StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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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 December 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.5%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.1%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual Tape Library is 2.1%, up from 1.4% 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	3.5%
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance	2.1%
StarWind Virtual Tape Library	2.1%
Other	92.3%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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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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reviewer1414572

DevOps Director at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics

Flexible and reliable with helpful support

I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster. Who would not like things to be faster? It would be nice if StarWind could come up with a best practice document for configuration. I had to do some playing around in my environment with test runs to get the configuration that really allowed for the maximum amount of throughput that I was going to get with the software. Once I had figured out what worked best, the solution was rather fast for backing up 30+ TB of data

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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

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"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."

"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."

"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."

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

"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."

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

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

"It is a stable solution."

"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."

"The solution made our backups way more reliable."

"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."

"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."

Cons

"The speed could be improved."

"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."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"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."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"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

"Updates need improvement."

"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."

"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."

"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."

"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""

"An emphasis on security can be improved."

"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."

"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."

"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."

"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."

"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"The price is a little high."

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

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

"The solution is cost-effective."

"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."

"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."

"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

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

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?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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...

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 28% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 21% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 20% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 17% of the time

FalconStor FreeStor vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 14% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Download StarWind Virtual Tape Library product 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

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

For SMB and Enterprises, who either look to get rid of backup tapes completely, or are willing to accelerate backup process and add an extra level of protection, our solution is StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It is an appliance that eliminates the need in physical tape and “pretends” to be a supported tape drive or autoloader, keeping all data on inexpensive, fast and high-capacity spinning disks.

Even with explosive data growth, StarWind VTL fits the backup into backup window by accelerating it, so the process does not overlap with production time. Optionally, it creates additional copy of backup data for better safety. It is also available in a software-only form, as part of StarWind VSAN functionality.

StarWind VTL targets those, who need to replace existing tape backup infrastructure or accelerate it if regulatory requirements prohibit replacement. In case the goal is just virtualizing tape backup or creating a stretched backup infrastructure, StarWind Tape Redirector will come in handy.

StarWind

Sample Customers

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

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library