Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

StarWind Storage Appliance vs StorMagic SvSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Sentiment score
8.1
StorMagic SvSAN cuts costs and enhances ROI by needing just two servers, saving up to $30k annually in licensing.
StorMagic SvSAN helped us save around sixty percent on previous costs.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
With StorMagic, we calculate the return on investment to be about two years, compared to other solutions we could have adopted.
Information Technology Infrastructure Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
StorMagic SvSAN has delivered great benefits in overall cost-efficiency since it is an integral part of our complete solutions for clients.
Consultant at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Sentiment score
8.7
Customers highly praise StorMagic SvSAN for its expert, 24/7 support, emphasizing quick, personalized, and effective service.
I rate them at a nine out of ten due to their prompt responses and effective solutions to our issues.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
They respond rapidly to support requests and provide assistance beyond their scope.
Consultant at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
StorMagic offers exemplary customer and technical support, ensuring excellent service and timely assistance that enhances my clients' experience.
Senior Solution Consultant at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
Sentiment score
7.7
StorMagic SvSAN provides flexible scalability for edge setups, ideal for small to medium organizations, with suggested improvements for larger environments.
We can simply add more ESX hosts to a cluster and deploy additional controllers without any issues.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
StorMagic SvSAN is easy to scale.
Consultant at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
Scaling CPU and servers can be costly due to increased licensing fees beyond two nodes.
Senior Solution Consultant at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
Sentiment score
8.8
StorMagic SvSAN is lauded for its stability, redundancy, and efficiency, ensuring seamless operations and minimal downtime for medium use cases.
StorMagic SvSAN has demonstrated flawless stability over the past six years, with no reported downtime, bugs, or glitches.
Senior Solution Consultant at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Its ability to seamlessly migrate running machines to another host during maintenance ensures uninterrupted operations and a transparent user experience.
Information Technology Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
The stability of StorMagic SvSAN is excellent.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
 

Room For Improvement

StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
StorMagic SvSAN needs improved UI, scalability, security, and pricing to enhance user experience and enterprise compatibility.
It would be beneficial to have a central place for configurations, similar to VMware vCenter.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
Ideally, the console should provide plugins or similar configuration options for seamless integration with these tools.
Consultant at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
Unauthorized access to the SvSAN server could cause significant damage.
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees
 

Setup Cost

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
StorMagic SvSAN provides cost-effective licensing based on storage capacity, often 20-70% cheaper than competitors, aligning with enterprise budgets.
The pricing model, based on the usable storage capacity, is simple and predictable.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
I would rate the cost a one out of ten with ten being the most costly.
Consultant at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
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.
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees
 

Valuable Features

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
StorMagic SvSAN provides cost-effective, flexible, and user-friendly storage with high availability, easy setup, and supports extensive cluster configurations.
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.
Global Data Center & Disaster Recovery Manager at Curium Pharma
For our solution in production plants, stability is crucial.
Information Technology Infrastructure Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
StorMagic engineers were very helpful in setting up the system, remoting into our system to assist, which was very beneficial.
IT Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (16th), All-Flash Storage (31st)
StorMagic SvSAN
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed for NAS and holds a mindshare of 1.2%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
StorMagic SvSAN, on the other hand, focuses on Software Defined Storage (SDS), holds 4.5% mindshare, down 6.7% since last year.
NAS Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StarWind Storage Appliance1.2%
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)15.1%
Dell PowerStore10.4%
Other73.3%
NAS
Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StorMagic SvSAN4.5%
Red Hat Ceph Storage14.3%
DataCore SANsymphony6.3%
Other74.9%
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Assistant at Bharat Electronics Limited
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
reviewer2619357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Provides immediate benefits after deployment
StorMagic SvSAN is flexible and easy to use. It is compatible with various hardware, including Cisco, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro. The company is also flexible with its recommended specifications, allowing users to exceed them without issue. I have not encountered any problems with StorMagic SvSAN on any hardware vendor I have tried. The cost of hardware required for StorMagic SvSAN is significantly lower than that of competitive solutions. Their licensing model, based on storage usage, offers flexibility and affordability. For instance, we utilize a two-terabyte license. Overall, StorMagic SvSAN's pricing is comparable to, if not more affordable than other options. StorMagic SvSAN supports various storage types and brands within a cluster, accommodating past and current technologies. Over the years, we've transitioned from traditional spinning disks to SSDs and now utilize NVMe SSDs, with StorMagic seamlessly supporting each upgrade. While faster drives inherently deliver better performance, StorMagic has consistently functioned without issue across a range of drive types and brands. Hardware flexibility is as crucial as cost, especially for a smaller company like ours that needs to adapt quickly. With hardware frequently changing, upgrading, and involving different vendors, maintaining flexibility and consistency is essential. Having a solution that works the same way across all vendors, whether it's Cisco or HP, significantly benefits our small support team. Witness effortlessly manages up to 1,000 SvSAN clusters. While we haven't personally utilized that many, it has effectively handled our multiple clusters without issue. The software's hardware requirements are very flexible. It reportedly runs on platforms as small as a Raspberry Pi. We currently operate it on a small HP desktop computer with excellent results, and it scales seamlessly with the rest of our system. The primary advantage is its two-host architecture, requiring only two hosts plus a Witness for full functionality. This contrasts with competitors who necessitate three hosts, significantly increasing costs. Avoiding the need for a third host translates to substantial savings, estimated at $20,000. Although StoreMagic's costs remain high, the ability to eliminate a host and its associated expenses results in considerable cost savings. This Edge Control provides a simple, visually appealing dashboard for easy administration of all clusters. The well-designed interface ensures clear and understandable cluster management. It provides immediate benefits after deployment. StorMagic SvSAN significantly reduces downtime in our environment by allowing us to perform maintenance or system updates without disrupting user access. With SvSAN, we can seamlessly switch all running machines to a secondary machine, ensuring continuous operation and eliminating noticeable downtime for end-users. This has resulted in substantial savings on maintenance costs and provided peace of mind regarding system reliability. StorMagic SvSAN helped us save costs by eliminating needing a third witness host. Their pricing has remained relatively consistent over the past ten years, with only a modest increase of about 10 to 15 percent. Despite this, their pricing is still very competitive, and they have been proactive in helping us find ways to save money. While I would always like to see even more cost savings, I understand that they need to make a profit as well. We've likely saved 30 to 40 percent annually by using StoreMagic, simply due to the cost reductions in hosting and maintenance time across multiple sites. StorMagic SvSAN provides a hyperconverged high-availability solution with enterprise functionality, and that is all we use it for.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
14%
Healthcare Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind Storage Appliance?
The tool is mostly for medium companies and requires no maintenance. It has a good price and performance. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StorMagic SvSAN?
StorMagic SvSAN is very cost-efficient. The pricing model, based on the usable storage capacity, is simple and predictable. You know exactly how much each storage tier costs, and upgrading is strai...
What needs improvement with StorMagic SvSAN?
Maybe the hardware compatibility could be expanded or widened. Another point could be to change the price model since it has lots of capacity but does not always fit our pricing requirements. We ar...
What is your primary use case for StorMagic SvSAN?
The purpose is that since I work for a manufacturing company globally, our requirement was to install smaller VMware clusters in our production plants around the world. We can't, for production and...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StorMagic
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Sheetz Inc., Giant Eagle, RWE Renewables, Keiser Corp., TDK, Oxford University, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Rommelsbacher, Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort, Eugen Forschner GmbH
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Storage Appliance vs. StorMagic SvSAN and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.