We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and StorMagic SvSAN 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."The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"They require more media visibility."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"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."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
"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."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews while StorMagic SvSAN is ranked 8th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 9 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while StorMagic SvSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StorMagic SvSAN writes "The best choice for performance and price". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas StorMagic SvSAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, DataCore SANsymphony, LINBIT SDS and StarWind Storage Appliance. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. StorMagic SvSAN report.
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