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."It's quite easy to manage."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime."
"HPE SimpliVity is scalable. Some 200 people at my organization are using this solution at present."
"Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"It is simple and easy to use."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"It has reduced my data center activities."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"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 option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"File level restores work well, but indexing will help make the process faster."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"Once I am onto the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node."
"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."
"I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
"The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"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..."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 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.
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.