We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual Tape Library and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"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 features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"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."
"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 initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"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."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
More StarWind Virtual Tape Library Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 14th in HCI with 6 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, HPE StoreVirtual and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind Virtual Tape Library vs. VMware vSAN report.
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