StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs StorPool comparison

StarWind and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. StarWind is ranked #24, while StorPool is ranked #18. StarWind holds a 2.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.9% 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 Tape Library are competing products in the data handling and storage solutions category. StorPool appears to have an advantage in terms of performance and scalability, while StarWind excels in feature variety and perceived value.

Features: StorPool offers high performance, scalability, and seamless integration with various cloud environments. Its notable features include efficient storage performance and the ability to expand storage almost without limit. StarWind Virtual Tape Library provides robust backup and recovery features along with compatibility with numerous server environments. It enables virtual tape creation and archiving to cloud platforms, making it a flexible solution.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could enhance its traditional deployment options and offer more comprehensive documentation for on-premise environments. Additional cost transparency could also benefit potential users. StarWind Virtual Tape Library may improve by simplifying its deployment process and making its technical management less complex. It could also work on integrating newer cloud services for broader compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool features an easy deployment process with strong cloud integration and responsive customer service. StarWind Virtual Tape Library has a more traditional deployment model, backed by extensive technical documentation and supportive customer service tailored towards detailed backup solutions.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool's pricing model is designed to be cost-effective, offering favorable ROI thanks to its scalable performance-based pricing. StarWind Virtual Tape Library may entail higher initial setup costs, but users find these justified by its extensive feature set and long-term reliability.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs. StorPool Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs. StorPool

December 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:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual Tape Library is 2.2%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.9%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.3%
StorPool	2.9%
StarWind Virtual Tape Library	2.2%
Other	91.6%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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reviewer1414572

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

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The initial setup is pretty quick."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."

"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."

"It is a stable solution."

"The solution made our backups way more reliable."

"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."

"With StorPool we were able to build live failover on top of our LXC infrastructure. This allows us both to live-migrate containers between compute nodes without any downtime and, in case of an entire node suffering any type of failure, we can bring all containers back online within a minute on a spare compute node."

"The speed of the storage solution also allows us to provide service to applications that are very I/O intensive."

"The two 10GE networks provide redundancy and increased performance as they serve as two separate networks doubling the throughput and doing multipathing and load balancing. We now have a high performance shared storage system which enables us to run on private cloud. Our previous system used bare-metal hardware, which provided high performance but inflexible management. Now we have best of both worlds, SSD-class performance with flexibility of a private cloud system."

"Creating snapshots within seconds for big disks has helped our different migration projects since it allows us to perform them in a short period of time."

"The team behind it was very engaged and had the skills and ability to support a service provider."

"Performance, redundancy, scalability and cost-effectiveness. StorPool delivers superbly in all of these areas."

Cons

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"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."

"I have not seen ROI."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"The solution is expensive."

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"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 initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."

"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."

"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."

"At times we need to check the disks and do some minor operations. A friendlier user interface would be useful in such cases."

"he only place we feel they could improve is the time it takes to bring new features to production."

"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."

"It would be good if, with next releases, StorPool provide a better GUI for monitoring and statistics. This would make our experience even better and complete."

"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."

"Live and historical performance statistics would be useful, though my understanding is that this is on the way in a future release."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"The product is very expensive."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."

"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."

"It provides us with a significant reduction in TCO due to their pay-as-you-grow licensing model, which means we don’t have to pay upfront for hardware and licensing for capacity thStorPoolat we don’t yet need to use."

"StorPool software is cost-effective and gives us a pricing advantage over our competitors."

"StorPool's pricing and licensing model is very transparent. As always, one has to due his due diligence when choosing a product like distributed storage solutions."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

No data available

Computer Software Company

17%

Performing Arts

17%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	1

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?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 6% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 21% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 17% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 17% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 14% of the time

FalconStor FreeStor vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 13% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 56% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 18% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs StorPool

Compared 13% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

December 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

December 2025

Download StarWind Virtual Tape Library product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

December 2025

Download StorPool product report

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

For SMB and Enterprises, who either look to get rid of backup tapes completely, or are willing to accelerate backup process and add an extra level of protection, our solution is StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It is an appliance that eliminates the need in physical tape and “pretends” to be a supported tape drive or autoloader, keeping all data on inexpensive, fast and high-capacity spinning disks.

Even with explosive data growth, StarWind VTL fits the backup into backup window by accelerating it, so the process does not overlap with production time. Optionally, it creates additional copy of backup data for better safety. It is also available in a software-only form, as part of StarWind VSAN functionality.

StarWind VTL targets those, who need to replace existing tape backup infrastructure or accelerate it if regulatory requirements prohibit replacement. In case the goal is just virtualizing tape backup or creating a stretched backup infrastructure, StarWind Tape Redirector will come in handy.

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

Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi

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

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs. StorPool

December 2025

Free Report: StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs. StorPool

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