We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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."The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"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."
"You can get almost all the features of the tool at a low cost. The tool also has built-in backup mechanisms. It also has a physical firewall for internet management which other competitors lack."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"Sangfor HCI has a bundle of security features that are easy to monitor on the HCI dashboard."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"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."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"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."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"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 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."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"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'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"Its virtual machine tools can be improved. These tools should be enhanced for use in other applications and operating systems, such as Linux."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"Support may be an issue for customers in some industries. For example, financial institutions may require 24/7 support."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"The migration process could be easier."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"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."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"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."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"The management console could use a facelift."
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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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