We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and HPE SimpliVity 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."Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"The solution has many good features."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"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."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups."
"Its performance and availability are most valuable."
"A very small package but with lots of memory and CPU."
"The whole backup capability, where we are able to create backups and restore backups in typically 40 to 50 seconds, has been great."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"Backups happen very quickly."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"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."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"I have not seen ROI."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"When it comes to performing backups, the dashboard is not intuitive and not user-friendly."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"The ease of new deployments could be improved."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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