


Scality RING and StarWind Virtual SAN are competing storage solutions designed for modern data management. StarWind Virtual SAN often has the upper hand due to its advanced features leading to higher satisfaction; however, Scality RING frequently scores better in pricing and reliability, offering significant value for investment.
Features: Scality RING provides robust scalability and geo-replication for large-scale, multi-site deployments. It supports multi-cloud environments and ensures data durability and management. StarWind Virtual SAN is known for high-performance storage in virtualized settings, offering speed and integrated support for hyper-converged infrastructures. It is appreciated for simplicity and easy integration with various scenarios, including hybrid cloud.
Room for Improvement: Scality RING can improve its deployment approach by reducing the need for specialized expertise to shorten deployment time. Its customer support could become more responsive to enhance user experience. Additionally, enhancing integration options with diverse software environments may increase its adoption. StarWind Virtual SAN could enhance its cost model to lower initial investment barriers, broaden integration capabilities with other platforms, and potentially simplify its pricing structure for better transparency.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Scality RING uses a modular deployment approach, which may require specialized expertise, potentially extending deployment time. Its customer service is robust but can improve in responsiveness. StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for streamlined deployment with faster installations and less complexity. It also receives high marks for proactive and supportive customer service.
Pricing and ROI: Scality RING generally offers a predictable pricing model with lower initial costs, providing strong support for diverse workloads leading to high ROI. In contrast, StarWind Virtual SAN, with a higher initial investment, focuses on maximizing performance and reducing long-term costs, offering substantial ROI through improved performance efficiencies.
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.
I think RING's ability to maintain predictable costs while providing scalable storage solutions impacts our budget by allowing us to pay only for capacity.
For instance, while the cost per gig on a block storage platform may be $2, it's $1.50 for NAS, and only $0.50 for object storage, leading to a remarkable 75% reduction in costs by utilizing the Scality platform.
Scality RING has reduced our operating costs.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.
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've always received responses within the required timeframe, the answers were technically relevant, and there was follow-up—people called us back to check if everything was okay and if the ticket could be closed.
Individuals such as Peter Mikolastik really make a difference by saying, 'Come on, what is the problem? I will help you,' rather than just brushing things off.
Technically, when we have major issues in P1, they are very responsive and we can't say that we don't get a response.
Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.
They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly who will be able to connect, verify your setup, run its parameters, and see exactly what's working and what is not, and adjust it, and they really help you with that.
The customer support from StarWind Virtual SAN is great, as the people are knowledgeable and have great knowledge about the product and the functionality we require in the system.
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.
Upwards, I think, almost unlimited by what we can imagine.
I've never had issues with scalability.
We are relatively well informed about their new features, what will be implemented in future versions, and the scalability of the solution.
If we want to expand our storage or add disks, it is easy to add them, configure the RAID, and then deploy it.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
When you move from a two-node cluster to a three-node cluster, you have to completely redo the way that they are connected to each other with iSCSI.
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.
It is a platform that is very stable at the customer level and does not generate incidents or blockages that you might encounter with standard storage solutions, where you can lose data.
I find that Scality RING is very stable because it allows for many maintenance operations without service loss.
There are factors that can cause Scality RING to become occasionally unavailable, but due to the system's resilience, it is capable of recovering or degrading gracefully.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.
I ran it on a two-node Hyper-V cluster setup, and I didn't experience any unexpected crashes or major issues.
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.
Encryption and data security need improvement. We don't have a solution for customers who need confidentiality.
They should prioritize quality over timeliness to minimize customer disruptions and not force customers into a cycle of fixes that interfere with daily work.
What we are currently missing and will be demanding in the new tender is an additional external backup of all data, ideally on a simple system, to safeguard against any severe local incidents so that we still have the data protected elsewhere.
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
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.
Fortunately, in terms of the license, we are able to expand the disks without having to adjust the license.
In the end, it always depends on how much you pay for it.
Regarding setup costs and licensing, our initial experience is somewhat dated now as we made a comprehensive purchase, including hardware, software, and system setup, which Scality handled at the time.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
StarWind Virtual SAN is very cost-effective for mid-level companies like ours, costing about one-sixth of what we would pay for a hardware solution that would require redundant hardware due to our remoteness.
I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.
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.
When a server is lost, the data is still accessible.
It is even better stored when there is only one copy on a system and there is a second copy on an immutability system, which is almost equivalent to backing it up on tape and taking it offline, making it completely inaccessible.
Scality RING has influenced our approach to scaling in different dimensions by providing a cost-effective solution for the tremendous amount of data we generate every day for each customer.
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 71 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 159 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 12 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 167 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 55 |
| Large Enterprise | 34 |
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.
Scality RING is the scalable and resilient object storage solution designed for modern workloads, providing seamless data protection against evolving cyber threats.
Scality RING leverages S3 object storage to meet unpredictable demands with a patented MultiScale Architecture that offers limitless scalability across capacity, performance, and more. It delivers end-to-end cyber resilience with CORE5 for ransomware protection, while its cloud-style economics and intuitive management empower enterprises to accelerate AI initiatives and optimize cloud deployments. Its flexibility is ideal for service providers managing extensive data needs.
What are the key features of Scality RING?Scality RING is extensively implemented in backup solutions across industries, supporting platforms like Veeam and CommVault. It aids in storage expansion and management of large data volumes alongside multi-site architectures. While not leading in AI spaces due to performance constraints, there's potential with faster disk support. It's also used in archives, binary lakes, multimedia services, and AI data lakes.
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?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.
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