StorPool vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

StorPool and VMware are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. StorPool is ranked #20, while VMware is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.5. StorPool holds a 2.5% 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: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StorPool vs. VMware Software Defined Storage

June 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 June 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 2.5%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Software Defined Storage is 0.9%, down from 0.9% 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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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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Achilles Lobo

Infrastructure Architect at Grupo Protege

Simple to configure and provides good performance

The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint. Dell deployed the solution, and it's very simple to use. VMware software is widely used by IT administrators VMware Software Defined Storage can be improved in the replication area. The solution has some…

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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

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

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

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

"It's very easy-to-use."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"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."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"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

"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 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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cons

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."

"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."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

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

"Monitoring and statistics UI is a bit clumsy."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

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

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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

"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'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."

"The solution is very expensive."

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

"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."

"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."

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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

25%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Performing Arts

12%

Government

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

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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 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

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 56% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 22% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 9% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

DataCore SANsymphony vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 38% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 33% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware Software Defined Storage

Compared 28% of the time

More VMware Software Defined Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

May 2025

Download StorPool product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Software Defined Storage

May 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

June 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: June 2025.

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