We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN Ready Nodes 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."A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"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."
"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 iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"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."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 12th in HCI with 14 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 7th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN and VxRail. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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