HPE SimpliVity vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity 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.
To learn more, read our detailed HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software.""The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from.""In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support.""Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest.""Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software.""The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team.""The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great.""The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"The setup is very easy.""The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use.""The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services.""Scaling is a piece of cake. We have been able to scale up in our Asia-Pac region. We even are doing site-to-site replication of certain systems that we need to have high availability on.""The compression and deduplication ratio.""The built-in backup and quick restore are good features.""The backup and restore features are the most valuable.""The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."

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"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself.""Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing.""It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux.""The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment.""In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature.""We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.""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."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pros →

Cons
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area.""It is difficult to control all of the hardware components.""There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time.""They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity.""If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online.""It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks.""The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation.""Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"HPE SimpliVity should cost less.""I have a free project with SimpliVity deployment in the next three months. What can be improved is that in one or two of these projects, I need a cloud backup for the infrastructure and data. As for the infrastructure of the product as it relates to customer size, it is not very good at this moment in Peru. I need a solution for the cloud. In Peru, it's a three or four solution provider for cloud services.""The technical, commercial, and marketing support is not at the level that it should be. They are not structured well. Other vendors provide better support, such as Dell.""I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system.""High availability for large production environments needs to be offered.""The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly.""We would like to have more security with the solution.""I have not seen ROI."

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"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better.""I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement.""Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse.""The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss.""The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification.""That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that.""It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind.""CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN."
  • "The price should be cheaper."
  • "ESXi licensing is a big part of initial investment if you do not already have that covered."
  • "All-in license, simple and fair."
  • "Other vendors fall short on price compared to HPE on this product."
  • "​Cost is a factor. It is quite expensive."
  • "It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal."
  • "For most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly."
  • More HPE SimpliVity Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."
  • "Its cost was reasonable."
  • "This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
  • "When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
  • "The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."
  • "I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."
  • "The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."
  • "We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
  • More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:I would highly advise new users to consult the StarWind technical team beforehand. Also, consider the paid version if… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Top Answer:What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware.
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity offers competitive pricing, generally lower than some alternatives. However, I believe there is room for… more »
    Top Answer:StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.
    Top Answer:Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind… more »
    Top Answer:I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were two… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    SimpliVity, HPE HCI
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.

    HPE SimpliVity Features

    HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Flexible, compact architecture
    • Centralized management
    • AI-driven intelligence
    • Built-in data protection and disaster recovery
    • VM-centric management and mobility
    • Simple to deploy, manage, and scale

    HPE SimpliVity Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Efficient: HPE SimpliVity helps reduce the number of devices in your data center while also decreasing the total cost of ownership.
    • Cloud benefits with enterprise capabilities: When your enterprise deploys HPE SimpliVity, you gain the agility, elasticity, and affordability offered by cloud computing.
    • Affordable and flexible: The solution provides IT teams with the performance, reliability, and resiliency of on-premises infrastructure. HPE SimpliVity allows them to start virtualizing their enterprise while also keeping sensitive data safe.
    • Reduced risk of data loss: Because HPE SimpliVity is a powerful solution with built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery, it is able to provide advanced data protection that reduces your organization’s risk of data loss and also lowers the risk of ransomware attacks.
    • Speed: HPE SimpliVity gives you the ability to deploy blocks and manage VM environments quickly and easily by using the VMware interface. In addition, the solution allows you to quickly view all data centers and remote offices within a single interface.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.

    Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.

    A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”

    PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”

    German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”

    For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA. 

    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
    Sears Home and Franchise Business
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Construction Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Transportation Company8%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise26%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise59%
    Large Enterprise27%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise49%
    Buyer's Guide
    HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.

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    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.