"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."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"It is extremely stable."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"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."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"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."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"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 vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
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NetApp HCI is ranked 14th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 3 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 13th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 2 reviews. NetApp HCI is rated 6.0, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. 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 Tape Library writes "Cost-effective, reliable, and the initial setup and deployment are included in the price". NetApp HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VxRail, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Scality RING8, VxRail and VMware vSAN. See our NetApp HCI vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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