We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training."
"The rate of compression for the data in SimpliVity is the most valuable feature."
"The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering."
"It has a proven track record of stability."
"The pricing of the solution is very good."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"The solution provides a single management console."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"The initial setup isn't hard."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
"Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal."
"Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue."
"I do not see the product really working in productivity at the moment with real loads."
"I would like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"There are certain aspects of sizing of the solution that need improvement."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"The interface could be a little bit better."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure report.
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