StarWind vs VMware VSAN vs other SAN Appliances

[psitec]

Have anyone done studies comparing Starwind VSAN, VMware VSAN, and SAN Appliance such as HP, EMC, NetApp in term:
1- Performance ~ iops
2- Management ~ how easy and flexible
3- Requirements which at the end will translate to cost
4- Features
5- Integration with VMware vSphere and vCenter
6- Reliability
7- Redundancy
8- Compression & Deduplication -- inline compression/dedup or post-processing
9- Cost

Traditional SAN Appliance can be costly and the idea behind the vSAN is to commoditize hardware - servers and disk. What hardware does anyone in this board has experience with aside from the big 3 - HP, Cisco, Dell which cost a bundle just to build vSAN infrastructure.

Does anyone have any experience with Supermicro or Quanta with StarWind vSAN with VMware vSphere 6.x?

Thanks and greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[anton (staff)]

Good place to start comparing features would be here:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/differ ... age-spaces

(there we give some kind of an overview)

1) We can share some numbers from our own test beds. Other guys are welcomed to share their results.

2) Very subjective but our GUI is pretty intuitive and human-friendly (like old Windows-based client of VMware Management Console was).

We have SMI-S so integration with System Center VMM is simple. For vCenter we're currently working on vCenter plug-in.

3) StarWind starts FREE with a two-node setup and can do true two nodes (no need for voting node like others insist). We don't ask for flash and 10 GbE equipment either.

I think you can start as lean with StarWind Virtual SAN as technically possible.

4) Widest range including off-loaded snapshots, in-line dedupe and log-structuring. See:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san

5) We're currently only working on vCenter plug-in... We connect to vSphere as NFS (not recommended in our particular case), iSCSI and vVols (that's on the way).

6)

7) 2-way or 3-way replication

Dedupe (fixed 4KB blocks or variable 32-256KB blocks), compression is on the way

9) Starts 0$

For hardware we recommend Dell, Intel & SuperMicro. Dell Reference architecture is here:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... redge-r730

...and others are on the way.

Good luck!

[Bohdan (staff)]

SATA

sata_raid0.PNG (45.71 KiB) Viewed 4757 times

SAS

sas_raid0.PNG (46.14 KiB) Viewed 4757 times

This is worst case scenario (no L1 cache, no L2 cache).