FreeNAS vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

FreeNAS suited really well in managing our legacy systems and it handled all our network flows really well, less maintenance is required on our part. FreeNAS also gave the option to switch to TrueNAS for free as now its support is limited. The major issue that we faced was with the installation as it is really complex and required lots of time. Rest all is good and FreeNAS still works well on our systems.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
• The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
• Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.

Incentivized

• Integration with Other Platforms: Some users have reported difficulty in integrating StarWind Virtual SAN with other platforms, such as cloud environments or other storage arrays, making it less flexible for some use cases.
• Lack of Advanced Features: Some users have reported that StarWind Virtual SAN lacks some advanced features, such as the ability to perform in-depth storage analysis and reporting, or the ability to manage storage tiering and data migration.
• User-Friendliness: While StarWind Virtual SAN features a user-friendly interface, some users have reported that certain features are still hard to use, especially for those without a background in storage technology.

Incentivized

This review is my baseline experience with StarWind Virtual SAN, should something significantly change in my experience over a longer period, then I will update this review but since the feature-set of StarWind Virtual SAN has been researched to meet our on-premise needs (and StarWind fulfills them), it should be relatively steady.

Incentivized

It was a little complex to get my head around the initial configuration and operation of StarWind Virtual SAN but after following the guides and some assistance from support once the initial setup is complete the day to day management is very straightforward.

The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.

Incentivized

The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.

Incentivized

There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.

Incentivized

Having dealt with a bit of subpar support in my career, I can say that the support team at StarWind never drifted lower than middle-of-the-pack. They met my expectations of support from contemporary tech companies, at least, and surpassed my expectations more often than not. Nothing makes a Monday morning scramble easier than knowing that support won't add more stress than it relieves.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Before swapping to FreeNAS, we'd been using plan old Linux servers running Samba and NFS with ZFS storage underneath. This worked really well for our requirements at the time but required a lot of administration when new versions came along, or new users had to be added or drives needed replacing, and so on. FreeNAS did away with 95% of that work and does a much better job too.

Incentivized

While they may have more robust enterprise grade features like duplication, the price point of Nimble and DD makes it a very tough sell in a cost concious environment. Starwind provides us with great reliability and enough features to make it an easy sell.

The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!

Incentivized

• Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
• Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
• FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys

Incentivized

• StarWind Virtual SAN has helped many organizations reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. This has been achieved through cost savings in areas such as hardware, power, cooling, and maintenance
• Provides high-performance, low-latency storage that is optimized for virtualization, which can help improve the speed and responsiveness of applications
• Provides synchronous replication, automated failover, and real-time replication monitoring, which helps ensure that data is always available and accessible