We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"I like all the features, but the most impressive recently has been the introduction of IBM's Flash Core Modules. They are a form of a flash drive, but they have many more features."
"It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability."
"The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"Tighter integration with cloud storage might be useful as a target for a variety of use cases."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"The disk reliability is not that good."
"Adding features for data deduplication is one area of improvement."
"There are big arrays now, and if a customer wants add more disks to it, you have to have another array. Adding disks to existing arrays is one of the most demanded things from our customers."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The documentation could be better."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 183 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VMware vSAN, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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