No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

SteelFusion vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

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

SteelFusion
Ranking in HCI
29th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of SteelFusion is 1.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 7.9%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSAN7.9%
SteelFusion1.3%
Other90.8%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

it_user866178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at MAZZETTI+GBA
Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices
The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"That is why Riverbed SteelFusion has delivered a masterclass technology that not only abstracted and virtualized the storage vendors’ unique logical storage structures, it has made it logically closer and seamless to the branch applications from a performance and experience perspective."
"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."
"Some of the valuable features of this product are: Software-defined class which is one of the building blocks for SDDC, flexible as it scales as and when needed, simple as it is easy to manage, and high performance as the local server can access data at full speed with low latency in SSD, while the absence of network-attached storage appliances lowers infrastructure cost."
"By using VMware vSAN we have limited the need to maintain multiple physical servers and have been able to reduce the entire cost of the IT operation and management because of the reduction of physical servers."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"Performance-wise, it has gone above and beyond what we originally spec'ed it for."
"The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment."
"Using vSAN, you can use the same servers as the hypervisor uses for the vSAN storage, so no SAN or NAS is needed and much less hardware is needed to provide the same HA solution."
"We are very happy with it and would highly recommend Virtual SAN for any demanding application that is running on VMware."
 

Cons

"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."
"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."
"It is quite an expensive solution for us and I would like to see some improvements on the backup side of the solution."
"I would like to see more basic reporting, or even expert reporting. I think with our licensing that we've paid our dues, and we should get the information."
"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged."
"It is an expensive solution."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."
"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
"​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
"We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually."
"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."
"The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues."
"We have increased our user productivity."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
908,344 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business101
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise135
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Roxtec, Engen, Bobst, CBP, IUCN, Mahoning County, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: July 2026.
908,344 professionals have used our research since 2012.