We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."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 enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"VxRail simplifies IT infrastructure management by providing a single management console for compute, storage, and network. The second advantage is that VxRail offers a continuously validated architecture from the OEM. This means that Dell thoroughly tests all firmware updates before being released or installed on the product, helping to prevent compatibility issues. The third benefit is its ten-year roadmap. Dell consistently announces a roadmap for the product spanning the next decade."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with."
"This is a good solution for medium-sized installations especially when it will be coupled with VMware."
"We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,"
"The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail. This makes all files act as a single file with a large and huge resource, and, of course, with customized administration, configuration, and resources. It provides automatic failover for redundancy and data recovery."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"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."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"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."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."
"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."
"Integration could be improved."
"The solution could improve by having more storage performance because in some other solutions you can have a file system that can be mounted at several places at one time."
"The only issue which is every now and again is that when you log in it will tell you that there's an issue with VxRail when there actually isn't. All that's required is a refresh or reload. The solution itself works but you may get some bad reports every now and again. Probably once every couple of months; there is no effect to the solution's capabilities."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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