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 most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"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."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus."
"The solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"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 replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"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."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"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."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"While SimpliVity was a pioneer of cloud connect capability, they have simply not exploited it."
"Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had."
"Bandwidth throttling during offsite backups would be better than the off-peak time setting for a 24/7 shop."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"Integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
"Product shipments did have a few bumps along the way, but that's to be expected when using any shipping company."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 7th 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 Scale Computing HC3, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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