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StarWind Storage Appliance vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Sentiment score
7.4
StarWind Virtual SAN offers high ROI by reducing costs, downtime, and using existing servers for efficient deployment.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Sentiment score
8.4
StarWind Virtual SAN excels in customer service with quick, professional support, seamless integration, and clear communication, ensuring satisfaction.
I would rate the customer support for StarWind Virtual SAN a ten, as they are responsive and competent.
When we set it up, they validate our settings and configurations to ensure we don't miss anything.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
Sentiment score
7.8
StarWind Virtual SAN offers scalable, flexible storage solutions, easily adapting to infrastructure growth with minimal reconfiguration, despite some licensing limitations.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
I have never needed to scale up or add additional nodes with StarWind Virtual SAN, but we have had to expand, and customer support has been excellent.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
Sentiment score
8.6
StarWind Virtual SAN is highly reliable with minimal maintenance, offering seamless, dependable operations across diverse environments, and earning user trust.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
 

Room For Improvement

StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
StarWind Virtual SAN users seek better documentation, management tools, and integration features, while appreciating its affordability and high availability.
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
Having more visibility on what's actually happening when an error occurs would be beneficial.
 

Setup Cost

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, easy to set up, offers flexible scalability, and has responsive support with perpetual licenses.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
The pricing can be a bit complex depending on the features you need.
 

Valuable Features

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
StarWind Virtual SAN offers robust features, simplicity, and reliability with seamless integration and automation for enhanced data redundancy and resilience.
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (15th), All-Flash Storage (30th)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
193
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed for NAS and holds a mindshare of 0.7%, down 0.9% compared to last year.
StarWind Virtual SAN, on the other hand, focuses on Software Defined Storage (SDS), holds 7.0% mindshare, down 8.5% since last year.
NAS
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
WJHG - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless integrations, high availability, and offers a free version
Although I am generally satisfied with VSAN and its performance, there are some areas that could be improved to enhance its effectiveness even further. One area that could benefit from improvement is scalability. While the tool works well in its current configuration, allowing for greater ease and flexibility in adding new nodes to the cluster without complications would be very beneficial, especially in growing environments. Additionally, I would like to see additional features in the next version, such as better support for automated resource management. This could include proactive suggestions for optimizing storage and memory usage, as well as preventive alerts about the health status of the servers. A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
I have had no setup costs and no challenges with setup and installation for StarWind Virtual SAN. The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
There are times when the feedback in the event of an impending issue or an actual failure can be limited. The remediation steps are usually fairly simple to resolve the issue, but the management GU...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Storage Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
858,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.