We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and Sunlight based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"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."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"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 solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"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."
"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."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"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."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"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)."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"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."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"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."
"Updates need improvement."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"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."
"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."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while Sunlight is ranked 28th in HCI with 2 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while Sunlight is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas Sunlight is most compared with VMware vSAN.
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