We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and HPE SimpliVity 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.
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"The most valuable features of this solution are fast deployment, security, and it is easy to upgrade."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"The product enables me to use any software or database."
"The HA, which means I have a copy of the VMs always available, and the moment a VM is down, the system tries to power it on again."
"The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well."
"The backup and restore features are the most valuable."
"The interface is very good and is very easy to navigate. You can find everything you need from one central place."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"The initial setup is simple."
"Offsite backup, replication, and duplication of data are important for our plant environment since we are hard on our equipment."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"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."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved."
"This solution is very costly."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites."
"We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage."
"SimpliVity's data management could be better. Nutanix's interface is a bit more user-friendly."
"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."
"Needs to improve the cloud integration, such as Azure and AWS."
"I think that they should have their own hyper-converged system."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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