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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (2nd)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th), HCI (14th)
VMware Software Defined Sto...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
reviewer2865906 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
High availability server failover has provided reliable on‑premises hardware redundancy
The best features StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers are easy and simple setup. Support did a lot of the work during the setup process, which made it easy for me. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance has positively impacted my organization by giving us high availability. High availability has benefited my team and organization by providing redundancy for hardware failure.
Mohammad Jundiah - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Qatar Datamation Systems
Data security and performance excel but integration and licensing need improvement
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery.  Additionally, I worked with VMware Software Defined Storage both internally and with partners to consolidate servers into one solution The most valuable features of VMware Software…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scalability is one of the best features. You can quickly add more. You can swap out the drives with larger sizes, you can add more shelves. All of that is perfect - the whole concept of keeping it modular..."
"From an intangible standpoint the lack of care and feeding is notable and freed up the Storage Team to do other things."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"Service and support is phenomenal."
"The performance levels and the storage have improved my organization because we're a 95% virtualized environment and we're able to allocate resources as needed and manage our whole infrastructure that way."
"The solution is very reliable."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are the speed and dependability, which are the main features that we get from Pure; it is faster than its competition, and we do not have any documented downtime from it ever."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"They have the best support I've experienced with any vendor I've worked with up until now."
"At the moment I haven't any reason or cause for improvement because it does what it does as it says on the tin, and it just works."
"The StarWind Hyperconverged Appliance really took us forward in terms of technology, delivery speeds, and management overheads."
"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."
"This solution has allowed us to take advantage of newer technologies, maintain our servers with ease, and reduce downtime."
"StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center, and it is much simpler to manage."
"The product is user-friendly from an administrative standpoint and very easy to use."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."
"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."
"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without the requirement of additional hardware, which is the biggest advantage."
"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."
"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good."
"The technical support is awesome."
 

Cons

"Storage. There could be better storage."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"Technical support needs improvement. With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"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."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss. I don't use it much as it is a bit slow and buggy."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"We did have some issues with shipping the product to one our sites."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"It doesn't have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors."
"Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution."
"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."
"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"
"The cost of the product is where an improvement could be made. It's generally very expensive and requires a lot of architecture that needs to be designed according to specific situations."
"It's easy to scale and expand but the main catch is the cost. It's expensive."
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"We have a seen a reduction in TCO. It is definitely a cost-effective solution for us. We have seen ROI."
"It is light years beyond anything else with the same price point."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"Pure Storage FlashArray's pricing is very competitive."
"The licensing is $100,000."
"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."
"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"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."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"The product is quite expensive and is among the most expensive for this type of solution."
"A single socket costs you around US $6,000 for three years. At a minimum, you have a three load cluster for a medium or enterprise-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other side. It comes to around $30,000."
"I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting."
"The solution is very expensive."
"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business73
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise160
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business51
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance fo...
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Regarding StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's AI capabilities, I think it does not have any. I think it does not have...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Software Defined Storage?
The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for...
What needs improvement with VMware Software Defined Storage?
There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansibl...
What is your primary use case for VMware Software Defined Storage?
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery. Ad...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
No data available
VMware SDS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Helse Nord, Sky
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware Software Defined Storage and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.