We performed a comparison between Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and StarWind Virtual SAN 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 scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"The most valuable feature is full integration with Cisco API and UCS, which means you can have complete networking and storage from Cisco."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"The initial setup is easy."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"The solution is stable."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"The problem is that we always have to keep an eye out for new releases to make sure that the version we're running is up-to-date."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"Its price could be better."
"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."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"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."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 28 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 55 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 7.6, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "An all-in-one option that is stable and offers good management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell PowerFlex, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, StorMagic SvSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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