We performed a comparison between Scale Computing HC3 and VMware vSAN 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 StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"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 main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"The solution is scalable."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"The technical support is good."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"The product could use a better control center."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 19th in HCI with 8 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Scale Computing HC3 writes "A reliable stripped-down solution that comes with excellent support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Scale Computing HC3 vs. VMware vSAN report.
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