We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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."Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"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."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"The manageability for controlling the console is the most valuable feature."
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."
"The installation process is very quick. When you purchase it, it's up and running without much delay. Adding any additional components is simple, allowing for easy and fast scaling without adding complexity. The centralized management portal makes it easy to manage the entire system."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"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."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
"Integration could be improved."
"The implementation of a VxRail, it's straightforward, but the ongoing utilization, and integration, are where it can start to become difficult if you're not used to doing it."
"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."
"Obtaining support was hindered by the frequent changes to the hotline numbers."
"I would like better integration with VCF from VMware, which is the Cloud Foundation tool set, so we can easily provision servers very quickly."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"My customers want more storage for university databases."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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