We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and HPE SimpliVity 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 available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"It is a scalable solution."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"If you were comparing this solution to VMware, it has more features, and it's very fast on the recovery."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."
"SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution."
"The technical support is exceptionally good."
"Its performance is quite good, and it is also easy to use. One of the biggest benefits is the included backup solution."
"The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product."
"The access, high availability, and interface are the most valuable and important for us. There is one interface for the whole product, which is very important because you have a single pane to view all the infrastructure of a customer. You can improve your data recovery plan or DRP, or you can make a special emergency plan if a disk has any problem."
"A very small package but with lots of memory and CPU."
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better."
"The solution must provide other hypervisors."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"The solution could have an optimization site."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Scale Computing HC3. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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