BeeGFS vs StarWind Virtual SAN
BeeGFS
beegfs.ioStarWind Virtual SAN
starwindsoftware.comSide by side
| Figure | BeeGFS | StarWind Virtual SAN |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · Storage Management Software | 8.2 (#5) | 8.4 (#3) |
| Founded | 2014 | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Kaiserslautern, Germany | Beverly, Massachusetts, USA |
| Purpose | BeeGFS is a parallel file system designed for high-performance computing, AI, and other data-intensive workloads. | StarWind Virtual SAN is software that replaces physical shared SAN storage and targets Enterprise ROBO, SMB and Edge environments. |
| Support | Hive Enterprise includes professional support, and BeeOND Enterprise lists 5×9 Next Business Day support with 24x7x4 available upon request. | VSAN Free is self-supported or community-supported through StarWind Forums, while the paid edition includes deployment, configuration, integration and responsive technical support. |
Plans
StarWind Virtual SAN
- StarWind Virtual SAN FreeFree
- Virtual SAN FreeFree
- DatacenterPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- StarWind Virtual SANPriced on request
In their own words
BeeGFS
BeeGFS is a parallel file system for high-performance computing, AI, and other data-intensive workloads. Its user-space services run over filesystems such as ext4, XFS, and ZFS, with metadata spread across multiple servers. It is designed to scale performance and capacity from small clusters to enterprise systems with thousands of nodes. Native client and server components are available for Linux across x86_64, AMD, ARM, OpenPower, and other CPU architectures. BeeGFS 8 Remote Storage Targets synchronize with S3 object storage, while BeeGFS Copy supports parallel copying among BeeGFS and other locally mounted file systems. System-wide monitoring and Grafana dashboards provide views of performance and system health. Hive Enterprise adds high availability, metadata and file-content mirroring, quota enforcement, and tiered storage pools. The Community Edition is free up to 1 PB of total storage and is for self-supported end users; its BeeOND use is limited to five compute nodes contributing storage. Capacity beyond 1 PB requires a subscription license. BeeGFS is available for Linux, API, and self-hosted deployment.
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is software designed to replace physical shared SAN storage in SMB, ROBO, and Edge environments. It provides fault tolerance and high availability starting with two nodes, and supports iSCSI, SMB3, NFS v4.1, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics, and iSER. Deployment options include Windows-native software in a Hyper-V partition or a Linux-based virtual machine on a chosen hypervisor. An HTML5 console is used to monitor and manage hardware and software resources. Listed reliability features include ZFS self-healing, AI-powered telemetry, and call-home systems. Supported hypervisor versions include VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 or later, Windows Server Hyper-V 2019 or later, oVirt/OLVM/RHV 4.4 or later, Proxmox VE 9.1 or later, and XCP-ng 8.3 or later. The free edition is self- or community-supported, and its comparison lists web UI support for KVM only; paid editions list KVM, Hyper-V, and ESXi. A 30-day trial is available, while paid pricing is on request.