No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

StarWind Virtual SAN vs StarWind Virtual Tape Library comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 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
231
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (3rd)
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)
StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (23rd), HCI (27th)
 

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.
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1414572 - PeerSpot reviewer
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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"We have seen savings in our storage, and the speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes, reducing backup and restore times from 93 days to minutes and simplifying storage for us."
"I recommend this solution for production because it has good performance and capacity management."
"It benefits our IT organization in the way that it's easier for the administrators to manage."
"This was our first all-flash storage enclosure, so we saw huge boost in performance for all of our servers."
"If you need faster storage and a good product, this is the one you should go ahead with."
"After switching to Everpure FlashArray, we saw significant results, as whatever hardware we used before is now compressed to 80%, maximizing space utilization in a single system."
"It’s easy to set up and support is excellent."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"Overall, StarWinds vSAN is a cost-saving storage option with top-notch support."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"From what we have implemented, we are not finding any lacking features or issues with our configuration that we would like to see improved."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"The support that they provide is excellent, with 24 hours a day seven days a week support, and all the engineers and the support staff know the solution very well."
"We simply replicate our backups from Veeam to the virtual tape library that StarWind implements, while magically transporting those to B2 for our offsite backup requirements."
"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 solution made our backups way more reliable."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
 

Cons

"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"I would rate this a seven out of ten because it's a good performance storage, but the price is a little bit high."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"The only minor issues that come to mind are that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad. Also, the solution should be cheaper."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped to decrease the total cost of ownership, and I believe our total cost has probably gone up, but that's balanced by our increased amount of data and number of use cases."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"While the tool works well in its current configuration, allowing for greater ease and flexibility in adding new nodes to the cluster without complications would be very beneficial, especially in growing environments."
"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."
"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 solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"In practice, it is somewhat technical to deploy and manage, but overall it gets the job done."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is about the only thing that's wrong with it. A little bit better pricing would be great."
"It is cost-effective because after buying a subscription, they provide a service to upgrade hardware for free. They are providing so many features. When you consider the features provided, it is cost-effective."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"The best features come included without any additional cost."
"It was less expensive than some of the alternatives. It's not as though it was a premium price to get that kind of quality. It's a very competitive product from a price perspective..."
"It is not the cheapest one out there. We're paying yearly, but I'm not 100% sure."
"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
"The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."
"StarWind is best price/performance for SMB."
"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
"This solution has a great price for the functionality."
"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
"The initial setup and deployment are also covered in the purchase at no additional cost."
"The pricing of the solution could be more flexible to meet the needs of smaller to mid-market size companies."
"If you currently have Veeam there is no other solution that is as easy and affordable as StarWind."
"The solution is cost-effective."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
12%
Legal Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business167
Midsize Enterprise55
Large Enterprise34
No data available
 

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?
I have knowledge about the licensing part, which we obtained for around 10 years from the time of deployment, but I d...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
When it comes to Everpure FlashArray ports shown in the GUI, it would be better if, when one of the Pure array ports ...
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 invoi...
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...
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 exa...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
StarWind SAN & NAS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Volvo, Sony, Samsung, Hitachi
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.