StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.2%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual Tape Library is 2.2%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	3.3%
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance	2.2%
StarWind Virtual Tape Library	2.2%
Other	92.3%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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reviewer1414572

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

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensures efficient replication and helps maintain our data centers' uptime."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."

"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."

"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."

"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."

"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."

"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

"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."

"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."

"It is a stable solution."

"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."

Cons

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"I would like to see better integration."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."

"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."

"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."

"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."

"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."

"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."

"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."

"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."

"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."

"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"The product is very expensive."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"The price is a little high."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."

"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

18%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Hospitality Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	8

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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Comparisons

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 20% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 16% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 14% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 12% of the time

FalconStor FreeStor vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library

Compared 12% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

December 2025

Download StarWind Virtual Tape Library product report

Overview

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.

Pure Storage

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

For SMB and Enterprises, who either look to get rid of backup tapes completely, or are willing to accelerate backup process and add an extra level of protection, our solution is StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It is an appliance that eliminates the need in physical tape and “pretends” to be a supported tape drive or autoloader, keeping all data on inexpensive, fast and high-capacity spinning disks.

Even with explosive data growth, StarWind VTL fits the backup into backup window by accelerating it, so the process does not overlap with production time. Optionally, it creates additional copy of backup data for better safety. It is also available in a software-only form, as part of StarWind VSAN functionality.

StarWind VTL targets those, who need to replace existing tape backup infrastructure or accelerate it if regulatory requirements prohibit replacement. In case the goal is just virtualizing tape backup or creating a stretched backup infrastructure, StarWind Tape Redirector will come in handy.

StarWind

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library