We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series 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."We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"Its performance is quite good, and it is also easy to use. One of the biggest benefits is the included backup solution."
"The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V"
"It is just a one-stop shop, a single appliance that I can control through my virtual center."
"The feature that I like the most is the backup feature embedded inside the HPE SimpliVity. When we have any activity, within five minutes, we have a backup. It also has PDR for performing disaster recovery."
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering."
"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."
"We can get backups faster. We have a smaller footprint for hardware, which takes up less space. So, we use less electricity and floor space."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"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."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"This is a great product."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"We would like to have more security with the solution."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
"If there was anything I would like to see, it would be indexed backups."
"The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal."
"Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
"Support could be better."
"With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 150 reviews while Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 15th in HCI with 4 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6. 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Scale Computing HC3, whereas Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, HPE Alletra dHCI and VMware vSAN. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series report.
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