We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series 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 has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."
"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"The documentation could be better."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"
"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."
"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is ranked 18th in HCI with 3 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series writes "With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is most compared with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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