We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and StarWind Virtual Tape Library based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"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 biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"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."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS 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."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"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 initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"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."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 11th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 6 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual, VMware vSAN and IBM Cloud Object Storage. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library report.
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