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.
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"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."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"It's quite easy to install."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done."
"The solution is very stable."
"The most valuable feature is the quick restore."
"The ease of managing this system."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"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."
"We can backup with more frequency and minimize RPO and RTO."
"Our clients are very comfortable with the single management of the complete stack. The creation of VM systems is also very fast."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"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."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"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."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"To install or to update it is more complicated than other solutions."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
"Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there."
"There are some small changes that can be made to the interface to improve it but it typically works well."
"While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence."
"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."
"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."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"Updates need improvement."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"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."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, 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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