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."The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
"The most valuables features of it are the deduplication and the compaction because the ratios are much better than what we normally get on our FAS storage."
"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."
"It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"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."
"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."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"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."
"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."
"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."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"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."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
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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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