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 product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"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."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"The solution has many good features."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"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."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. The management is easy, and you don't have to have a lot of knowledge about storage, network, etc. It is simple to manage and simple to implement, and that's its key feature."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"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."
"It's a very nice solution. It's a complete solution that we are looking for because we don't have personnel with expertise."
"The backup and restore features are the most valuable."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"It is easy to set up."
"The rate of compression for the data in SimpliVity is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"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."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"The solution is not very stable."
"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."
"The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell."
"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."
"Product doesn't scale."
"HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show."
"The local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HP doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"Integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 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, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
