We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and NetApp HCI [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"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."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt."
"It has reduced my data center activities."
"Among the valuable features are that it's a complete solution, it's easy to use, and there is not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V"
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."
"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."
"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"The documentation could be better."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
"The product is expensive."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"The ease of new deployments could be improved."
"It would be better if we could deploy a hybrid cloud integrated to SimpliVity."
"The installation process could be simplified. It's a bit technical for non-IT users."
"The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule."
"There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."
"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
"In the next version I would like to see bigger GPU types and insurance for including transparency."
"The networking needs improvement."
Earn 20 points
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews while NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik, whereas NetApp HCI [EOL] is most compared with .
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