We performed a comparison between Pivot3 and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The integration is excellent."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"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."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"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."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
Earn 20 points
Pivot3 is ranked 26th in HCI while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Pivot3 is rated 8.6, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Pivot3 writes "One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Pivot3 is most compared with VMware vSAN, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN.
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