We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN Ready Nodes and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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.
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"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."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"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."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"It is easy to install."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"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."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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