HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
N/A
StarWind HCA
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
N/A
Pricing
HPE SimpliVity
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HPE SimpliVity
StarWind HCA
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HPE SimpliVity
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
Considered Both Products
HPE SimpliVity
No answer on this topic
StarWind HCA
Verified User
Manager
Chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance was the only option that offered the performance, reliability, and high availability that we were looking for. It's also the solution that is tailored for small organizations and removes a lot of the complexities and extra components needed to …
We evaluated both of these systems and obtained quotes for comparison. Unfortunately both were way out of budget. StarWind however was well within budget! I have also used Nutanix, and the complexity of the management and the setup of the nodes is way more difficult to set up …
StarWind at its core functions as the big hitters in the VSAN world, but comes at a better price. Their ability to provide us with HyperConverged technology without needing flash storage or an expensive storage switch is what drove us to buy StarWind. StarWind was also a better …
We chose Starwind over Nutanix and Scale because of price and hypervisor. Both Nutanix and Scale use a customer hypervisor and we wanted to use a hypervisor we were already well versed in. Starwind won over Simplivity because of cost and support. During our talks with HP we …
StarwWinds virtual SAN was the most cost effective and it was pretty easy to get set up. It was the only truly redundant 2 node Hyper-converged cluster solution and it was also the most cost-effective. We tried, tested, researched, and priced 4 other Hyper-converged and …
In the end, we chose StarWind because it offered us all the benefits of an HCA with a price that was about 10 times lower than the competitors' solutions.
I only know what I know...which is my IT world. Having two datacenters that were physical servers attached to a SAN that "attempted" to replicate and then migrating. For a SMB small IT shop that happens to have two datacenters already in place...this has been ideal. I can have a generalist maintain the system and we have a private cloud for DR with hardly any effort...the biggest gain by far!
As a nonprofit, we needed a virtualization platform that was reliable, cost effective, and simple to administer. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance checked all the boxes for us. We went with their refurbished models to lower the cost, and they've been rock solid. We were able to simplify our environment and the platform has been so reliable that I really don't have to think about it. This has been great for me as the sole sysadmin. There are a lot of pieces to manage, and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance have allowed me to focus less on the platform and more on the VM's themselves and the other pieces of our network environment. I think as long as you get the "right size" of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance that this platform could work well for many organizations.
Deduplication and Compression - SimpliVity keeps the space consumption to a minimum. We currently have 60 servers running virtually and we still have room to grow. This really helps with the backups as we can have longer retention.
Backups - Ability to keep backups for longer and to create multiple backup policies for a VM is a breeze. You can have a backup policy for each datastore as well as a separate backup policy for the same VM.
Creating Datastores is very easy. No more messing around with LUNS and iSCSI. Just go to the SimpliVity tab and select create datastore and it's done. You can also increase the datastore on the fly as well as have a datastore bigger than 2TB.
File level recovery is included as well. The whole backup process in SimpliVity can help you do away with other software.
It is extremely easy to set up, it comes with most options pre-configured for you. But the support group will walk through your entire setup and migration.
It is monitored by StarWind 24x7. Instead of issues being reactive with the monitoring I'm hoping things will be more proactive.
The performance has been outstanding. I think disk was our main limiting factor with our hold hardware.
Support team has slight accent but is not too difficult to understand.
Emphasis on security can be improved. Things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested.
Can't really think of much else...If I had to split hairs...on reboots sometimes it took a while to sync with the other node. Max was 30 minutes, but 99% of the time it's 3-4 minutes.
The hardware appliance convinced me. It is also good to use as a product in the box.Experience of the speed and security of the storage and the data on the storage is important.Installation is relatively easy and support is supportive. You are not left alone.Therefore a clear recommendation
Overall, the appliance is versatile. It covers the adaptation to all current hypervisors and can be addressed via different protocols. This prepares you for a wide range of uses.Rack mounting is also well thought out. And last but not least, apart from the technical performance, it is also an eye-catcher.
Working with the support team has been great. Connecting with somebody during and after business hours has been smooth, and they have always been responsive and professional. I don't have to wait very long to hear back from them when either sending out an email with a question or inquiry or when calling after business hours when we had to shutdown and bring back up the servers due to hurricanes here in Florida.
Support is very good. With proactive support, you are supported by an engineer in North America who answers the phone and immediately begins assisting with your issue. The folks I have dealt with in the last several years have been very skilled and it is rare to have a ticket open for more than a day or two. Issues affecting production are dealt with appropriately and are escalated within the support organization.
Literally, while writing this review, I just received an email from starwind saying my VSAN version was out of date due to a recent update coming out and they offered to help me install it. Its just amazing how "on top of it" support is. They'll monitor downtime, reboots, version issues, even the bios firmware on the Dell servers... I can't imagine using any other vendor, they just do it all, and they do it well.
The old saying: Preparation is everything.It should be ensured in advance that the operating system is up-to-date and therefore suitable for the appliance.The recommended network adapters should also be used in the network and the firewall rules adjusted.If this is planned in advance and everything is prepared, then the installation can be carried out relatively quickly.The manuals and the StarWind website are also a very good help.
Scale was a proprietary SAN software/hardware and outrageously high priced. The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance was just Dell servers with VMWare ESXi Hypervisor installed running two Windows Servers virtual machines where the StarWind SAN software is installed on. The only thing that was proprietary for StarWind was the StarWind SAN software
HPE SimpliVity provided us with the ability to replace our existing infrastructure with a solution that provided better backup and recovery, and an off-site DR solution, at a lower price point than other solutions.
Our CIS software has some poorly optimized SQL logic. Our old Failover Cluster w/ a VNXe3200 SAN would take up to 7 seconds to pull a customer's records up. It now takes only 1-2 seconds. Our front office has been much more pleasant since their install.
I would only rarely have to interact with our blade switches and VNXe SAN, so I wouldn't necessarily retain the knowledge of how to configure them. Each time I'd need to make a change, I'd have to refer back to my documentation. That's no longer an issue I have to deal with.
The rack footprint for our cluster went from 14U to 4U, and we were able to achieve it with much less network cabling and with lowered power requirements.
