Nexenta vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

Nexenta by DDN and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Nexenta by DDN is ranked #15 with an average rating of 9.0, while StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.5. Additionally, 66% of Nexenta by DDN users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Nexenta and StarWind Virtual SAN compete in the software-defined storage market. StarWind Virtual SAN may have the upper hand due to its advanced features, making it a worthy investment despite higher costs.

Features: Nexenta offers robust data management capabilities concentrated on scalability and enterprise compatibility, alongside flexible deployment options. StarWind Virtual SAN provides advanced data protection, seamless integration, and focuses on high availability, making it suitable for businesses emphasizing reliability and manageability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nexenta allows flexible deployment with various hardware configurations, aiding in integration. It offers responsive customer service for efficient setup. StarWind Virtual SAN simplifies its installation process to minimize downtime and provides comprehensive support, highlighting its streamlined approach.

Pricing and ROI: Nexenta is known for being cost-effective, offering lower setup costs and satisfactory ROI. StarWind Virtual SAN requires a higher initial investment yet justifies the expense with a broad feature set and reliability, often delivering a substantial ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

March 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

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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Anil Rahulwar

Storage Engineer at Movate

Offers good features like Fusion and stable product with better customer service

Fusion is the only best feature, but it's a very good feature. Nexenta is a very old product. Nexenta is a well-established product used in the UK, US, India, Dubai, Qatar, and other countries. It is very good. The interface is up to date. Everything is up to date. The OS version was recently upgraded to 5.5 FP3. AI features: DataDirect Networks owns Nexenta and has won awards for AI. They continuously work on AI features. DDN also has a product called Tintri Infinia with AI features. And NVIDIA product also has AI features. I look forward to working on those products.

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WJHG

Soporte IT at Sildan Security

Seamless integrations, high availability, and offers a free version

Although I am generally satisfied with VSAN and its performance, there are some areas that could be improved to enhance its effectiveness even further. One area that could benefit from improvement is scalability. While the tool works well in its current configuration, allowing for greater ease and flexibility in adding new nodes to the cluster without complications would be very beneficial, especially in growing environments. Additionally, I would like to see additional features in the next version, such as better support for automated resource management. This could include proactive suggestions for optimizing storage and memory usage, as well as preventive alerts about the health status of the servers. 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.

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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

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

"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"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 tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

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

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"It has a feature called Fusion that makes it more secure and productive."

"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."

"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."

"Having support is also very valuable to us as we are a small team."

"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."

"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."

"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"

"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."

"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"An area for improvement in Pure Storage FlashBlade is its price. It could be reduced. The technical support for Pure Storage FlashBlade also needs improvement. It used to be good, with more experienced engineers. Nowadays, it isn't, and it takes longer for support to solve problems."

"The speed could be improved."

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

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"The solution is expensive."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved."

"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."

"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."

"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."

"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."

"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."

"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"

"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."

"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price is a little high."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."

"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."

"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."

"This solution has a great price for the functionality."

"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."

"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."

"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."

"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

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

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What needs improvement with Nexenta?

There were some SMB issues, but they were resolved in the latest version. Four to five customers faced intermittent i...

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What is your primary use case for Nexenta?

It's for file systems. It's a NAS solution, and it has flexibility. There shouldn't be any outages because if one nod...

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What advice do you have for others considering Nexenta?

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I would recommend using it.

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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?

I can't give a sincere opinion on the installation and licensing costs because, as I have mentioned repeatedly, I am ...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

Although I am generally satisfied with VSAN and its performance, there are some areas that could be improved to enhan...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 21% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 12% 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

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nexenta

Compared 100% of the time

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VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 26% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 10% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 9% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

March 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

March 2025

Download Nexenta product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

March 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

StarWind SAN & NAS

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

Nexenta is the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage - what we call Open Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS).We uniquely integrate software-only "Open Source" collaboration with commodity hardware-centric "Software-Defined Storage" (SDS) innovation.

Nexenta by DDN

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

Sample Customers

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

GMO, Northern Backup, Cox Communications, University of Toronto, ScaleMatrix, Wipro, Ruhr University, Drillinginfo, George Washington University, Walton Electric, Faculty of Physics, NAU, ServerCentral

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

March 2025

Free Report: Nexenta vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

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