We performed a comparison between Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series and VxRail 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."It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The price was right."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"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."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"In our implementations, HDS Storage Virtualization has helped in migrating data with the least amount of downtime, compared to other storage technologies."
"The replication technology can move data faster than EMC MirrorView and requires less bandwidth. The Storage Virtualization technology is the most mature in the market, outside of IBM’s Storwize (which has a lot of compatibility issues, and EMC’s very expensive VPLEX solution); and it works."
"This solution allowed us to move from using standalone systems to having all our data center management in one place."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"It's very easy to upgrade."
"It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability."
"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."
"First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is so good."
"It is truly a hyper-converged infrastructure, so everything is there together."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"HDS reaches a ceiling depending on model. The G200 cannot transition to G400, the G400 can transition to G600 but cannot transition to G800, which is the top-end model."
"An update to its technology would be good. The G Series has been around for more than five years and HDS seriously needs to ramp up, since the competition has better performance at a lower cost with better features and functionalities. For example, it needs redirect on write Snapshot, preconfigured storage tiering with better IOPS, built-in deduplication technology on hybrid disk, etc."
"An area for improvement would be technical support. In the next release, I would like to see more features added to make this a more complete solution."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"if we're looking at costs, Nutanix will win because it allows flexibility in the type of hardware you can use."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"Sometimes during the upgrade process of VxRail, we experience errors that have nothing to do with reality and I cannot troubleshoot them without calling Dell and bringing in an engineer to figure it out."
"It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware."
Earn 20 points
Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is ranked 23rd in HCI while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is rated 8.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series writes "Allows for centralized management with great interconnectivity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and FlexPod XCS. See our Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series vs. VxRail report.
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