MinIO AIStor vs StarWind Virtual SAN
MinIO AIStor
min.ioStarWind Virtual SAN
starwindsoftware.comSide by side
| Figure | MinIO AIStor | StarWind Virtual SAN |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Storage Management Software | 8.8 (#2) | 8.4 (#3) |
| Spec score · Software-Defined Storage Software | 8.7 (#4) | 8.4 (#6) |
| Founded | 2014 | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California, United States | Beverly, Massachusetts, USA |
| Licence | AIStor is commercially licensed under MinIO's software licensing model; the former AGPLv3 MinIO community edition is frozen and no longer maintained. | The commercial agreement grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable software licence and says StarWind source code is proprietary trade-secret material. |
| Protocols | AIStor supports S3, S3 Express, SFTP, an Iceberg Catalog and Delta Sharing protocols. | The product supports iSCSI, SMB3, NFS v4.1, VVols iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. |
| Purpose | AIStor combines persistent memory, tables, objects, and files in an enterprise AI data store. | StarWind Virtual SAN is software that replaces physical shared SAN storage and targets Enterprise ROBO, SMB and Edge environments. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.3 out of 5 from 17 reviews | 4.7 out of 5 from 204 reviews |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 6.6 out of 10 from 3 reviews | 9.5 out of 10 from 167 reviews and ratings |
| Support | Enterprise includes SUBNET direct-to-engineer support 24/7/365 with a less-than-four-hour SLA and Panic Button; Enterprise Lite offers optional direct-to-engineer support with a less-than-five-day SLA. | VSAN Free is self-supported or community-supported through StarWind Forums, while the paid edition includes deployment, configuration, integration and responsive technical support. |
| What it does | AIStor combines persistent AI-agent memory, Apache Iceberg tables, S3-compatible objects and files in one enterprise data store. | StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage that replaces physical shared SAN hardware by pooling and mirroring internal disks and flash between virtualization hosts. |
Plans
MinIO AIStor
- AIStor FreeFree
- AIStor EnterprisePriced on request
- AIStor Enterprise LitePriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Enterprise LitePriced on request
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
MinIO AIStor
MinIO AIStor combines persistent memory, tables, objects, and files in an enterprise AI data store. AIStor Memory holds agent context, workspaces, secrets, artifacts, and telemetry. AIStor Tables provides native Apache Iceberg storage for analytics, feature stores, lakehouse architectures, and structured AI datasets. S3-compatible object storage covers models, checkpoints, training datasets, embeddings, documents, media, and logs. Access and integration options include S3, S3 Express, MCP, SFTP and Files, Iceberg Catalog, and OpenSharing. Management features include an admin console, QoS, lifecycle management, encryption, key management, a data firewall, and immutability. The product lists several replication modes, along with audit trails, Prometheus metrics, and error logs. Installation options include Linux, Windows, macOS, Kubernetes Helm, OpenShift, and Podman. AIStor Free costs nothing and includes the full feature set, but is intended for single-node, self-supported use without resilience beyond one node; redistribution is prohibited. Enterprise and Enterprise Lite pricing is available on request. Lite is for capacity requirements below 400 TiB; deployments exceeding that are upgraded to Enterprise. A 60-day trial is listed.
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.