We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and SteelFusion based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"They offer top-tier support."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"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 full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"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."
"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"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."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Earn 20 points
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while SteelFusion is ranked 26th in HCI. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while SteelFusion is rated 9.0. 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 SteelFusion writes "Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas SteelFusion is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
