Cisco HyperFlex vs StarWind HCA

• UCS manager in HX is truly helping us in doing one touch firmware upgrades. Scaling of HX cluster (in few minutes) is too seamlessly due to service profiles.
• HX does not hold you back by creating a single data store unlike other HCI products. With HX, you can create multiple data stores and allocate those to desired services. This help logically separate the install base on HX and removes confusion for the admins too.
• We run high IOPs workload on HX, and we never felt latency issues due to the Cisco backbone (as you get FI as a TOR switch and options to choose 10G or 40G speeds).
• With HX you truly enjoy a single window support from Cisco including for the top of the rack switch (FI in HX case). In other HCI infra, you certainly have to bank on to network switch vendor for support and bring HCI and switch vendor at one pane for troubleshooting latency related issues.
• While we increased our footprint on HX, we didn't added additional administrators to support the landscape. This was possible because of the simplicity in managing HX clusters.
• With HX we had setup stretched cluster between two near site data centres. This is a unique proposition in HX (we have 2 nodes in each data centre) and data centre failover works absolutely seamless.

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• Onboarding is well supported and simple. We were able to migrate all our VMs within a week of receiving the appliances.
• StarWind's Virtual SAN software gives the reliability of a failover cluster with the performance of local storage.
• ProActive Support ensures errors are detected and contact initiated automatically.
• I no longer have to troubleshoot three disparate systems when something goes wrong.

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• replication - as we need to use the same amount to storage to backup
• Cisco should come up with a strong hypervisor equal to vmware ESXi
• should come up with the repository of OS images and download automatically when a new OS version is released
• hybrid connectivity - missing

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• Could have been better communication during implementation
• Single pane of glass management console for cluster, VM, and backup operations has been slow to develop.
• If you want to set up Starwind vSAN in a lab to test, setup can be tedious. However, with the HCA itself StarWind HyperConverged Appliance handles all of that.

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• The simplified management makes it easier to operate and prevents mistakes.
• Guided installation using the installer VM means you don't have to configure every component by hand. Improves deployment speed and lowers the risk of configuration issues.
• Performance increase of 40-90% compared to our previous compute/storage cluster.

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• The initial cost of the setup was about $20,000 cheaper than the other solutions that I researched.
• It has made server maintenance much easier, because of high availability, which has made a big difference in the quality of life.
• It has made downtime for our end users almost never happen, which is a huge benefit.

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