We performed a comparison between Pivot3 and VMware vSAN 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.
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"They require more media visibility."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"This product is very expensive."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
Earn 20 points
Pivot3 is ranked 25th in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Pivot3 is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Pivot3 writes "One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Pivot3 is most compared with , whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Pivot3 vs. VMware vSAN report.
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