NetApp HCI [EOL] vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

NetApp and StarWind are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 208 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

7,795 Views
4,833 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

StarWind Virtual SAN

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Executive Summary

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

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

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

May 2026

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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 Virtual SAN

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

208

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (4th)

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

Jccerong Heron

System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs

The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

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

"NetApp HCI is used for enterprise-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure and we are using the standard version."

"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."

"We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols."

"The initial setup was straightforward; it was easy and fast to deploy, and NetApp Cloud Manager made getting up and running with Cloud ONTAP amazing, easy to use, simple, and it basically did everything."

"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."

"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"

"It is highly scalable, and their support is also extremely good."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"Our day-to-day servers are all on StarWind and our backups went from nightly to every minute, improving disaster recovery time from hours to minutes and helping us maintain high performance and high availability on minimalistic resources while saving approximately 80 percent in costs."

"With zero cost I can test a solution like Proxmox, making Starwind VSAN an excellent tool for home lab and virtualization testing."

"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."

"Overall, the solution proved to be much more cost-effective than the competition."

"We were able to leverage our previous hardware capital investment and converted our infrastructure to use StarWind VSAN; the migration process was simple, and afterwards, we had a highly reliable SAN system."

"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."

"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."

"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."

"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."

"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."

"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."

"The networking needs improvement."

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

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one."

"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."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."

"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."

"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing."

"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."

"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"

"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."

"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."

"In all areas the product could be made faster."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"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."

"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."

"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

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"

"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."

"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."

"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."

"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."

"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."

"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

14%

Marketing Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Wholesaler/Distributor

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

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	167
Midsize Enterprise	54
Large Enterprise	34

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we are using the free version, so we did not incur any cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The better features are in the paid version, and I would like to see something from the graphical user interface in the free version, which is not available. I wanted to see better understanding of...

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What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?

In production, I wanted to use StarWind Virtual SAN for shared storage. My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is shared storage. I wanted shared storage with local resources for Hyper-V, specif...

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Comparisons

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

Compared 29% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

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StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 5% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

May 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

May 2026

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

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 Virtual SAN offers robust, scalable solutions for high availability in VMware and Hyper-V environments, providing real-time data replication and seamless infrastructure integration.

StarWind Virtual SAN stands out for high availability, impressive performance, and smooth integration with existing systems. Its real-time data replication capabilities minimize downtime and boost operational efficiency. Users appreciate the platform's cost-effectiveness and compatibility with diverse hardware, allowing for seamless deployment across hyper-converged infrastructures and data redundancy setups. Despite the strong feature set, calls for a more user-friendly setup and interface are common, alongside requests for clearer documentation and a web-based management interface.

What are the most notable features?

High Availability: Ensures continuous operation with real-time replication.
Seamless Integration: Works smoothly with existing IT infrastructure.
Scalability: Adapts to changing capacity needs easily.
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces traditional SAN system expenses.
Energy Efficiency: Saves on power consumption with optimized functionality.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Reduced Maintenance: Minimizes IT staff involvement, lowering costs.
Enhanced Performance: Facilitates efficient data handling.
Operational Efficiency: Decreases downtime, increasing productivity.
Flexibility: Supports various IT configurations and strategies.

In industries like small businesses, StarWind Virtual SAN is implemented to replace costly SAN systems, ensuring uptime and strong performance. It's leveraged for hyper-converged infrastructure, failover clustering, and backup strategies, meeting diverse IT demands from hosting virtual machines to data migration.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: May 2026.

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