QoreStor vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Quest Software and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Quest Software is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.0, while StarWind is ranked #11 with an average rating of 10.0. Quest Software holds a 0.1% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and QoreStor both compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure category, aiming to enhance IT environments with their specialized capabilities. StarWind appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive approach, excelling in integration and turnkey solutions that provide a more seamless experience for data centers.

Features: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers high availability, proactive monitoring, and live migration, along with a robust support system that ensures minimal IT burden. Users benefit from its turnkey solutions and consolidated storage options. QoreStor, on the other hand, is noted for its extreme data deduplication and compression capabilities, making it ideal for environments with significant storage needs. It features flexible hardware usage and is optimized for reducing storage costs substantially.

Room for Improvement: StarWind users would like a more intuitive GUI and streamlined documentation. They also desire broader hardware support beyond Microsoft Windows Server. QoreStor users anticipate improved cloud integration and enhanced ransomware protection, seeking faster installation and better customer support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind provides excellent support with proactive monitoring and fast issue resolution, making on-premises deployments straightforward. QoreStor, while effective in support, has faced feedback regarding its deployment processes, with users preferring clearer guidelines owing to some challenges with its support structure.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind is highlighted as a cost-effective solution with quick ROI, driven by reduced infrastructure complexities and comprehensive service packages. In contrast, QoreStor is praised for its budget-friendly pricing strategies, allowing capacity cost management, although initial costs may rise with extensive storage predictions. Both products offer substantial cost-effectiveness, but StarWind's comprehensive approach often delivers more notable cost-saving benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed QoreStor vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

QoreStor vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

September 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 October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QoreStor is 0.1%. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.2%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance	2.2%
QoreStor	0.1%
Other	93.6%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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Jeff Manuszak

CTO at EDSI

Cost-efficient, highly scalable, and installable on different types of hardware

They could improve on support a little bit. We have not had to engage their support much, but when we do have issues, it can take longer to get things resolved. We are pretty lenient as we do a lot of IT support ourselves. We are not very hard on support organizations, but when a customer has a support issue, it would be easier if the support processes were a little bit more automated. It would be beneficial to have an easier way to upload diagnostic dump files. They can make it easy for the customer to collect the diagnostic data. There can be some kind of monitoring solutions to alert users to issues with the appliance or software, making it easy for customers to monitor their systems in the field. This is especially critical because it stores customers' backups, and a failure can have significant business impacts. If a customer does not have the backups and has a disaster, they can be out of business, so monitoring is key.

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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.

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 most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

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

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

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

"The solution provides many controllers."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"QoreStor has helped us to reduce our backup storage requirements on-premises. We've been using the same devices for quite a while, and so it lets us keep using them as opposed to having to rip out all that hardware and create a new on-prem solution. The advantage here is even if we had to retire the hardware tomorrow, the QoreStor part doesn't change. We just have to have additional hardware and put the solution back on whatever hardware we pick and it'll do the same thing."

"We need revisions and safe backup so that it could be held up in court, but deduplication and compression are the main features why we have Quest QoreStor. That's where it really shines. I use ZFS and XFS at home, and Quest QoreStor is even better."

"The extreme compression of data is a big thing for us. We were looking for an online backup solution, and QoreStor is very good in terms of data compression. It helps us minimize the required storage in the Blob Storage environment."

"I would rate QoreStor a ten out of ten for what it offers for the price."

"Deduplication is the most valuable feature. It saves us a lot of space. When we back up 100 terabytes of data, after dedupe, it only uses maybe five to six terabytes for the disk space in QoreStor."

"Quest QoreStor definitely saved us money."

"It integrates with various backup software solutions, which makes it compatible with existing backup workflows and processes."

"This software solution can be installed on many different types of hardware, which makes it very flexible. We can run it on virtual machines or virtual servers, providing convenience for solutions of varying sizes, from small to large."

More QoreStor pros

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

"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."

"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."

"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."

"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."

"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."

"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."

"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years."

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"The speed could be improved."

"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 would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"They could improve on support a little bit. We have not had to engage their support much, but when we do have issues, it can take longer to get things resolved."

"The ransomware protection of QoreStor could use improvement."

"The importance of support is significant to me. I was working for a service provider, and all of our customers had a Quest or warning. Sometimes the support really underperforms."

"Support is one point of improvement for Quest QoreStor. Support is sometimes not adequate."

"There can be some kind of monitoring solutions to alert users to issues with the appliance or software, making it easy for customers to monitor their systems in the field."

"Overall, I am happy with this solution, but a way to export configuration settings would be beneficial. After everything is set up and configured, there should be a way to export the configuration. In case something happens to the QoreStor server, and we need to reinstall and configure everything, being able to import the configuration would be helpful. This feature does not currently exist."

"The management interface is in need of improvement. The graphical user interface (GUI) for the web management tools appears clunky, and not super intuitive."

"The setup of the software is definitely not the easiest thing. I worked a lot with Quest engineers, especially in the early days when we were first testing it and trying it out. I actually had some of the developers working with us at one point because they were going through these point releases, and I was having trouble getting it to work in this S3-compatible situation. We got it all working eventually, but setup is definitely not the easiest thing in the world."

More QoreStor cons

"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."

"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."

"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."

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

"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."

"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."

"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."

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

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

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

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"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."

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

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

"The product is very expensive."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The cost is per terabyte, and overall, the cost was reasonable when compared to some competitors."

"Its pricing model is very attractive. You have one price, and you get everything from QoreStor."

"The pricing is good. It is competitive for a managed services provider. I like the ability to pay by the terabyte, allowing for an incremental cost that we and our customers can afford, so the solution grows with the customer."

"Quest QoreStor's pricing is affordable. We evaluated Veeam, a well-known company for backup solutions, but found their pricing to be quite high. Veeam's price was almost double. For us, Quest QoreStor is very affordable."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"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."

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

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

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Performing Arts

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	2

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	8

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 else besides data replication does QoreStor offer?

Quest QoreStor can be used for multiple things besides data replication. For example, it can be trusted to make a bac...

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How does Quest QoreStore protect your data?

One of our favorite features of Quest QoreStore for data protection isn't the backup, actually, though we're using it...

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How does Quest QoreStore solve repetitive data replicas?

When I first found out about data replication and the many benefits it had, I couldn't help but wonder - what about t...

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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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

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No data available

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 18% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 16% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 15% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

QoreStor

September 2025

Download QoreStor product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

September 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

No data available

QoreStor

No data available

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

QoreStor optimizes storage costs through advanced deduplication and compression, seamlessly integrating with backup infrastructures and supporting diverse hardware. It enhances data security with replication and offers flexible deployment with minimal maintenance.

QoreStor offers significant benefits in deduplication, which leads to space savings and reduced storage expenses. This system integrates effortlessly with backup platforms like NetVault and Veeam, functioning as a reliable backup target for both on-premises and cloud environments. The ease of integration is complemented by its replication capabilities, which add a layer of data security by enabling geographically dispersed backups. Its cloud tiering functionality extends storage capabilities, ensuring cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions. While enhancements are needed in areas like Cloud Tier support, Air Gap features, and GUI intuitiveness, the continued developments aim to further optimize storage and backup solutions.

What are QoreStor's key features?

Deduplication and Compression: Achieves high deduplication rates and space savings.
Seamless Integration: Works well with diverse backup infrastructures.
Replication: Facilitates data security through multi-location backups.
Cloud Tiering: Extends storage capabilities efficiently.
Minimal Maintenance: Requires low maintenance efforts.

What benefits should be considered in user reviews?

Cost-Effectiveness: Offers competitive pricing and optimized storage.
Storage Optimization: Reduces storage needs with advanced data handling.
Flexibility: Supports diverse hardware and deployment options.
Data Security: Enhances protection with robust replication features.

QoreStor is widely implemented in industries for backup and restore operations, providing data deduplication and compression as key functionalities. Its integration as a backup target across platforms like NetVault and Veeam makes it ideal for enterprises that require efficient data management and storage cost control. Many organizations utilize its features to optimize cloud storage seamlessly while focusing on internal data handling or acting as service resellers.

Quest Software

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

American Airlines, at&t, Bank of America. Barclays, ebay, Ford

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

QoreStor vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

September 2025

Free Report: QoreStor vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Find out what your peers are saying about QoreStor vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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