We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 8 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable solution with an easy initial setup process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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