We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 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."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."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"Cisco offers very good quality."
"The storage system is its most valuable feature. It has eliminated our entire need for having to worry about storage. We were storing a lot of syslog data and using a lot of templates in our data center. With the storage system, we are now saving an enormous amount of space."
"Most of our users are Cisco customers, so it fits in within the suites we use. Primarily for me, as a solution architect, it's the technology and architecture that is the most valuable. I know from my technical colleagues that it's easy to use and for the customer, the up-time is the most valuable asset. It's running, has low failure, and so on which is why we use it."
"The UCS, which is by far the best management tool there is on the market, regardless of vendor. It's the only tool I see that gives you the opportunity to size and scale all the assets and capacity you have in your data center, from a unified view."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"Great integration with backup software."
"The solution is stable."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"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."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"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."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"The additional feature I would like to see included in the next release of this solution is more security. We want to add more data servers to all the hosts all over the world. We have 140 hosts that connect to one data center in Manila."
"We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products."
"If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great."
"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."
"They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out."
"The storage layer seems to be a little better on the VMware than on HyperFlex side."
"If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product. Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"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."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"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."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Try it today
Try it today
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.