Portworx Enterprise vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Portworx Enterprise vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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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

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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Paulo Jose Bosco Otto

Consultant at PBOservicos-Informatica

A solution backed by strong customer support, that is stable and scalable

As a company managed in a Kubernetes environment, being trusted by a Kubernetes vendor, Red Hat creates barriers against using other certified solutions that work. Because IBM is a competitor of Pure Storage, things seem to be getting worse. I don't have plans to use Portworx Enterprise in the future because, at the moment, I am working with Ondat, and I have to follow NetApp's direction on that. When evaluating Portworx, one should make sure their company has already chosen Pure Storage. Still, if they are evaluating the solution on Ondat or Dell or other platforms, they should get a roadmap statement from Pure Storage, that they will continue to develop storage hardware diagnostics. I rate Portworx a nine out of ten.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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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 performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"Portworx virtualizes the aspects of the underlying block storage. That is good because they can also use block storage for their future deployment instead of just NFS."

"The solution is user-friendly."

"The best thing about Portworx is the Stork, they have called the VPS (Volume Replacement Strategy) and they also have topology awareness, and these are the three features I like."

"A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications."

"Portworx is a simple solution. It's similar to Pure Storage products. They're all easy to use and install. You need to have a little expertise with containers to use Portworx, but it will be no problem for you if you understand containers."

"I like that you have a small dedicated file system that is fast and resilient for containerized workloads."

"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."

"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."

"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."

"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."

"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."

"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"The speed could be improved."

"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"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."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately."

"They have not integrated Portworx with Ondat since they are too focused now on Pure Storage APIs and not on users like us."

"I would like to see a more native mapping to mainframe-type systems."

"The integration has room for improvement."

"The documentation could be better."

"I think the vendor could provide more training for new users who may not be familiar with containers."

"It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well."

"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."

"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."

"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."

"Not much can be improved, to be honest."

"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."

"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."

"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The price of Portworx Enterprise is high."

"The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM."

"I'm not sure how the licensing was broken out, but I don't think our offering of the Portworx was more than USD $20,000."

"It has two offerings. One is free, which is limited to only five nodes. The other is enterprise, which is a bit pricier."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

29%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

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...

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

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

What do you like most about Portworx Enterprise?

A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, provid...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portworx Enterprise?

The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM.

What needs improvement with Portworx Enterprise?

It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchas...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...

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Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Download Portworx Enterprise product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

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

Portworx is the solution for running stateful containers in production, designed with DevOps in mind. With Portworx, users can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm. Portworx solves the five most common problems DevOps teams encounter when running stateful services in production: persistence, high availability, data automation, security, and support for multiple data stores and infrastructure.

Pure Storage

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

NIO, GE Digital, DreamWorks Animation, Lufthansa, beco, NEW CONTEXT

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Portworx Enterprise vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance