We performed a comparison between Scale Computing HC3 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.
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"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."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"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."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"The sales process is easy."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"The product could use a better control center."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"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."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"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."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 21st in HCI with 7 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Scale Computing HC3 writes "A reliable stripped-down solution that comes with excellent support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and HPE SimpliVity, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Scale Computing HC3 vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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