NetApp HCI [EOL] vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

NetApp and StarWind are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Read 66 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews

1,489 Views
1,161 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

StarWind HyperConverged App...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

September 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

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th), HCI (14th)

Featured Reviews

Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022

Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to set up, and you don't have to do much work to get it to do what it needs to do."

"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."

"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."

"It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run."

"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."

"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."

"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."

"The most valuable feature is the convergence."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."

"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."

"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."

"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."

"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."

"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."

"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."

"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."

"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."

"I would like to see the implementation process improved."

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."

"There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."

"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."

"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."

"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."

"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."

"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."

"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."

"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."

"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."

"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."

"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

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What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

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What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...

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Comparisons

No data available

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 24% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

August 2025

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

August 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Overview

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology

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