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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 196 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews
    • 3,262 Views
    • 825 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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

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    To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: May 2025).
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    May 2025
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    Helped 859,579 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
    7.7
    Number of Reviews
    196
    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

    "The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."
    "Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
    "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"
    "The solution is very scalable."
    "NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
    "The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
    "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."
    "The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros
    "StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
    "The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
    "Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
    "When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
    "The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
    "The best features are the software's ease of setup and the excellent technical support."
    "Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
    "StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by saving money in skill set development, and certainly minimal downtime across all of our installations, where they maintain almost zero downtime in their 24/7 operations."
    More StarWind Virtual SAN pros
     

    Cons

    "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."
    "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."
    "The networking needs improvement."
    "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 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 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."
    "HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."
    "I would like to see the implementation process improved."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons
    "I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
    "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 initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
    "Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
    "There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
    "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."
    "We have found this product to suit our needs."
    "StarWind Virtual SAN could be improved, and I wish the management GUI worked better."
    More StarWind Virtual SAN cons
     

    Pricing and Cost Advice

    "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."
    "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."
    "The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
    "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."
    "Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
    "All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
    "Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
    "You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
    More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice
    "I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN."
    "StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
    "This solution has a great price for the functionality."
    "I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."
    "Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
    "This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
    "Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."
    "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
    Financial Services Firm
    18%
    Real Estate/Law Firm
    18%
    Computer Software Company
    11%
    Manufacturing Company
    9%
    Computer Software Company
    17%
    Manufacturing Company
    10%
    Financial Services Firm
    9%
    Government
    8%
     

    Company Size

    By reviewers
    Large Enterprise
    Midsize Enterprise
    Small Business
     

    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?
    I have had no setup costs and no challenges with setup and installation for StarWind Virtual SAN. The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
    See all answers
    What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
    There are times when the feedback in the event of an impending issue or an actual failure can be limited. The remediation steps are usually fairly simple to resolve the issue, but the management GU...
    See all answers
     

    Comparisons

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    Compared 16% of the time
    StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 14% of the time
    DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN Logo
    DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN
    Compared 14% 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]
    June 2025
    NetApp HCI [EOL] reportDownload NetApp HCI [EOL] product report
    Buyer's Guide
    StarWind Virtual SAN
    June 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
    May 2025
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