HPE StoreVirtual vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #21, while Microsoft is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.0. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 1.3% mindshare in SDS, compared to Microsoft’s 7.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 77% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

HPE StoreVirtual and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct compete in the network storage domain, with HPE StoreVirtual having the edge in integrated platform capabilities and broad hypervisor support.

Features: HPE StoreVirtual offers high availability with its Network RAID feature, broad hypervisor support, and a single-point contact for issue resolution. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is notable for its performance via RDMA, feature integration within the Windows Server environment, and scalability for Microsoft ecosystem users.

Room for Improvement: HPE StoreVirtual needs better partner implementation strategies, a simplified licensing process, and improvements in latency and configuration. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct requires more comprehensive documentation, better API support, and improvements in network capabilities and management interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE StoreVirtual is acclaimed for easy on-premises deployment and has a reliable customer service team. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is valued for its integration within Windows systems and benefits from a broad support network.

Pricing and ROI: HPE StoreVirtual offers competitive licensing but can become costly without careful management, yet it typically provides excellent ROI. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, part of the Windows Server suite, offers cost efficiencies for Microsoft users with positive ROI, although initial costs can be high.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

July 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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE StoreVirtual is 1.3%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.6%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Vebjorn Nergaard

Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

Reliable with helpful support and good replication

The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"Speed and ease of use are the two most valuable features."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It appears to be very stable and very robust."

"A company can scale it easily."

"Data is stored in two different places, leveraging more security and availability. Therefore, network problems are having less affect on iSCSI."

"The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure."

"The solution is very stable."

"A very flexible solution."

"he interface and the installation makes it easy as it's all in one piece of hardware and it doesn't need to be connected to anything else."

"Simplicity of not having to buy FC or FCoE SAN. Instead, we buy servers with their own storage."

More HPE StoreVirtual pros

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

"The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"Its technical support is excellent."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

Cons

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"I have not seen ROI."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"The speed could be improved."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users."

"Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately."

"The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger."

"User interface could be improved."

"It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker."

"One of the areas that need improvement is the consolidated management platform, to manage all of the nodes from one place and the licensing around that."

"The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years."

"It is a costly solution."

More HPE StoreVirtual cons

"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."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"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."

"Documentation management could be improved"

"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."

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct a three, as there were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil."

"It costs less than $10,000 for one machine. If it costs more than 15% higher than this, then the customer may change to another solution."

"One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included."

"Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen."

"If you buy a five-year license, not only does the technical support expire after five years, but you also lose the ability to change and expand the VSA, and the systems won't go down."

"For our organization, I believe the cost is 16,000 Euros for a three-year license. It costs a bit more to do the maintenance on our servers as well. It's also on an HP ProLiant server and an organization will need to do the maintenance there also. I believe the price for that is around 2000 Euros a year."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"The solution is expensive."

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addi...

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What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution. At the moment, the new version does...

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Comparisons

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Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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VMware vSAN vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 50% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs HPE StoreVirtual

Compared 50% of the time

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VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 62% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 15% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 6% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual

July 2025

Download HPE StoreVirtual product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

June 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Also Known As

No data available

HPE StoreVirtual, HPE VSA

MS Storage Spaces Direct

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

HPE StoreVirtual storage ensures that organisations can optimise the benefits of server virtualisation with cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery. The iSCSI-based, scale-out storage platform is easy to manage and change – meeting ongoing business demands without creating IT bottlenecks or application downtime. Overcoming the cost and management limitations of traditional storage area networks (SANs), HPE StoreVirtual nodes use storage clustering to form a single pool of resources that enable organisations to buy only what they need today, scaling non-disruptively to meet requirements in the future.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

NBrIX, WIND Telecom, Netrics

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

Buyer's Guide

HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

July 2025

Free Report: HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE StoreVirtual vs. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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