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."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"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"
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"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 support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"The solution's simplicity is its most valuable feature. The usability is also good."
"The configuration capabilities are good."
"Technical support is perfect. They explain to us the solution in a very clear and simple way. When we call them, they know the right answer and get the right person automatically."
"Improves backup time and DR solution."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"The pricing of the solution is very good."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
"I would love to see a more proactive approach to implementing patches and reaching out to customers with new initiatives."
"HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380."
"I have some worries about the support after the acquisition. The support was better before HPE acquired SimpliVity."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
"Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"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."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"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."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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