Longhorn Block Storage vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Longhorn Block Storage
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.N/A
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.N/A
Pricing
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Small Businesses
Akamai Connected Cloud
Akamai Connected Cloud
Score 8.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.7 out of 10
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Storage Scale
IBM Storage Scale
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.4
(144 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(14 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.6
(13 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(120 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(8 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Longhorn Block StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE
Longhorn is performing well as storage for databases and in almost any solution that uses exclusive access to volumes (ReadWriteOnce in Kubernetes nomenclature). When write access is required from many clients (ReadWriteMany) Longhorn Block Storage covers its volumes with NFS (file-based) access. Longhorn Block Storage also is well fitted in every architecture where data security (snapshots, backups, multiple replicas) is more important than access speed (in terms on IOPS and MiB/s).
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StarWind
For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.
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Pros
SUSE
  • Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
  • Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
  • Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
  • Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
  • Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI
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StarWind
  • the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
  • The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
  • Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.
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Cons
SUSE
  • ReadWriteMany Longhorn volumes are still using NFS (file-based) protocol in the core.
  • Using iSCSI as main protocol instead of FC ties Longhorn to Ethernet-based LAN which is in most architectures much slower that FC-based SAN.
  • Longhorn could implement S3 as alternative access protocol to its volumes.
  • Backups, and snapshots configuration could be configured at each volume-level by administrators (maybe from additional CRD object?), because currently is configured at storage-class level which is not granular enough.
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StarWind
  • Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources
  • Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3
  • Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
  • Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
  • Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication
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Likelihood to Renew
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!
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Usability
SUSE
Longhorn is mature software defined storage solution that is still developed and receive new functionalities. From the beginning every Longhorn volume have multiple (at least two) replicas, can leverage manual or automatic snapshots and backup to external S3 volume. Longhorn provides nice and clear GUI for administrators, but also can be managed from CLI.
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StarWind
Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues, we had a similar occurence, where we needed to re-provision the SSD cache and the StarWind Support (Yaroslav) helped through remote support and a switch to the Free version afterwards.
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Reliability and Availability
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.
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Performance
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.
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Support Rating
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.
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Implementation Rating
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.
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Alternatives Considered
SUSE
GlusterFS was first Persistent Storage solution used in our Kubernetes-based clusters. It is file-based what in some usages led us to many data corruptions. CEPH is object-based persistent storage which can be used as file-based Persistent Storage in Kubernetes. It is also is much more resource-hungry than other solutions including Longhorn. Dell PowerScale (or Isilon) is a hardware-software solution, that provides volumes that can be accessed by file-based NFS and CIFS protocols. Recently was added access to its volumes with object-based S3 protocol. Longhorn is in the middle. It is block-based, it is build on industry standards like iSCSI, performs very well on 10Gbit or faster LAN and commodity hardware (or in virtual machines)
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StarWind
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management
console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email
alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven
to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory
issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash.
The management console also allows us to monitor the solution
performance and provides us with access to system logs.
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Scalability
SUSE
No answers on this topic
StarWind
The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!
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Return on Investment
SUSE
  • It has provided a highly available storage solution for almost all our Kubernetes deployments
  • We can deploy new app versions with peace in mind because we have working data backups
  • Application development is faster because devs can play with data and easily restore it when needed
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StarWind
  • It eliminates the need for expensive storage hardware and provides an affordable software-defined storage solution.
  • It allows organizations to use commodity hardware, reducing the dependency on proprietary hardware.
  • It ensures that data and applications are always available, reducing downtime and increasing productivity.
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ScreenShots

StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots

Screenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SANScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SAN