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 a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"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."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"The initial setup is simple."
"SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well."
"The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product."
"Its ease of use is valuable. It is being used in a mining company. They wanted their working nodes to be seamless, and they wanted ease of use. That's why they opted for SimpliVity. They are running VMware virtual machines on it."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"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 pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The sales process is easy."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"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."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had."
"Product doesn't scale."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"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."
"HPE support is still not aware/trained on SimpliVity, and this is beginning to show."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"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."
"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."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
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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.
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