We performed a comparison between Pivot3 and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"The integration is excellent."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"One point for improvement is to increase the performance capabilities of the Windows-based executable as compared to its Linux Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) equivalent."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
Earn 20 points
Pivot3 is ranked 25th in HCI while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Pivot3 is rated 8.6, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Pivot3 writes "One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Pivot3 is most compared with VMware vSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StorMagic SvSAN, DataCore SANsymphony and StoneFly VSO NAS.
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