We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"The ability to have a feature-rich software set which extends the capabilities of the back-end storage arrays."
"Using SBC, a valuable feature is the mirroring, which is the virtualization of the disk between disparate places."
"The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"The most valuable feature is its reliability."
"I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"It's got full features, so we can compress volumes. We can do thin volumes and we can change them on the fly."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"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."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"The solution could have a better built-in performance monitor."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"t is limited in terms of a single system to eight nodes or four, what they call IO groups."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"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."
"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."
"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"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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IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 36 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "A highly scalable product that is relatively easy to use and set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VxRail, VMware vSAN, IBM Spectrum Scale and DataCore SANsymphony, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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