"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."
"It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"It's quite easy to install."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"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."
"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."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
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NetApp HCI is ranked 18th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 4 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 5th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 46 reviews. NetApp HCI is rated 6.6, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI writes "Crashes continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities". NetApp HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. See our NetApp HCI vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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