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StarWind Virtual SAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (3rd)
StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (20th), HCI (24th)
 

Featured Reviews

Cristian Ion - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Information Technology Engineer at Eta2u
All-flash storage has unified my clients’ workloads and has reduced TCO through efficient data services
The pricing and licensing of Everpure FlashArray is a problem because Everpure is considered more expensive than competitors. IBM, Lenovo, and Dell are more aggressive on prices. It is a very complicated market, especially now, and I understand the prices are higher at Everpure because of the software and all the enhancements it has. However, in this competitive market, we have a big problem selling to customers that are on a tight budget. A product with better pricing would be a win in the end. The RC or C20, for example, was a very good product that I could sell more easily than other options. Everpure FlashArray//C is sufficient for most workloads and virtualization workloads if you do not have very large databases. A product like that helps, and perhaps a new product in the future that is a little cheaper than the current options would be a possibility to gain more market share. I see the return on investment clearly from using Everpure FlashArray, but the challenge is selling it to customers for the first time. There are many customers who fall in the sweet spot where they are too small for an X or even a C model. They need something a little cheaper, they have the money for a cheaper version, and they need the performance of a Pure system. These customers could be more easily approached if Everpure offers a version of a local device in the future that is even cheaper than the C-class. I am trying now to help customers understand the concept behind AG1. I know that AG1 is not profitable if capacity is less than 50 terabytes. However, some customers would be very willing to pay for 25 terabytes in a cloud operated by Pure and to have it accessible with very good speed. We will see what the future brings.
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.
reviewer1414572 - PeerSpot reviewer
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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"With this program, all of our applications are able to perform faster and this enables us to provide faster platforms and services to our customers and employees."
"I can personally state that the Pure Storage Flash Systems are the best built and Pure has the utmost professional customer care."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Pure FlashArray is that it's user-friendly, easy to manage, and very flexible."
"For VMware, it has been a humongous savings."
"The best features of Pure Storage FlashArray are its ease of use and user-friendly interface, and the performance allows all types of services to be visualized from a single point of interface, making it more robust and user-friendly."
"The biggest return on investment for us is not having to do a swap out of the arrays every five years."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"In both solutions, this platform satisfied those requirements."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"One point to highlight is how easy it is to configure and manage."
"A thorough analysis and testing of existing offerings in the network storage market has shown that StarWind Virtual SAN is the perfect network storage solution."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"StarWind Virtual SAN has helped us save considerable costs as we do not need a very large storage device such as a SAN as we had to purchase before."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"We simply replicate our backups from Veeam to the virtual tape library that StarWind implements, while magically transporting those to B2 for our offsite backup requirements."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"The support that they provide is excellent, with 24 hours a day seven days a week support, and all the engineers and the support staff know the solution very well."
"It is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"The solution is not cheap. It's much more expensive than DataCore."
"If there is one thing that I did not appreciate about Pure, it is that between the two different lines, which would be FlashBlade and Everpure FlashArray, there is no easy way to migrate LUNs as far as being able to replicate across those platforms."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting."
"Pure Storage's logs could provide more visibility to the end-user. The logging algorithms are different from those of other vendors. For example, Cisco's logs provide extensive troubleshooting data, whereas Pure Storage logs offer limited information. We have to contact support to get more information."
"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"Based on my experience with various technologies like EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage, one area for improvement is compliance certifications. NetApp excels in this area, particularly in the American Army or defense sector, where NetApp has approval, whereas others are striving to achieve the same. NetApp also delivers security, ransomware protection, and scale-up capabilities more effectively."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The main reason I gave it a 7 instead of an 8 or 9 is the limited feature access in a free version available during my testing."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"In practice, it is somewhat technical to deploy and manage, but overall it gets the job done."
"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 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

"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"Pure Storage is expensive. It comes with features, so you get what you pay for. It is expensive compared to our old storage systems, but from the amount of human effort that you have to pay to babysit a storage system, it reduces that. I don't know if the TCO is reduced, but it's not a concern for us."
"FlashArray is expensive, but the quality justifies the price."
"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"Our Evergreen Storage subscription is supposed to be good when we go to upgrade."
"The guaranty that Pure Storage provides when you purchase it doesn't meet the overall capacity needs to provide extra storage, if needed. Thus, it is not meeting our expectations."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."
"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."
"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."
"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."
"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."
"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."
"The solution is cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business74
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business170
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise34
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for StarWind Virtual SAN is very simple; that is another good t...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN has latency that is not as good versus VMware vSAN, but I believe it is more of a Hyper-V limita...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is that it replaced our VMware vSAN. I transitioned from VMware vSAN to Sta...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
StarWind SAN & NAS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.