We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"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."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"The solution has many good features."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"The integration is excellent."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"This is a great product."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"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."
"The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency."
"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"This solution is very costly."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"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."
"The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. 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 Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN.
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