NetApp HCI [EOL] vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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 67 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews

4,618 Views
3,186 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, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

August 2026

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Helped 913,654 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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th), 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.

Read full review

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

"The solution has generally affected storage performance in our organization by adding a high-performance storage option into the environment."

"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."

"NetApp HCI solves predictability challenges with industry-leading performance capabilities that allow the granular control of every application."

"The benefits for our organization are the performance that we're able to get out of it, as well as the guaranteed minimum performance from a storage perspective."

"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."

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

"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."

"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"We managed to build a fault-tolerant and highly available IT environment with a reliable and cost-effective solution."

"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."

"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."

"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."

"The solutions from StarWind were not only a major increase in performance, but they were very affordable for us."

"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."

"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."

"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"The initial setup is very painful. It's not straightforward, requires a lot of knowledge to get it going."

"The NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take a look at that."

"There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."

"Its stability is 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 crash."

"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."

"Unfortunately, the solution has not reduced our hypervisor footprint."

"I would like to have more variety, like GPU cards."

"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"The control center looks really good and looks like it could be very valuable. However, at the moment, not having email notifications makes it less worth it."

"It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well."

"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."

"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss. I don't use it much as it is a bit slow and buggy."

"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 communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me."

"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."

"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"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."

"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."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"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 didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

"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."

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

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

"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."

"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."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

21%

Outsourcing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Marketing Services Firm

Construction Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Marketing Services Firm

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	51
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	8

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?

I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance for server failover to ensure high availability for the server.

See all answers

Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 24% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 8% of the time

Zadara vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 4% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

September 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

August 2026

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

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance integrates storage and computing power into a single platform, offering scalability and efficiency for high-availability virtual environments. It enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing hardware needs and eliminates the requirement for traditional SAN solutions.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance provides a streamlined, pre-configured setup that simplifies deployment and management. Its compact design saves space while offering high availability and redundancy. The appliance supports real-time VM synchronization and proactive monitoring to enhance performance and reduce downtime. Although appreciated for its efficiency, users suggest improvements such as clearer documentation, better support team communication, enhanced monitoring tools, and a web-based management interface.

What are the key features of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

Preconfigured Deployment: Simplifies setup with ready-to-use configurations.
High Availability: Ensures continuous operation with redundancy measures.
Proactive Monitoring: Offers peace of mind by monitoring and addressing potential issues.
Real-Time VM Synchronization: Maintains efficiency with instant synchronization of virtual environments.
Intuitive Management: Streamlines operation with simplified management processes.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Reduction: Decreases hardware expenses by consolidating resources.
Space Efficiency: Compact design optimizes physical space usage.
Operational Simplicity: Eases management workload with intuitive controls.
Rapid Scalability: Facilitates quick adaptation to changing demands.
Improved Performance: Enhances overall efficiency and reduces downtime.

In healthcare, StarWind HyperConverged Appliance supports critical applications with minimal downtime, ensuring patient data availability. Educational institutions leverage its simplified management for virtual classrooms, while financial services appreciate its rapid deployment capabilities for secure transaction processing. Industrial sectors benefit from its fault tolerance in maintaining seamless operation during production.

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

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