Nexenta vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

Nexenta by DDN and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Nexenta by DDN is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.0, while StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.4. Nexenta by DDN holds a 1.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 66% of Nexenta by DDN users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Nexenta and StarWind Virtual SAN compete in the software-defined storage market. StarWind Virtual SAN may have the upper hand due to its advanced features, making it a worthy investment despite higher costs.

Features: Nexenta offers robust data management capabilities concentrated on scalability and enterprise compatibility, alongside flexible deployment options. StarWind Virtual SAN provides advanced data protection, seamless integration, and focuses on high availability, making it suitable for businesses emphasizing reliability and manageability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nexenta allows flexible deployment with various hardware configurations, aiding in integration. It offers responsive customer service for efficient setup. StarWind Virtual SAN simplifies its installation process to minimize downtime and provides comprehensive support, highlighting its streamlined approach.

Pricing and ROI: Nexenta is known for being cost-effective, offering lower setup costs and satisfactory ROI. StarWind Virtual SAN requires a higher initial investment yet justifies the expense with a broad feature set and reliability, often delivering a substantial ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

July 2025

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nexenta is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 6.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

Offers good features like Fusion and stable product with better customer service

Fusion is the only best feature, but it's a very good feature. Nexenta is a very old product. Nexenta is a well-established product used in the UK, US, India, Dubai, Qatar, and other countries. It is very good. The interface is up to date. Everything is up to date. The OS version was recently upgraded to 5.5 FP3. AI features: DataDirect Networks owns Nexenta and has won awards for AI. They continuously work on AI features. DDN also has a product called Tintri Infinia with AI features. And NVIDIA product also has AI features. I look forward to working on those products.

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Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

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.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It has a feature called Fusion that makes it more secure and productive."

"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."

"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."

"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."

"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."

"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."

"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."

"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."

"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"I have not seen ROI."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved."

"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."

"StarWind really needs to market its product more."

"Including their own hyper-visor would be a valuable improvement over simply integrating with Hyper-V."

"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."

"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."

"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."

"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."

"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."

"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."

"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."

"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."

"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."

"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

No data available

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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What needs improvement with Nexenta?

There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved in the latest version. Four to five customers faced intermittent i...

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What is your primary use case for Nexenta?

It's for file systems. It's a NAS solution, and it has flexibility. There shouldn't be any outages because if one nod...

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What advice do you have for others considering Nexenta?

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I would recommend using it.

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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) combin...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that it was easy to implement, license, and the cost was ve...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

StarWind Virtual SAN could be improved, and I wish the management GUI worked better.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nexenta

Compared 70% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Nexenta

Compared 30% of the time

More Nexenta Competitors

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 25% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 10% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

July 2025

Download Nexenta product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Nexenta is the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage - what we call Open Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS).We uniquely integrate software-only "Open Source" collaboration with commodity hardware-centric "Software-Defined Storage" (SDS) innovation.

Nexenta by DDN

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

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

GMO, Northern Backup, Cox Communications, University of Toronto, ScaleMatrix, Wipro, Ruhr University, Drillinginfo, George Washington University, Walton Electric, Faculty of Physics, NAU, ServerCentral

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

July 2025

Free Report: Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Find out what your peers are saying about Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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