NetApp HCI [EOL] vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

NetApp and StarWind are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 209 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

8,276 Views
5,048 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

StarWind Virtual SAN

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI.

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

June 2026

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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

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StarWind Virtual SAN

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

209

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (4th)

Featured Reviews

Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022

Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Read full review

Jccerong Heron

System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs

The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."

"NetApp HCI has improved our organization by allowing us to put more time into investing in new ideas and spending less time in the administration of the solution."

"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."

"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers."

"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."

"Everything we've moved over runs two times faster and in some cases, a lot faster, far more than twice, which our users noticed."

"It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to offer high availability service without purchasing external storage systems."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."

"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."

"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."

"This solution has allowed the company to create an HA virtual server environment satisfying budget restrictions and reliability requirements."

"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."

"This solution has helped us maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources, and we have saved about 80 percent versus purchasing a physical SAN and gained peace of mind, which is important."

"Technically the change is enormous and the operational risk in case of disaster has been minimized."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"We went with a different solution and having run that for a while, I would say that there is a lot more than they could do to make it more streamlined."

"It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."

"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."

"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."

"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."

"It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

"There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."

"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."

"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."

"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."

"While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing."

"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."

"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."

"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."

"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."

"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."

"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."

"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."

"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."

"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Marketing Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	167
Midsize Enterprise	55
Large Enterprise	34

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that pricing was straightforward. The setup costs were invoiced to us, we paid that, and then we were able to schedule a time to work with a...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

I think that StarWind Virtual SAN can be improved in terms of scalability. Currently, we have a two-node cluster, and the maximum that is available is a three-node cluster. Being able to scale beyo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is to be able to utilize directly attached storage as a SAN. A specific example of how I use StarWind Virtual SAN for directly attached storage is that we ...

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 24% of the time

VxRail vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 5% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

June 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

May 2026

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

Overview

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

StarWind Virtual SAN offers robust, scalable solutions for high availability in VMware and Hyper-V environments, providing real-time data replication and seamless infrastructure integration.

StarWind Virtual SAN stands out for high availability, impressive performance, and smooth integration with existing systems. Its real-time data replication capabilities minimize downtime and boost operational efficiency. Users appreciate the platform's cost-effectiveness and compatibility with diverse hardware, allowing for seamless deployment across hyper-converged infrastructures and data redundancy setups. Despite the strong feature set, calls for a more user-friendly setup and interface are common, alongside requests for clearer documentation and a web-based management interface.

What are the most notable features?

High Availability: Ensures continuous operation with real-time replication.
Seamless Integration: Works smoothly with existing IT infrastructure.
Scalability: Adapts to changing capacity needs easily.
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces traditional SAN system expenses.
Energy Efficiency: Saves on power consumption with optimized functionality.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Reduced Maintenance: Minimizes IT staff involvement, lowering costs.
Enhanced Performance: Facilitates efficient data handling.
Operational Efficiency: Decreases downtime, increasing productivity.
Flexibility: Supports various IT configurations and strategies.

In industries like small businesses, StarWind Virtual SAN is implemented to replace costly SAN systems, ensuring uptime and strong performance. It's leveraged for hyper-converged infrastructure, failover clustering, and backup strategies, meeting diverse IT demands from hosting virtual machines to data migration.

StarWind

Sample Customers

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: June 2026.

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