We performed a comparison between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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 StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"It's quite easy to install."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."
"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..."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"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."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"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."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."
"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"The cloud deployment could be improved."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"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 response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
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Earn 20 points
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 23rd in HCI while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure writes "Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN.
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