NetApp FAS Storage Arrays vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
NetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.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
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind Virtual SAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind 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
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind Virtual SAN
Considered Both Products
NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

No answer on this topic

StarWind Virtual SAN
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN gave us all of the features we wanted at a price we couldn't walk away from. Other vendors offered some bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, they are effectively presenting the same thing: compute, storage, and networking in a hardware package …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind Virtual SAN
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NetApp AFF A-Series
NetApp AFF A-Series
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Storage Scale
IBM Storage Scale
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(15 ratings)
9.4
(144 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(14 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(3 ratings)
9.6
(13 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.9
(3 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
NetApp FAS Storage ArraysStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
NetApp
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
NetApp
  • The selling point for NetApp FAS is the application and data protection integration capabilities they provide.
  • We have been able to use NetApp FAS in a variety of use cases with a standard set of management tools.
  • NetApp FAS has evolved over the years from just NAS to also include block protocols. At this time they support almost all industry standard protocols.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cons
NetApp
  • Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
  • Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
  • Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"
Read full review
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
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
NetApp
It just works! We've used NetApp FAS Storage Arrays systems since 2011 and have had fantastic results, in particular since 2016 as performance has drastically improved. Tools are great/user friendly, command line capabilities are very strong ... it is simply very effective at what it does!
Read full review
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!
Read full review
Usability
NetApp
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
NetApp
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.
Read full review
Performance
NetApp
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
NetApp
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
NetApp
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
NetApp
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Scalability
NetApp
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!
Read full review
Return on Investment
NetApp
  • The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about.
  • Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either.
  • Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots

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