


StorMagic SvSAN and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct compete in the realm of virtual storage solutions. StorMagic SvSAN is appealing for its cost-effectiveness and simplicity, particularly in smaller organizations, whereas Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is preferred by larger enterprises due to its robust feature set and justifies its higher price.
Features: StorMagic SvSAN offers lightweight deployment, minimal hardware requirements, and efficient storage management suitable for edge and small data centers. Alternatively, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct includes high availability, scalability, and seamless integration with Windows Server environments, which supports larger and more complex setups.
Room for Improvement: StorMagic SvSAN could enhance its high-end scalability, increase its feature richness to appeal to larger enterprises, and improve its integration capabilities with various environments. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could simplify its deployment process, reduce its dependency on Windows ecosystems, and offer more tailored support for small to mid-sized businesses.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorMagic SvSAN provides a straightforward deployment with excellent technical support known for its quick resolutions and responsiveness. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers more intricate installation processes due to its feature-rich nature, yet it benefits from Microsoft’s extensive support network. Deployment is particularly advantageous for enterprises familiar with the Windows ecosystem.
Pricing and ROI: StorMagic SvSAN is attractive due to its lower upfront cost, making it ideal for businesses with budget constraints seeking reliable storage solutions while achieving rapid ROI. In contrast, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, with its higher initial investment, is tailored for companies planning to fully utilize its comprehensive feature set, offering significant ROI over time.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
While our systems will be out of life in a few years, I believe that in that time, the payback from Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct will save us money on virtualization and storage costs, making it extremely beneficial after six years of use.
I see some ROI in Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, such as saving time and money, and I estimate these savings to be about 30%.
StorMagic SvSAN helped us save around sixty percent on previous costs.
With StorMagic, we calculate the return on investment to be about two years, compared to other solutions we could have adopted.
StorMagic SvSAN has delivered great benefits in overall cost-efficiency since it is an integral part of our complete solutions for clients.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
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.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
There were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions.
Microsoft focuses on Azure as a cloud service.
I rate them at a nine out of ten due to their prompt responses and effective solutions to our issues.
They respond rapidly to support requests and provide assistance beyond their scope.
StorMagic offers exemplary customer and technical support, ensuring excellent service and timely assistance that enhances my clients' experience.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been extremely good, allowing for both vertical and horizontal expansion.
It has limitations; it's configured for eight servers per site but can be scaled to 16 servers.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is limited.
We can simply add more ESX hosts to a cluster and deploy additional controllers without any issues.
StorMagic SvSAN is easy to scale.
Scaling CPU and servers can be costly due to increased licensing fees beyond two nodes.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been incredibly stable as long as it is configured correctly; incorrect configurations lead to surprises, which is common with any product.
Storage Spaces Direct is stable enough, however, there can be some glitches.
StorMagic SvSAN has demonstrated flawless stability over the past six years, with no reported downtime, bugs, or glitches.
Its ability to seamlessly migrate running machines to another host during maintenance ensures uninterrupted operations and a transparent user experience.
The stability of StorMagic SvSAN is excellent.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions.
One year ago, I had a problem, and it was difficult to identify and solve due to a lack of tools.
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and there are problems regarding performance that need to be addressed.
It would be beneficial to have a central place for configurations, similar to VMware vCenter.
Ideally, the console should provide plugins or similar configuration options for seamless integration with these tools.
Unauthorized access to the SvSAN server could cause significant damage.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
I find the Azure Local to be a bit expensive, especially due to hidden costs associated with additional tools needed for monitoring and alerting.
Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct.
The pricing model, based on the usable storage capacity, is simple and predictable.
I would rate the cost a one out of ten with ten being the most costly.
Choosing the maximum capacity proved cost-effective, especially compared to alternatives like VMware vSAN, which would have been significantly more expensive based on VCP cores.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
The redundancy and fault tolerance features of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct have helped maintain data integrity and availability in my company by providing multiple copies through three-way mirroring, delivering hardware performance needed for our applications, which is crucial.
For caching, I use disks with more total bits written, which protects the main storage because writes are combined.
The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.
I am able to bring fully functional virtual infrastructure in a matter of two hours with StorMagic SvSAN, compared to other technologies that are very complex.
For our solution in production plants, stability is crucial.
StorMagic engineers were very helpful in setting up the system, remoting into our system to assist, which was very beneficial.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| StorMagic SvSAN | 4.5% |
| Pure Storage FlashBlade | 3.3% |
| Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct | 6.1% |
| Other | 86.1% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 21 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
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.
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.
StorMagic SvSAN is simple hyperconverged storage used to eliminate downtime. It provides high availability with two nodes per cluster, and boasts users among thousands of organizations to keep mission-critical applications and data online and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
SvSAN is a lightweight solution that has been designed specifically for small-to-medium-sized businesses and edge computing environments such as retail stores, manufacturing plants and even oil rigs at sea.
SvSAN provides organizations with a simple, 'set and forget' solution that enables lightweight high availability as a virtual SAN (VSAN) with a witness VM that can be local, in the cloud, or as-a-service, and support up to 1,000 2-node clusters. It provides a low barrier to entry with capacity-based licensing and minimal hardware requirements, allowing organizations to use existing equipment. Plus, any IT professional can deploy and manage 1,000 sites as easily as 1, with automation tools and scripts.
SvSAN gives organizations choice and control by allowing configurations of any x86 server models and storage types, even mixed within a cluster, while vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors can be used. It is built to perform, with code that eliminates performance bottlenecks and caching features to boost performance and prevent over-provisioning. SvSAN accommodates future growth and technologies too, with support for containers and VMs, and allows compute and storage to be scaled easily and independently.
SvSAN's additional features help to deliver 100% uptime with synchronous mirroring and no single point of failure, even with poor, unreliable networks, and non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades. Disaster protection is provided with capability for stretched clusters that reduce risk, plus extensive integrations with backup and DR providers and the option to add a third node to clusters. SvSAN also ensures data security with FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption, software RAID options and the elimination of split-brain risk.
We monitor all Software Defined Storage (SDS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.