StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool comparison

StarWind and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.4, while StorPool is ranked #20. StarWind holds a 6.7% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StorPool users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StorPool and StarWind Virtual SAN both compete in the software-defined storage solutions category. StorPool appears to have the upper hand in scalability and performance, while StarWind Virtual SAN has advantages in seamless integration and cost-effectiveness.

Features: StorPool offers exceptional scalability and high performance along with synchronized data protection across multiple nodes. StarWind Virtual SAN emphasizes integration capabilities, support for hyper-converged and disaggregated infrastructures, and ease of use.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could enhance integration with existing infrastructures and offer more attractive pricing for smaller deployments. StarWind Virtual SAN may improve its scalability options and performance to match competitive offerings from larger-scale environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool provides a flexible deployment model with robust customer service for large-scale environments. StarWind Virtual SAN offers simplified deployment suited to varied settings, backed by comprehensive documentation and community support to aid integration.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool's substantial initial setup costs lead to a strong ROI for performance-heavy deployments, making it an ideal choice for large-scale needs. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a cost-effective solution with lower startup costs, making it appealing for mid-sized organizations with budget constraints while retaining essential features.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool

May 2025

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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

8.5

Pure Storage FlashBlade boosts ROI by reducing costs, enhancing efficiencies, increasing VM density, and saving 20%-85% in time.

Sentiment score

7.3

StarWind Virtual SAN offers cost-effective, high-availability solutions with quick ROI through reduced downtime, maintenance, and hardware expenses.

Sentiment score

7.3

Organizations reduced TCO using StorPool, benefiting from commodity hardware, increasing gross margin by 15% with favorable cost per GB.

It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.0

Pure Storage FlashBlade support is praised for responsiveness and knowledge but criticized for slower responses and occasional language barriers.

Sentiment score

8.3

StarWind Virtual SAN’s support is praised for expertise, quick responses, and comprehensive assistance in technical and account-related issues.

Sentiment score

9.2

StorPool excels in customer service with responsive support, expert advice, and quick deployment, ensuring infrastructure optimization and satisfaction.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly who will be able to connect, verify your setup, run its parameters, and see exactly what's working and what is not, and adjust it, and they really help you with that.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

When we set it up, they validate our settings and configurations to ensure we don't miss anything.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

8.8

Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for scalability, ease of expansion, and support, despite some areas needing improvement.

Sentiment score

7.7

StarWind Virtual SAN excels in scalable storage, easy expansion, broad capabilities with premium licensing, and infrastructure growth compatibility.

Sentiment score

8.5

StorPool offers seamless scalability through easy node integration, enhancing performance and capacity without service interruptions across deployments.

Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

StarWind Virtual SAN's scalability is good, and I have had an easy experience adding more space to the system.

Gregory McGrady

PC Network Specialist at Watauga County

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.8

Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for its impressive stability and reliability, with minimal disruptions and consistent uptime even during upgrades.

Sentiment score

8.5

StarWind Virtual SAN is stable, reliable, and handles workloads seamlessly, with issues often due to external factors, not the software itself.

Sentiment score

8.1

StorPool offers reliable, stable performance with advanced features like compression, ensuring continuous data protection and commercial advantages.

In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is stable as I haven't encountered any downtime or issues.

Charles Opio

Tech Support Engineer at Sybyl

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Room For Improvement

Users seek better cloud integration, enhanced deduplication, improved support, protocol enhancements, simpler configuration, and a more intuitive interface.

StarWind Virtual SAN needs better automation, documentation, interface, and centralized management for enhanced user experience and efficiency.

StorPool's users seek a more intuitive UI, faster feature rollout, and increased visibility of new functionalities and integrations.

Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

Its configuration should be easier.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers high performance and features, justifying its cost with no extra software fees and fixed support costs.

StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for cost-effectiveness, flexible licensing, affordable pricing, and excellent support for small enterprises and nonprofits.

StorPool offers flexible, cost-effective pricing with high performance, scalability, and excellent support, reducing total cost of ownership.

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that it was easy to implement, license, and the cost was very good.

Gregory McGrady

PC Network Specialist at Watauga County

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers fast, scalable, and user-friendly storage with efficient integration, analytics, and versatility for diverse needs.

StarWind Virtual SAN offers ease of installation, high availability, excellent support, and integration with existing hardware for seamless virtualization.

StorPool provides scalable, high-performance storage with robust management, redundancy, and stability, ideal for complex, global deployments.

We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.

Parul-Patel

System admin at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 6.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

Read full review

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support

The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

Read full review

reviewer1721697

Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.

Great service and support with a constant addition of new features

As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

26%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Performing Arts

12%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

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) combin...

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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 accep...

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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 remedia...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 24% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 15% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 3% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 56% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 21% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

June 2025

Download StorPool product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

StarWind

StorPool is intelligent storage software that runs on standard servers and builds scalable, high-performance storage system out of these servers (software-defined storage). It focuses on the block-level storage and excels at it. It is incredibly flexible and can be deployed in both converged setups (on compute nodes, alongside VMs and applications) or on separate storage nodes.

StorPool has advanced fully-distributed architecture and is arguably the fastest and most efficient block-storage software on the market today. It is the best storage system when building a cloud.

StorPool

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool

May 2025

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