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 has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The backup and restore features are the most valuable."
"Stability is pretty good. We have no complaints as it has been running seamlessly with no downtime."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"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."
"I like the expandability of the solution. We can effortlessly grow the storage and resources without downtime."
"The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"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."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"The sales process is easy."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"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."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"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."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
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.
