StorPool vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

StorPool and VMware are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. StorPool is ranked #19, while VMware is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.5. StorPool holds a 2.4% mindshare in SDS, compared to VMware’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StorPool users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StorPool and VMware Software Defined Storage compete in the software-defined storage market. StorPool seems to have the upper hand with competitive pricing and robust support, but VMware offers comprehensive features appealing to feature-focused buyers.

Features: StorPool excels in performance scalability, seamless integration with open-source platforms, and impressive data resilience. VMware Software Defined Storage provides a range of enterprise features like high availability, and deep integration with VMware's virtualization ecosystem, making it attractive for enterprises invested in VMware.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could benefit from enhanced enterprise feature sets and broader integrations with legacy systems. Optimized management interfaces and improved user onboarding might also enhance user experience. VMware Software Defined Storage could improve by streamlining the setup process, reducing complexity in deployment, and offering more cost-effective solutions for smaller businesses.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool provides straightforward deployment with strong, responsive customer support. VMware Software Defined Storage offers an extensive setup process with a support system embedded within VMware's infrastructure, assisting complex environments but potentially delaying initial deployment.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool offers lower setup costs and faster ROI, which is enticing for businesses with tighter budgets. VMware Software Defined Storage has higher initial costs but justifies these with a robust feature set and strong integration capabilities, suitable for businesses seeking comprehensive storage solutions within a VMware environment.

To learn more, read our detailed StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage

April 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 May 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.4%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Software Defined Storage is 0.9%, down from 1.1% 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.

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it_user689271

President at eApps Hosting

Enabled us to increase both our gross margins and performance while also decreasing latency

We initially started using StorPool at three locations with a capacity of 250+ TB.By implementing StorPool, we managed to increase both our gross margins and performance, while decreasing the latency to 0.19-0.26 ms up to 125,000 IOPS We now deliver all-flash performance and improved uptime with…

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RashidAnwar

Senior Project Lead at Tetra Pak

A stable solution that can be used for database applications and virtualization for multiple locations

VMware Software Defined Storage is used for database applications and virtualization for multiple locations VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption. Redundancy and scalability are the other valuable features of the solution. You can scale it on the go,…

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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

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."

"The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint."

"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."

"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."

"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good."

"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."

"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without additional hardware."

"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."

Cons

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"The solution is expensive."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution."

"It doesn't have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors."

"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."

"The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The solution has some limitations in terms of replication to remote sites or cloud infrastructure, which need improvement."

"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."

"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"

"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"The price is a little high."

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

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

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

"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."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"The price could be cheaper."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"The solution is very expensive."

"I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting."

"A single socket costs you around US $6,000 for three years. At a minimum, you have a three load cluster for a medium or enterprise-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other side. It comes to around $30,000."

"The product is quite expensive and is among the most expensive for this type of solution."

"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

22%

Performing Arts

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

11%

No data available

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...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

See all answers

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What do you like most about VMware Software Defined Storage?

VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Software Defined Storage?

The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for...

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What needs improvement with VMware Software Defined Storage?

There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansibl...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% 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

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 58% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 20% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 11% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 11% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

DataCore SANsymphony vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 100% of the time

More VMware Software Defined Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

April 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

April 2025

Download StorPool product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Software Defined Storage

April 2025

Download VMware Software Defined Storage product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware SDS

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

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

VMware software-defined storage is a simple, yet intelligent, storage data center architecture that aligns with business and application demands—eliminating static, purpose-built and inefficient hardware with dynamic, agile and automated solutions.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

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

Helse Nord, Sky

Buyer's Guide

StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage

April 2025

Free Report: StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage

Find out what your peers are saying about StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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