We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity 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 fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"It has a proven track record of stability."
"No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"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 department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it."
"Backups happen very quickly."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"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."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"They require more media visibility."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."
"They can bring more awareness about this product. In this part of the world or this region, people normally don't know about SimpliVity and its capabilities. The company we have it sold to hasn't been able to fully utilize all the features or understand the features. So, product awareness should be improved."
"The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"The installation process could be simplified. It's a bit technical for non-IT users."
"Once I am onto the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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