Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
8.5
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
6.0
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
154
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 (16th), All-Flash Storage (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. HPE SimpliVity is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 8.6%, down 10.2% compared to last year.
StarWind Storage Appliance, on the other hand, focuses on NAS, holds 0.8% mindshare, down 0.8% since last year.
HCI
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
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
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
862,452 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
13%
Performing Arts
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
The price is almost equal to VMware vSAN, making it not much cost saving. However, the time-saving during upgrades is notable.
What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
 

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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: July 2025.
862,452 professionals have used our research since 2012.