NetApp AFF A-Series vs. StarWind Storage Appliance (SA)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NetApp AFF A-Series
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.N/A
StarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
StarWind SA helps organizations with fixed compute platforms meet storage performance and capacity growth requirements by providing them with high-performance and scalable storage covered by 24/7 support. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed to handle high-performance or unpredictable data growth. It serves storage as a single namespace to different environments via multiple uplink protocols: iSCSI, SMB3, NFS, including RDMA-capable iSER and SMB Direct. As an all-flash hyperconvergence…N/A
Pricing
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Features
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
NetApp AFF A-Series
8.3
Ratings
8% below category average
StarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
9.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Flash Array Performance9.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Flash Array Integration9.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Data Compression6.40 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades8.20 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Simplicity8.90 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Power Savings8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
User Ratings
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
NetApp AFF A-SeriesStarWind Storage Appliance (SA)
Likelihood to Recommend
Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
Read full review
It is well-suited for small and medium businesses and possibly niches in larger networks. It is iSCSI-based, so not suitable for FC environments. You don't have to have advanced knowledge to implement it, but a little bit of knowledge about how storage works can help. It is excellent for our VMware ESXi environment with three hosts.
Read full review
Pros
  • Protective multiple project and business data is excellent.
  • Solutions for data storage and data migration.
  • Providing useful and quality data reports is effective.
Read full review
  • Very cost-effective. You choose the hardware.
  • Very reliable and performant.
  • Excellent proactive support. They call us when there is an issue.
  • Very flexible. Can mix and match spinning disk and SSD depending on capacity and performance needs.
Read full review
Cons
  • As always, Netapp upgrades are really painful. I wish there was an easy way of upgrading Netapp.
  • GUI is hard to use and CLI is even worse. GUI is confusing and you click all over the place before you get over the learning curve. CLI has changed from the 7-mode days and is very confusing to use. I have had scenarios where the support themselves use documentation to put in the proper commands.
  • Like any array, Netapp's CDOT has it's own bugs in the software. We learnt the hard way when one of our nodes went down and a bug prevented take over of SCSI services which resulted in an APD situation on all our ESXI hosts. Was a nightmare rebooting all the VM's and ESXI's to relieve them of the APD's. People don't pay millions towards a storage platform to go through nightmares.
Read full review
  • Not sure what improvements are needed. The UI could possibly be more intuitive.
Read full review
Usability
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
The IBM All Flash FAS was similar in performance and price, but we were already a NetApp shop. This made the decision easier to go with the NetApp AFF system so it would tie in with our SnapManager architecture, as well as keep the learning curve short.
Read full review
I have not been able to work with same featured product in our organization, however the performance of this platform has been excellent. The support center has been reliable and trustworthy giving us 100% support on daily basis when we deach them. It is affordable to any business enterprise that is ready to implement data storage and transfer programs. The maintenance and scalable cost is reasonable and and the services has been great.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Epic, our EMR providor, has very aggressive guidelines for performance. The Netapp AFF meets those guidlines easily eben in a mixed workload environment. This has helped us meet our business objectives by not having to diversify our storage platforms or vendors.
  • Multi-protocol support (block (ISCSI/FiberChannel) or File (NFS/CIFS)) Allows us to use the Netapp systems to solve all storage requirements regardless of the system needing storage
  • Clustered technologies along with non-disruptive movement of data between nodes on the cluster make hardware refreshes simple and allows the business to keep running without interruption even during massive data moves.
Read full review
  • It enabled us to upgrade our storage and switch from FC to iSCSI at a reasonable cost.
  • iSCSi is so much less expensive to maintain.
  • StarWind is upgradable and you never lose your investment.
Read full review
ScreenShots