SteelFusion vs VMware vSAN comparison

Riverbed and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Riverbed is ranked #27, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Riverbed holds a 0.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 15.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Riverbed users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

SteelFusion

Read 2 SteelFusion reviews

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110 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 230 VMware vSAN reviews

17,206 Views
12,292 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

SteelFusion

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and SteelFusion compete in data storage and management solutions. VMware vSAN leads in seamless VMware environment integration, while SteelFusion is better for centralized data management across remote locations.

Features: VMware vSAN offers hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities with optimized data locality, enhanced data compression, and high performance for scalable environments. SteelFusion provides centralized data storage, consolidates branch infrastructure, and simplifies operations across multiple locations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN integrates tightly within the VMware ecosystem for streamlined setup. SteelFusion's deployment model offers centralized data management, reducing complexity in large-scale deployments. Both have robust customer support; SteelFusion distinctively addresses remote challenges.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN may have a higher upfront cost due to its features and scalability, potentially favorable in well-suited environments. SteelFusion offers a balanced initial investment with rapid ROI, especially for centralized management of remote sites.

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

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

SteelFusion

Ranking in HCI

27th

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

230

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of SteelFusion is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.9%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

it_user866178

Chief Technology Officer at MAZZETTI+GBA

Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices

The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.

Read full review

Yves Sandfort

CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."

"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."

"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."

"The solution has high performance."

"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."

"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."

"vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost."

"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."

"The solution is easy to use."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."

"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."

"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."

"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."

"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."

"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."

"Pricing is something of a concern."

"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."

"The price of the solution package depends on the nodes and other factors. The cost some of our customers paid was $500,000. The licensing cost for the components is very good."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."

"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."

"My customers have found VMware vSAN to be a little expensive."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Educational Organization

53%

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Questions from the Community

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How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

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Comparisons

No data available

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

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HCI

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

March 2025

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Also Known As

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vSAN

Overview

Riverbed SteelFusion is the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure for branch IT, enables 100% consolidation of branch data and servers from remote sites into data centers, delivering complete data security and centralized data protection, without compromising on any of the benefits of running branch services locally for your users. SteelFusion eliminates the need for physical servers, storage and backup infrastructure at branch locations, creates the ability to instantly provision and recover branch services, and provides full visibility and superior performance of on-premises and cloud-based applications, leading to dramatic increases in data security, business continuity, agility and operational efficiency.

Riverbed

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

VMware

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