We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Sunlight based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"The price was right."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"The pricing of the solution is very good."
"Our customers get a lot more horsepower for a lot less management."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"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 way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done."
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"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."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"Integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges."
"I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install."
"We have had some failures out-of-the-box. We have had some failures with the OmniStack module. One thing that we didn't fully understand was how much of the internal memory was used up by the OmniStack piece, which basically makes up SimpliVity."
"Scalability is something that needs to be improved because if you need more storage then you have to add more nodes."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"They should optimize the administration stack because it is consuming too much memory. It ends up consuming 20% of memory. They have another product for this feature, but I would like to have this feature within HPE SimpliVity."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews while Sunlight is ranked 29th in HCI with 2 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Sunlight is rated 8.0. 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 Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas Sunlight is most compared with VMware vSAN.
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