HPE StoreVirtual vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #21, while Microsoft is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 1.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Microsoft’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

HPE StoreVirtual and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct compete in the network storage domain, with HPE StoreVirtual having the edge in integrated platform capabilities and broad hypervisor support.

Features: HPE StoreVirtual offers high availability with its Network RAID feature, broad hypervisor support, and a single-point contact for issue resolution. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is notable for its performance via RDMA, feature integration within the Windows Server environment, and scalability for Microsoft ecosystem users.

Room for Improvement: HPE StoreVirtual needs better partner implementation strategies, a simplified licensing process, and improvements in latency and configuration. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct requires more comprehensive documentation, better API support, and improvements in network capabilities and management interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE StoreVirtual is acclaimed for easy on-premises deployment and has a reliable customer service team. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is valued for its integration within Windows systems and benefits from a broad support network.

Pricing and ROI: HPE StoreVirtual offers competitive licensing but can become costly without careful management, yet it typically provides excellent ROI. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, part of the Windows Server suite, offers cost efficiencies for Microsoft users with positive ROI, although initial costs can be high.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

September 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 October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.3%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct	7.3%
HPE StoreVirtual	1.5%
Other	87.1%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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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 performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"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."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

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

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It allows compute and storage to operate separately, and has the ability to take SAN nodes out of production for maintenance with little effort and zero downtime."

"It's very stable and it's easy to use."

"A company can scale it easily."

"The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with glitches or bugs."

"The solution is very stable."

"The seamlessness behind the scenes of block management."

"The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is hardware independent."

"Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

"Its technical support is excellent."

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

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

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

"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."

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

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

Cons

"I have not seen ROI."

"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."

"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."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"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."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately."

"Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently."

"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."

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

"Product looks like it is in the end of development."

"The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance."

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

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

More HPE StoreVirtual cons

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

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

"There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems."

"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."

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

"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."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be cheaper."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

"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."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"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."

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

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Performing Arts

14%

Transportation Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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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 bes...

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

Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...

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What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recomme...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 35% of the time

VMware vSAN vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 32% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 32% of the time

More HPE StoreVirtual Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 57% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 9% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

September 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

September 2025

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

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

September 2025

Free Report: HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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