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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
    • 1,484 Views
    • 1,158 Comparison Views
    98% willing to recommend
     

    Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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.

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    To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2025).
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    July 2025
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    Helped 861,390 peers since 2012

    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
    32
    Ranking in other categories
    No ranking in other categories
    StarWind HyperConverged App...
    Average Rating
    9.6
    Reviews Sentiment
    7.7
    Number of Reviews
    66
    Ranking in other categories
    Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th), HCI (14th)
     

    Featured Reviews

    MB
    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.
    Read full review
    Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
    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

    "The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
    "The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution."
    "HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance."
    "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."
    "When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
    "This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
    "It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
    "The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
    "It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
    "The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
    "The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
    "The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
    "Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
    "We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
    "What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
    "We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
    More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros
     

    Cons

    "In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."
    "I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
    "It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
    "The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
    "I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule."
    "It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
    "The networking needs improvement."
    "The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
    "It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
    "The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
    "The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
    "The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
    "The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
    "CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
    "We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
    "What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
    More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons
     

    Pricing and Cost Advice

    "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."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    "Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
    "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."
    "Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    "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."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
    "We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
    "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."
    "Its cost was reasonable."
    "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."
    "In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
    "We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
    More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice
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    Top Industries

    By visitors reading reviews
    Real Estate/Law Firm
    19%
    Financial Services Firm
    19%
    Computer Software Company
    12%
    Comms Service Provider
    8%
    Educational Organization
    14%
    Computer Software Company
    13%
    Manufacturing Company
    9%
    Financial Services Firm
    9%
     

    Company Size

    By reviewers
    Large Enterprise
    Midsize Enterprise
    Small Business
     

    Questions from the Community

    Ask a question
    Earn 20 points
    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.
    See all answers
    What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
    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 inf...
    See all answers
    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...
    See all answers
     

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    Product Reports

    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp HCI [EOL]
    June 2025
    NetApp HCI [EOL] reportDownload NetApp HCI [EOL] product report
    Buyer's Guide
    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
    June 2025
    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reportDownload 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
    Sears Home and Franchise Business
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    July 2025
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