Compare Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report
Nutanix Acropolis AOS
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
DataCore SANsymphony SDS
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct
StarWind Virtual Tape Library
Red Hat Ceph Storage
StorPool
Scality RING8
VMware Software Defined Storage
Maxta
IBM Spectrum Accelerate
Veritas Access Appliance
Red Hat Gluster Storage
LizardFS
StorMagic SvSAN
Elastifile
Zadara Storage Cloud
Datera
LINBIT SDS
Veritas Access
FalconStor FreeStor
Atlantis USX
Peaxy
Amplidata
Amax StorMax SDS
FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform
DDN IME
Lightbits
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Read 31 NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP reviews.
Read 1 Red Hat Ceph Storage review.
Read 20 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews.
3,441 views|638 comparisons
Christian Gruetzner
Service Architecture at All for One Group AG
High availability enables us to run two instances so there is no downtime when we do maintenance
It's helped us to dive into the cloud very fast. We didn't have to change any automations which we already had. We didn't have to change any... Read more »
Data Storage Specialist at a tech services company
Excellent user interface, good configuration capabilities and quite stable
It's possible that we should have used the solution a long time ago as it appears to cost the business less money to run some of our data systems... Read more »
Kristopher Skully
Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve
Gives us full redundancy - compute and the storage - we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running
The old solution we had worked. It was starting to show its age and it consisted of several more pieces of equipment than the StarWind... Read more »
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, StarWind, DataCore and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS). Updated: December 2020.
"The FlexClones make all the management easier for us." "NetApp's XCP Migration Tool... was pretty awesome. It replicated the data faster than any other tool that I've seen. That was a big help." "NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well." "Another feature which gets a lot of attention in our environment is the File Services Solutions in the cloud, because it's a completely, fully-managed service. We don't have to take care of any updates, upgrades, or configurations." "Unified Manager, System Manager, and Cloud Manager are all GUI-based. It's easy for somebody who has not been exposed to this for years to pick it up and work with it." "We use the mirroring to mirror our volumes to our DR location. We also create snapshots for backups. Snapshots will create a specified snapshot to be able to do a DR test without disrupting our standard mirrors. That means we can create a point-in-time snapshot, then use the ability of FlexClones to make a writeable volume to test with, and then blow it away after the DR test." "We're using snapshots as well and it's a pretty useful feature. That is one of the main NetApp benefits. Knowing how to use snapshots in the on-prem environment, using snapshots on the cloud solution was natural for us." "The solution's Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are good. Snapshot copies are pretty much the write-in time data backups. Obviously, critical data is snapshotted a lot more frequently, and even clients and end users find it easier to restore whatever they need if it's file-based, statical, etc."
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"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."
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"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks." "The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing." "The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy." "High-availability is what I bought it for." "The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..." "We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that." "The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward." "Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster."
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"The only issue we had lately was that outside our VPC we could not reach the virtual IP, the floating IP. I heard that they have fixed that..." "Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair." "One difficulty is that it has no SAP HANA certification. The asset performance restrictions create challenges with the infrastructure underneath: The disks and stuff like that often have lower latencies than SAP HANA itself has to have." "Some of the licensing is a little kludgy. We just created an HA environment in Azure and their licensing for SVMs per node is a little kludgy. They're working on it right now." "The DR has room for improvement. For example, we now have NetApp in Western Europe and we would like to back up the information to another region. It's impossible. We need to bring up an additional NetApp in that other region and create a Cloud Manager automation to copy the data... I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution like it was in the NetApp solution about a year ago. I would like to see something like AltaVault but in the cloud." "How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically." "We have used technical support. As long as they don't call me at four o'clock in the morning to tell me that a drive failed and they are sending me another one, I like it. They have a tendency to do that." "Multipathing for iSCSI LUNs is difficult to deal with from the client-side and I'd love to see a single entry point that can be moved around within the cluster to simplify the client configuration."
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"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."
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"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager." "This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB." "We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since." "The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware." "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..." "We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers." "The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..." "At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Cons »
"They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage..." "The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company." "In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer." "Cloud is cloud. It's still expensive. Any good solution comes with a price tag. That's where we are looking to see how well we can manage our data in the cloud by trying to optimize the costs." "I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs." "Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost." "Our licensing costs are folded into the hardware purchases and I have never differentiated between the two." "For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."
More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Pricing and Cost Advice »
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO." "When I researched they came the most cost-effective." "The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point." "I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400." "The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such." "We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage." "Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support." "There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice »
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What do you like most about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Top Answer: In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Top Answer: Regarding licensing fees, the caveat is that with the Windows-based OS, we have to pay for that licensing for both… more »
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Top Answer: When we purchased the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances, they shipped with the Windows-based vSAN solution. Since then… more »
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ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO Ceph
The leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services and supports up to a capacity of 368TB. Software service supports various use cases, such as: File shares and block-level storage serving NAS (NFS, SMB / CIFS) and SAN (iSCSI) Disaster Recovery, Backup, and Archive DevOps Databases (SQL, Oracle, NoSQL) Cloud Volumes ONTAP is offered in a standard single-node configuration or in a High Availability (HA) configuration.
Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN "Ready Nodes", targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a "software only version", which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it's the fuel powering StarWind HCA.
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Learn more about Red Hat Ceph Storage
Learn more about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Rohit, AdvacnedMD, D2L, Trinity Mirror, Eidos Media, WireStorm, Cordant Group, JFK Medical Center, ALD Automotive, Healthix, City of Baton Rouge, ON Semiconductor Dell, DreamHost Sears Home and Franchise Business
Energy/Utilities Company10%
Manufacturing Company6%
Construction Company18%
Transportation Company18%
Educational Organization12%
Real Estate/Law Firm3%
Small Business7%
Red Hat Ceph Storage is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 1 review while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 3rd in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 20 reviews. Red Hat Ceph Storage is rated 7.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ceph Storage writes "Excellent user interface, good configuration capabilities and quite stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Because it's all built into one box, they could offer us the majority of the functionality we wanted, affordably". Red Hat Ceph Storage is most compared with MinIO, VMware vSAN, IBM Spectrum Scale, Nutanix Acropolis AOS and Red Hat Gluster Storage, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSAN and DataCore SANsymphony SDS.
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