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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 199 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews
    • 4,684 Views
    • 2,998 Comparison Views
    100% willing to recommend
     

    Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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
    October 2025
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    Helped 870,697 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 Virtual SAN
    Average Rating
    9.6
    Reviews Sentiment
    7.6
    Number of Reviews
    199
    Ranking in other categories
    Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (5th)
     

    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
    Vladimir Simion - PeerSpot reviewer
    Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support
    The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.
    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

    "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"
    "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."
    "It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
    "The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
    "HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."
    "The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
    "It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
    "The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
    "The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
    "StarWind was a great price to performance ratio and it had a great support team behind it that helped me configure the solution and also size it to the customer's needs for them not to overpay for it and not get something that was not useful for them."
    "StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
    "One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
    "Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
    "It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
    "StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
    "One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
    More StarWind Virtual SAN pros
     

    Cons

    "It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
    "It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
    "In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."
    "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."
    "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."
    "They could improve the packaging."
    "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."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
    "Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
    "Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
    "While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
    "It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
    "The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
    "The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
    "I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
    "Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
    More StarWind Virtual SAN cons
     

    Pricing and Cost Advice

    "You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
    "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."
    "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."
    "Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    "Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"
    "The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."
    "Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."
    "Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
    "This solution has a great price for the functionality."
    "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
    "The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."
    "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
    More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice
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    Top Industries

    By visitors reading reviews
    No data available
    Computer Software Company
    17%
    Manufacturing Company
    10%
    Financial Services Firm
    8%
    Government
    8%
     

    Company Size

    By reviewers
    Large Enterprise
    Midsize Enterprise
    Small Business
    By reviewers
    Company SizeCount
    Small Business8
    Midsize Enterprise9
    Large Enterprise19
    By reviewers
    Company SizeCount
    Small Business162
    Midsize Enterprise54
    Large Enterprise33
     

    Questions from the Community

    Ask a question
    Earn 20 points
    What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
    It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
    See all answers
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
    My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for StarWind Virtual SAN was okay.
    See all answers
    What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
    Currently, StarWind Virtual SAN is working perfectly fine, so there are no changes I would suggest.
    See all answers
     

    Comparisons

    No data available
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    VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 19% of the time
    DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 16% of the time
    Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 13% of the time
    StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 12% of the time
    Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 10% of the time
    More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors
     

    Product Reports

    Buyer's Guide
    NetApp HCI [EOL]
    October 2025
    NetApp HCI [EOL] reportDownload NetApp HCI [EOL] product report
    Buyer's Guide
    StarWind Virtual SAN
    September 2025
    StarWind Virtual SAN reportDownload 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 provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    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
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    October 2025
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