We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity 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."It is extremely stable."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"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."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"The initial setup is simple."
"I find the replication feature valuable."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"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."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
"Once I am onto the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"Its deployment should be easier."
"The product is expensive."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
"The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"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."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 51 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 42 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.8. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Flexible and easy to set up with excellent support". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN, VMware vSAN and Commvault Distributed Storage. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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