


StarWind Storage Appliance and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series provide robust storage solutions to tech buyers. Despite users being happier with the pricing and support of StarWind Storage Appliance, Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series appears to be superior due to its features, making it worth the price.
Features: StarWind Storage Appliance is commended for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series highlights performance, flexibility, and integration capabilities, standing out due to its comprehensive performance and integration.
Room for Improvement: Users suggest improving StarWind Storage Appliance's monitoring tools and management capabilities. For Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, users indicate that firmware updates and documentation can be enhanced.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for straightforward deployment and responsive support. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series has received mixed reviews regarding deployment complexity and support quality.
Pricing and ROI: StarWind Storage Appliance is noted for its cost-effectiveness and positive ROI. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, while seen as a higher upfront investment, is recognized for its long-term ROI.
Operational tasks such as provisioning storage and monitoring performance happen faster, and less downtime risk and hardware consolidation mean we support more workloads with fewer resources and less data center overhead.
We have never had an outage in my four and a half years, but in our company's ten or eleven years, there has never been any planned upgrades that required downtime.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
Since we obtained Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, we have certainly generated more revenue from customers regarding the disaster recovery system that we did not have in the past.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
I would rate the technical support an 11 out of 10.
Everpure FlashArray is probably not cheap storage, but it provides great performance, scalability, and everything a customer needs.
I would rate the customer support a perfect 10.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
Our customers can scale up or scale out, raise the performance, and expand the storage spaces by investing every year.
We have successfully upgraded the controllers, scaled capacity, and scaled arrays without much impact on the system and with seamless planning.
Regarding scalability, Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is the highest.
For scalability, I would rate Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series at about 90%; it is very good.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
We have continuous 99.9% uptime and do not experience any users reporting performance issues due to latency.
The vision Pure Storage FlashArray offers through the GUI is clearer; we can discern the status, what is cabled, and how direct flash is enabled.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
The type of connection that is used in Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series should be improved.
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series can be improved with a 25 gigabyte connection or 100 gigabyte connection.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
Some smaller organizations may find it slightly expensive, but for enterprises, when considering performance, future hardware investments, and overall benefits, it is a very cost-effective solution for mid and enterprise organizations.
The price of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is very good.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very good because we are a Lenovo partner.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
On the DE storage, the most valuable feature, in my opinion, is the performance.
The synchronization between the two systems stands out for me due to its reliability and simplicity regarding the swap and the active-passive disaster recovery.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Everpure FlashArray | 6.9% |
| Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series | 1.6% |
| StarWind Storage Appliance | 0.6% |
| Other | 90.9% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 71 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 159 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 2 |
The FlashArray family delivers consistent, high-performance data services across block, file, and object workloads. As part of the Everpure Platform, it provides the foundation for a unified data plane, enabling applications to reliably access, protect, and manage data across environments with simplicity and predictability. With built-in capabilities such as inline data reduction, snapshots, replication, and ransomware resilience, FlashArray ensures efficient operations, protected data, and consistent application uptime.
As the foundation of the (unified) data plane, FlashArray enables policy-driven automation, monitoring, and centralized management while integrating across cloud and on-premises environments. Built on an Evergreen architecture, it supports non-disruptive upgrades and continuous performance improvements over time while simplifying operations at scale.
What Key Features Does FlashArray Offer?
What Benefits Should Users Consider?
In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series offers simplicity and ease of use, making it ideal for mid to large businesses. It provides virtualization support, reliability, and comes with dual controllers and integrated storage, all at a competitive price point.
Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series stands out with its focus on cost-effective performance for mid to large enterprises. It supports virtual environments like VMware and widely used applications such as Oracle SQL Server and SAP. The system is designed for quick deployment and easy maintenance with minimal downtime, providing a reliable block-level storage experience. While it offers impressive features, there's a need for improvements in scalability, hyper-converged infrastructure support, structured replication, and to expand connections. Enhancements in backup software integrations and the introduction of a snapshot feature could enrich the user experience.
What are the key features of Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series?Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is primarily deployed in industries like manufacturing, small business, and database systems. It supports video surveillance archiving and production storage. On-premises deployments are common for virtual machine storage and infrastructure replacement, with some transitioning to cloud environments like AWS.
StarWind Storage Appliance offers a user-friendly interface and cost-effective storage, featuring fast replication and iSCSI compatibility. Designed for efficiency, it excels in both standard and SSD hardware environments, supporting Microsoft Hyper-V Clusters and ensuring high availability for critical applications.
The storage appliance integrates smoothly into diverse infrastructural setups, offering easy management with all-flash arrays to boost performance. It supports remote sites with minimal resource requirements and is billed on a per-node basis, making it financially accessible. Notably, lacking a heartbeat node and flexible clustering support, it suits organizations familiar with existing storage systems. However, potential improvements include better integration with ecosystems like HP, Veeam, and Commvault, and enhanced setup processes. It faces challenges in node synchronization and dashboard consistency across versions, with StorMagic noted as offering more flexibility.
What are the key features of StarWind Storage Appliance?StarWind Storage Appliance is primarily employed for backup and storage in industries supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and virtual machines, seamlessly replacing legacy SAN systems. It's implemented across enterprises in two-node clusters, ensuring operational efficiency and accommodating remote site requirements through robust performance and network protocol support.
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