We performed a comparison between StarWind Storage Appliance and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The integration is excellent."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."
"I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our StarWind Storage Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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