NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

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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: March 2024).
765,386 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 of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it.""Its functionality and technical support are adequate to help prevent failure due to errors.""The most valuable features are tiering to S3 and being able to turn it on and off, based on a schedule.""There is unified storage, which provides flexibility. It is set up perfectly for performance and provisioning. We are able to monitor everything using a separate application. It provides error and critical warnings that allow us to take immediate action through ONTAP. We are able to manage everything, log a case, and follow up with the support team, who can fix it. That is how it is unified.""It's very easy to set up, and within 40 minutes, you can apply storage notes in Azure.""Its scalability is very good.""Lastly, the API and web services are fairly good. That is an important feature too. We write some code to do different things. We have code that runs to make sure that everything is being backed up as we say it is and we try to also detect places where we may have missed a backup.""The storage tiering is definitely the most valuable feature... With respect to tiering, the inactive data is pushed to a lower tier where the storage cost is cheap, but the access cost is high."

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"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software.""This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime.""It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more.""It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly.""Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn.""Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support.""This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers.""The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."

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Cons
"The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases.""The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that...""I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution.""It definitely needs improvement with respect to clustering and with respect to more collaborative integrations with Azure. Right now, we have very limited functionalities with Azure, except for storage. If CVO could be integrated with Azure that would help. When there is any sort of maintenance happening in the cloud, it disrupts the service in Cloud Volumes ONTAP.""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.""We want to be able to add more than six disks in aggregate, but there is a limit of the number of disks in aggregate. In GCP, they provide less by limiting the sixth disk in aggregate. In Azure, the same solution provides 12 disks in an aggregate versus GCP where it is just half that amount. They should bump up the disk in aggregate requirement so we don't have to migrate the aggregate from one to another when the capacities are full.""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.""The integration wizard requires a bit of streamlining. There are small things that misconfigure or repeat the deployment that will create errors, specifically in Azure."

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"This is a great product.""Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date.""It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI.""While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage.""I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit.""High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance.""We ran into an issue with alerts.""When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good, but it was a test system, not a real purchase."
  • "We purchased the product directly from NetApp."
  • "The deal with the seller was acceptable; the pricing is reasonable."
  • "The AWS consumer-based pricing model makes it easy for developers to use their credit cards to spin up virtual servers immediately."
  • "Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration."
  • "They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage..."
  • "The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company."
  • "In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."
  • More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "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."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing of CVO is fair across the board. It's exactly where it should be for the data we're getting. The price-performance ratio is right where we need it to be. I've seen solutions that cost more… more »
    Top Answer:I would want more visibility and data analytics where we can see anomalies within the shares within the GUI.
    Top Answer: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”… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own hardware costs.
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost-effective point… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    872
    Comparisons
    515
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    689
    Rating
    8.8
    Views
    4,798
    Comparisons
    1,502
    Reviews
    103
    Average Words per Review
    596
    Rating
    9.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    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.

    Offer
    Take Control with Unified Cloud Storage

    Sign up for a 30-day trial to see how Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help you optimize cloud storage costs and performance, while enhancing data enterprise-grade protection, security, and compliance - wherever your data lives.

    30-days for free

    Try it today

    Sample Customers
    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Healthcare Company18%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    University8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise75%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise51%
    Large Enterprise40%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is ranked 1st in Cloud Software Defined Storage with 60 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is rated 8.8, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP writes "Its data tiering helps keep storage costs under control". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is most compared with Azure NetApp Files, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Portworx Enterprise and Google Cloud Storage, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.

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