HPE StoreVirtual vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

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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 July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 1.3%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.6%, up from 7.4% 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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Vebjorn Nergaard

Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

Reliable with helpful support and good replication

The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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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 onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"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."

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

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"A company can scale it easily."

"HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console."

"he interface and the installation makes it easy as it's all in one piece of hardware and it doesn't need to be connected to anything else."

"The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management."

"A very flexible solution."

"All of the administrative tasks are easy and everything is centralized."

"It appears to be very stable and very robust."

"I guess on the top of the list is certainly ease of use."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."

"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

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

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"One of the areas that need improvement is the consolidated management platform, to manage all of the nodes from one place and the licensing around that."

"The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger."

"It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker."

"The solution needs to ensure it is on par with the industry in terms of availability of features and various other options."

"The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users."

"The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years."

"f you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear."

"In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product."

More HPE StoreVirtual cons

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"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 have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price could be cheaper."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."

"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."

"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."

"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."

"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."

"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"The solution is expensive."

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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

19%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

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...

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...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

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We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addi...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution. At the moment, the new version does...

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Compared 52% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 48% of the time

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Compared 62% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

HPE StoreVirtual

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Also Known As

No data available

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

MS Storage Spaces Direct

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

HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct