We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series 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 vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"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."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The ease of setting up our DR site with SimpliVity. It was very simple. I did not have to set up a separate storage, server, and networking environments."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."
"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"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."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"Bandwidth throttling during offsite backups would be better than the off-peak time setting for a 24/7 shop."
"The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform."
"When we make some upgrades to the platform, it does take time to stabilize the structure again."
"The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there."
"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."
"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is ranked 18th in HCI with 3 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is rated 8.0. 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series writes "With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is most compared with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series report.
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