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HPE SimpliVity vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.8
HPE SimpliVity offers varying ROI timelines, significant cost savings, reduced complexity, and easy VM expansion, reported by users.
Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
HPE SimpliVity is praised for responsive, knowledgeable support, despite minor issues with response times and documentation accessibility.
Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
The technical support from the HPE side is excellent, and I give them 10 out of 10.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I would rate technical support from HPE SimpliVity eight out of ten.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
HPE SimpliVity offers easy scalability but may face limitations and flexibility issues in large enterprise environments.
Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
With HPE, customers can scale up the HPE SimpliVity solution anytime.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
HPE SimpliVity is scalable, as it can be scaled in terms of addition of nodes.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
HPE SimpliVity is highly stable and reliable, with most issues linked to external factors, earning high user ratings.
Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
From HPE's side, it is stable, and customers find it easy to manage and easy to grow.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

HPE SimpliVity requires improved integration, faster updates, enhanced features, simplified interface, better support, and expanded cloud compatibility.
StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Pricing could be an area for improvement, as there are many other options that are very cost-effective compared to HPE SimpliVity or converged solutions.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
 

Setup Cost

HPE SimpliVity offers cost-effective hyper-converged solutions with competitive pricing and lower total ownership costs compared to alternatives.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
 

Valuable Features

HPE SimpliVity provides efficient data management with deduplication, backup, and recovery, enhancing performance and reducing complexity and costs.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
The greatest benefit is that customers don't need multiple hardware solutions from other vendors. Virtualization comes in a single box.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
HPE SimpliVity is a complete solution for converged infrastructure, having its own local data store for the virtual machines and workloads.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
HCI (6th)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (15th), All-Flash Storage (31st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. HPE SimpliVity is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 6.8%, down 9.0% compared to last year.
StarWind Storage Appliance, on the other hand, focuses on NAS, holds 1.3% mindshare, up 0.8% since last year.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE SimpliVity6.8%
VxRail12.4%
VMware vSAN10.0%
Other70.8%
HCI
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Storage Appliance1.3%
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)15.5%
NetApp FAS Series10.8%
Other72.4%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable
There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Assistant at Bharat Electronics Limited
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
6%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Transportation Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise80
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
What do you like most about HPE SimpliVity?
The solution's technical support is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind Storage Appliance?
The tool is mostly for medium companies and requires no maintenance. It has a good price and performance. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.