We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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."I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds."
"I like the expandability of the solution. We can effortlessly grow the storage and resources without downtime."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V"
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"The initial setup isn't hard."
"It is a smart solution for virtualization"
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"I am impressed with the product's firewall and virtualization."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"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."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had."
"High availability for large production environments needs to be offered."
"The error reporting needs to be improved."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
"As far as I know, no hyper-convergence solution includes security, so you have to buy security from another brand. For example, you buy SimpliVity or Nutanix. They don't really have a security solution inside the product. It would be good if there is a security solution inside this solution so that it is not only for the virtualization of CPU, RAM, disk, and network but also for security."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"One question that has come up frequently in the last week is whether or not the renewal cost for Sangfor's HCI solution is too high."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"The interface could be a little bit better."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0. 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 Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Scale Computing HC3, whereas Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE Hyper Converged and OpenNebula. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure report.
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