We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged 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."The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"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."
"It is extremely stable."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"The most valuable feature is the in-built backup system. The backup speed is also excellent."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"The solution has many good features."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We can avoid downtime when there's maintenance or updates needed. Also, we have homogenous hardware, so we have a lot of trust in the solution's reliability."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."
"The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently."
"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 support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"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."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites."
"Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"The solution is not very stable."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"Updates need improvement."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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