We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."
"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."
"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"The most valuable feature is the convergence."
"It is a unique product with simplified setup and independent control over storage and compute."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"The sales process is easy."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"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..."
"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."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."
"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."
"Its stability is very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crash."
"It is difficult to get acclimated to all the new features quickly. The onboard process could be improved to bring clients up to speed faster."
"In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."
"There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"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."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."
"Updates need improvement."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
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NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". NetApp HCI [EOL] is most compared with , whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN.
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