We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI.
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"The HA, which means I have a copy of the VMs always available, and the moment a VM is down, the system tries to power it on again."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"The solution has many good features."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The integration is excellent."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"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."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. 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 StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN.
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.
