StarWind Virtual SAN vs StorPool comparison

StarWind and StorPool are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.5, while StorPool is ranked #20. StarWind holds a 7.2% mindshare in SDS, compared to StorPool’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StorPool users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StorPool and StarWind Virtual SAN both compete in the software-defined storage solutions category. StorPool appears to have the upper hand in scalability and performance, while StarWind Virtual SAN has advantages in seamless integration and cost-effectiveness.

Features: StorPool offers exceptional scalability and high performance along with synchronized data protection across multiple nodes. StarWind Virtual SAN emphasizes integration capabilities, support for hyper-converged and disaggregated infrastructures, and ease of use.

Room for Improvement: StorPool could enhance integration with existing infrastructures and offer more attractive pricing for smaller deployments. StarWind Virtual SAN may improve its scalability options and performance to match competitive offerings from larger-scale environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StorPool provides a flexible deployment model with robust customer service for large-scale environments. StarWind Virtual SAN offers simplified deployment suited to varied settings, backed by comprehensive documentation and community support to aid integration.

Pricing and ROI: StorPool's substantial initial setup costs lead to a strong ROI for performance-heavy deployments, making it an ideal choice for large-scale needs. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a cost-effective solution with lower startup costs, making it appealing for mid-sized organizations with budget constraints while retaining essential features.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool Report (Updated: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool

May 2025

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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:

ROI

Sentiment score

8.4

Pure Storage FlashBlade delivers cost savings, efficiency gains, and increased VM density, with returns seen within four years.

Sentiment score

7.4

StarWind Virtual SAN offers high ROI by reducing costs, downtime, and using existing servers for efficient deployment.

Sentiment score

7.3

Organizations reduced TCO using StorPool, benefiting from commodity hardware, increasing gross margin by 15% with favorable cost per GB.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

8.2

Pure Storage FlashBlade's customer service is praised for expertise but sometimes experiences slower responses due to growth challenges.

Sentiment score

8.4

StarWind Virtual SAN excels in customer service with quick, professional support, seamless integration, and clear communication, ensuring satisfaction.

Sentiment score

9.2

StorPool excels in customer service with responsive support, expert advice, and quick deployment, ensuring infrastructure optimization and satisfaction.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

I would rate the customer support for StarWind Virtual SAN a ten, as they are responsive and competent.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

When we set it up, they validate our settings and configurations to ensure we don't miss anything.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

8.9

Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for its scalability and ease of expansion, satisfying various industries like banking and media.

Sentiment score

7.8

StarWind Virtual SAN offers scalable, flexible storage solutions, easily adapting to infrastructure growth with minimal reconfiguration, despite some licensing limitations.

Sentiment score

8.5

StorPool offers seamless scalability through easy node integration, enhancing performance and capacity without service interruptions across deployments.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

I have never needed to scale up or add additional nodes with StarWind Virtual SAN, but we have had to expand, and customer support has been excellent.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.8

Pure Storage FlashBlade is highly rated for stability, reliability, and performance, with minimal downtime and swift recovery.

Sentiment score

8.6

StarWind Virtual SAN is highly reliable with minimal maintenance, offering seamless, dependable operations across diverse environments, and earning user trust.

Sentiment score

8.1

StorPool offers reliable, stable performance with advanced features like compression, ensuring continuous data protection and commercial advantages.

In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Room For Improvement

Users want better cloud integration, support, pricing, efficiency, and improvements in analytics, configuration, and backup for FlashBlade.

StarWind Virtual SAN users seek better documentation, management tools, and integration features, while appreciating its affordability and high availability.

StorPool's users seek a more intuitive UI, faster feature rollout, and increased visibility of new functionalities and integrations.

Its configuration should be easier.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Having more visibility on what's actually happening when an error occurs would be beneficial.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade is costlier but valued for performance, ease, and reliability, justifying its comprehensive licensing with included software.

StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, easy to set up, offers flexible scalability, and has responsive support with perpetual licenses.

StorPool offers flexible, cost-effective pricing with high performance, scalability, and excellent support, reducing total cost of ownership.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The pricing can be a bit complex depending on the features you need.

JohnPerez

IT Administrator at Panoptic Services, Inc.

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers high performance, scalability, and ease of use with excellent data protection and seamless integration for large storage needs.

StarWind Virtual SAN offers robust features, simplicity, and reliability with seamless integration and automation for enhanced data redundancy and resilience.

StorPool provides scalable, high-performance storage with robust management, redundancy, and stability, ideal for complex, global deployments.

We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.

Redy ERIYAWAN

IT Field Support Engineer at Unisys

For more quotes and insights, download the Pure Storage FlashBlade report

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.

Julian Clarke

Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.

Kyle Buxton

Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the StarWind Virtual SAN report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the StorPool report

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 7.2%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorPool is 2.4%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Meesam Raza

Network Engineer at ILAB Information Technology

Effortless data storage with seamless expansion

Training is required to use FlashBlade, but the user-friendly modules offer clear explanations, making it remarkably easy to explore and complete the initial setup after completion. It has improved our organization significantly. Previously, we faced difficulties with our old server, which was not reliable enough. Switching to Pure Storage FlashBlade resolved these issues. We realized the benefits within five months. Managing FlashBlade is straightforward, and any issues we cannot resolve can be escalated to Pure Storage support. Pure Storage enhances data protection with encrypted memory modules and a Trusted Platform Module, ensuring data is encrypted and secured. This is critical for our backup files, which we know are always secure.

Read full review

Seth Weber

Network & Systems Administrator at Clarion Forest VNA

Easy to use with good support and reasonable pricing

The only thing I could suggest to improve is the documentation. The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc. However, they've improved the documentation greatly since I got started in 2022 (writing now as of 2025.02.19) CONS include: • Documentation for initial setup can be a bit ambiguous at times, yet support helps you get through it; you're good once you're up and running. • It's not native and not a bad thing. Just keep in mind it's a third-party solution so it won't be as "drop-in" as a native solution offered by your hypervisor.

Read full review

reviewer1721697

Managing Director at CloudScale365, Inc.

Great service and support with a constant addition of new features

As of now, the product has been working really well for us. They keep updating and launching new features. Their support has been great and have always been available. I have personally met with multiple Storpool engineers and spoke about different options and features. There are too many features that we don't know or use yet. My recommendation would be to promote the new features and give users different examples of how they can be used and how we can benefit from them. This is a great product.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Performing Arts

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Also, the pricing can be a bit complex depending on the features you need.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

Initially, there was a bit of a learning curve for some of our users, but Microsoft's documentation was helpful. Also...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 2% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StorPool

Compared 57% of the time

LINBIT SDS vs StorPool

Compared 20% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StorPool

Compared 11% of the time

More StorPool Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

May 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

April 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

StorPool

April 2025

Download StorPool product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

No data available

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

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

StarWind

StorPool is intelligent storage software that runs on standard servers and builds scalable, high-performance storage system out of these servers (software-defined storage). It focuses on the block-level storage and excels at it. It is incredibly flexible and can be deployed in both converged setups (on compute nodes, alongside VMs and applications) or on separate storage nodes.

StorPool has advanced fully-distributed architecture and is arguably the fastest and most efficient block-storage software on the market today. It is the best storage system when building a cloud.

StorPool

Sample Customers

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

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

CloudSigma, Kualo, Togglebox, Neterra, Serveo, Superhosting.bg, GroupOne, DRFortress, Metanet, Dia, Server Storage Solutions

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool

May 2025

Free Report: StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Virtual SAN vs. StorPool and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.

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