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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 861,170 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

    "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."
    "This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
    "The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
    "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."
    "NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
    "Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
    "It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run."
    "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."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
    "I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
    "High-availability is what I bought it for."
    "It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
    "The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
    "The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
    "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."
    "The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."
    "The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
    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."
    "It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."
    "To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
    "I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."
    "It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
    "The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
    "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."
    "I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
    "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."
    "The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
    "The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
    "We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
    "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."
    "Product shipments did have a few bumps along the way, but that's to be expected when using any shipping company."
    "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."
    "I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
    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."
    "Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    "All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
    "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."
    "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."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "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."
    "It's an all in one package, making it very easy."
    "This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
    "Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
    "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."
    "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."
    "In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
    "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."
    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
     

    Comparisons

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    Compared 14% of the time
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    Compared 11% of the time
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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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