We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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."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."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"It is a smart solution for virtualization"
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"Currently, when we need to do capacity planning, we have to rely on Sangfor's support team for assistance. However, if there were dedicated tools available, we could handle it ourselves and increase efficiency."
"The initialization is not fully automated and has room for improvement."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues."
"Lacks network support."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP."
"The error reporting needs to be improved."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"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."
"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."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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