"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."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"Its ease of use is valuable. It is being used in a mining company. They wanted their working nodes to be seamless, and they wanted ease of use. That's why they opted for SimpliVity. They are running VMware virtual machines on it."
"The technical support is exceptionally good."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds."
"Backups happen very quickly."
"The configuration capabilities are good."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"The initial setup isn't hard."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"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."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"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."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"The solution wasn't able to connect to the cloud, and there's no micro-segmentation. The configuration of this solution is also complex."
"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."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"It would be better if it could integrate more easily with other vendors."
"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."
"I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"As far as I know, no hyper-convergence solution includes security, so you have to buy security from another brand. For example, you buy SimpliVity or Nutanix. They don't really have a security solution inside the product. It would be good if there is a security solution inside this solution so that it is not only for the virtualization of CPU, RAM, disk, and network but also for security."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
"The error reporting needs to be improved."
"There are certain aspects of sizing of the solution that need improvement."
"The interface could be a little bit better."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 4th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 60 reviews while Sangfor HCI is ranked 10th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 9 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2, while Sangfor HCI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sangfor HCI writes "Has good support ". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and Dell PowerFlex, whereas Sangfor HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VxRail, Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Sangfor HCI report.
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