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HPE StoreVirtual vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
HPE StoreVirtual
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th)
StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (20th), HCI (24th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Vebjorn Nergaard - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1414572 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Director at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics
Flexible and reliable with helpful support
I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster. Who would not like things to be faster? It would be nice if StarWind could come up with a best practice document for configuration. I had to do some playing around in my environment with test runs to get the configuration that really allowed for the maximum amount of throughput that I was going to get with the software. Once I had figured out what worked best, the solution was rather fast for backing up 30+ TB of data

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This storage has to be the most well thought out and effective storage that I have had the privilege to work with."
"The best features of Pure Storage are their support and analytics."
"We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's overall speed is its most valuable feature."
"Pure Storage FlashArray offers numerous valuable features, such as low latency and high throughput."
"Once we solved the data reduction and what Pure does we were hooked."
"We have perfect run through times and latency."
"The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when compared to other products, automatic tiering, availability, and disaster recovery are very good."
"StoreVirtual has proved to be a highly available, very stable and robust solution."
"The ability to scale out if/when additional capacity is required."
"Input/Output (I/O) has greatly improved."
"A company can scale it easily."
"Technical support has been excellent."
"HPE StoreVirtual is very easy to use from the management console."
"It is an excellent alternative to small hardware SANs if you already have the disk space on other servers and adequate network bandwidth for your level of disk activity."
"The support that they provide is excellent, with 24 hours a day seven days a week support, and all the engineers and the support staff know the solution very well."
"It is a stable solution."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"We simply replicate our backups from Veeam to the virtual tape library that StarWind implements, while magically transporting those to B2 for our offsite backup requirements."
 

Cons

"The difference in pricing could become a problem for Pure because the commoditization of the solutions could lead to a different price being a problem."
"They could improve the price."
"We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better."
"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."
"If we suddenly dump large amounts of data onto the storage system, it takes a while to process it."
"Everpure FlashArray can be improved as the pricing is expensive, but you do get what you pay for; you are paying a premium for better service, better warranties, less downtime, and other things, so I do not know that a lower price would work out because you probably would not have that high of quality for those things."
"I would like to see them develop the ability to integrate with more AWS services."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"Features like data deduplication would be great because in the end, this solution requires a lot of raw disk space because of the use of RAID5 on the hardware and RAID1 on the network."
"The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger."
"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."
"Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently."
"You shouldn't buy it, and get HP MSA or something similar."
"I suppose I could wish for less latency, but that might be coming from configuration as opposed to actual product support – especially since I only see latency on one of the two VSAs that we have deployed."
"I would like to have this solution easily integrate with VMware."
"The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"In practice, it is somewhat technical to deploy and manage, but overall it gets the job done."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We do not incur additional costs beyond the licensing fee."
"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"It's a good price point and it's a solid product for the price."
"It is a cheaper solution."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."
"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."
"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise161
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise19
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics
Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.