Lilly 21. FedEx 22. Ford 23. Freescale Semiconductor 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. Honeywell 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. Intuit 30. JPMorgan Chase 31. Kellogg's 32. KeyCorp 33. Liberty Mutual 34. L'Oréal 35. Mastercard

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

May 2025

Free Report: NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.

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