Red Hat Gluster Storage vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Red Hat Gluster Storage
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.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
Red Hat Gluster StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat Gluster 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
Red Hat Gluster StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Considered Both Products
Red Hat Gluster Storage

No answer on this topic

StarWind Virtual SAN
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere allows you to use two node setup and still provide highly available storage compared to VMware vSAN which requires three nodes minimum, also with VMware vSAN you have to use certified hardware and you have fewer options to choose from. StarWind …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Red Hat Gluster StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Small Businesses
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat Gluster StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.3
(138 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(14 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(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)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat Gluster StorageStarWind Virtual SAN
Likelihood to Recommend
Red Hat
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
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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
Red Hat
  • Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
  • Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
  • Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
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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
Red Hat
  • Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
  • Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
  • Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
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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
Red Hat
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
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Never went out of availability with StarWind.
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Performance
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
StarWind
It improves the overall performance.
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Support Rating
Red Hat
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
Red Hat
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
Red Hat
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
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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
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
StarWind
Is is future proof for us.
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Return on Investment
Red Hat
  • Positive - Alignment with the open source community and being able to stay abreast of the latest trending products available.
  • Positive - Reduced procurement and maintenance costs.
  • Negative - Impacts user/system maintainer training in order to teach them how to utilize and troubleshoot the product.
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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.
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