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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 ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."
    "Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
    "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."
    "It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
    "In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure."
    "We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."
    "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."
    "Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
    "How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
    "It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
    "Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
    "The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
    "It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
    "The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
    "Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
    "The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
    More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros
     

    Cons

    "The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
    "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."
    "I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
    "I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."
    "At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
    "It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."
    "It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
    "My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
    "The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
    "One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
    "The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
    "There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
    "It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
    "The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
    "The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
    "We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
    More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons
     

    Pricing and Cost Advice

    "The licensing fees are renewed annually."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    "You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
    "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."
    "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 aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
    "This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
    "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 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."
    "It's an all in one package, making it very easy."
    "We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
    "Its cost was reasonable."
    "The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."
    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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