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Maxta Hyperconvergence Software vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Maxta Hyperconvergence Soft...
Ranking in HCI
38th
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in HCI
14th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Maxta Hyperconvergence Software is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

LC
Has the ability to have a single-pane-of-glass using the VMware interface but it needs better support
The product helped improve the way our organization functions starting with our hiring practices. We do not have to have a storage engineer or other engineering specialists. So, for example, I had a budget to get someone for a security engineer position of $120,000 a year. In the end, after talking to several local people in my industry, they just told me that security guys will come in and then somebody will offer them $5,000 more and they will just go where the money is. So I went with a third party called the Arctic Wolf Networks to do all my monitoring of my Office 365 environments, all of our servers, collect all the logs, and get all the services I needed from one source that would be consistent. This way, I can hire just general networking engineers and they can run everything. I do not have to have special employees and the benefits of that flexibility are pretty great. With the solution, you can swap out a drive for a larger capacity drive. You can lose a couple of drives and everything still runs. You can lose the server and it is self-healing and you can schedule maintenance around events. But I do not have to have staffing 24-hours a day because we do not have outages. That is probably the biggest thing. Meanwhile, in another part of the network that I am currently taking over from the global holding company, they have outages all the time. Sometimes it is due to a network failure or sometimes it is just poor engineering practices and standards. Over there we just set up to large servers and a couple of data centers using the VxRail system, which is like vSAN, so it is pretty similar stuff to our current setups but just uses other products.
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The single-pane-of-glass VMware interface makes configuration and management easy so you do not need IT specialists."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
 

Cons

"A new company took over the product and now the support for Maxta has gone way downhill."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
16%
Educational Organization
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our inf...
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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