We performed a comparison between Scale Computing HC3 and VMware vSAN 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 Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"The product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"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."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"The product could use a better control center."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 19th in HCI with 8 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Scale Computing HC3 writes "A reliable stripped-down solution that comes with excellent support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Scale Computing HC3 vs. VMware vSAN report.
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