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."Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"The solution is scalable."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"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."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"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."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"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."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"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."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"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."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"The product could use a better control center."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 19th in HCI with 8 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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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