SteelFusion vs VMware vSAN comparison

Riverbed and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Riverbed is ranked #27, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. Riverbed holds a 0.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 15.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Riverbed users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

SteelFusion

Read 2 SteelFusion reviews

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112 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

15,081 Views
11,007 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

SteelFusion

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and SteelFusion compete in data storage and management solutions. VMware vSAN leads in seamless VMware environment integration, while SteelFusion is better for centralized data management across remote locations.

Features: VMware vSAN offers hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities with optimized data locality, enhanced data compression, and high performance for scalable environments. SteelFusion provides centralized data storage, consolidates branch infrastructure, and simplifies operations across multiple locations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN integrates tightly within the VMware ecosystem for streamlined setup. SteelFusion's deployment model offers centralized data management, reducing complexity in large-scale deployments. Both have robust customer support; SteelFusion distinctively addresses remote challenges.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN may have a higher upfront cost due to its features and scalability, potentially favorable in well-suited environments. SteelFusion offers a balanced initial investment with rapid ROI, especially for centralized management of remote sites.

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April 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:

Categories and Ranking

SteelFusion

Ranking in HCI

27th

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

231

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of SteelFusion is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.0%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

it_user866178

Chief Technology Officer at MAZZETTI+GBA

Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices

The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.

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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at Evolent

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."

"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."

"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."

"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."

"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."

"It's easy to use."

"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."

"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."

"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."

"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."

"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."

"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."

"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."

"The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful."

"This is quite an expensive solution."

"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."

"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."

"The price is okay."

"It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."

"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."

"I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee."

"Every product is licensed with full support for a certain number of years. The licensing could be cheaper."

"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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49%

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Questions from the Community

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

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Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

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How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

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Comparisons

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs SteelFusion

Compared 100% of the time

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VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 16% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HCI

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

April 2025

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Also Known As

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vSAN

Overview

Riverbed SteelFusion is the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure for branch IT, enables 100% consolidation of branch data and servers from remote sites into data centers, delivering complete data security and centralized data protection, without compromising on any of the benefits of running branch services locally for your users. SteelFusion eliminates the need for physical servers, storage and backup infrastructure at branch locations, creates the ability to instantly provision and recover branch services, and provides full visibility and superior performance of on-premises and cloud-based applications, leading to dramatic increases in data security, business continuity, agility and operational efficiency.

Riverbed

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

VMware

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