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.
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"It's quite easy to install."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"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 solution is very stable."
"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."
"The rate of compression for the data in SimpliVity is the most valuable feature."
"It has been performing well. It was more than what we expected."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us."
"The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install."
"I would like some reporting about backup and replication."
"I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle."
"Scalability is something that needs to be improved because if you need more storage then you have to add more nodes."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"The solution could have an optimization site."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"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..."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 150 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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