We performed a comparison between Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series and VMware vSAN 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."The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"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."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"The replication technology can move data faster than EMC MirrorView and requires less bandwidth. The Storage Virtualization technology is the most mature in the market, outside of IBM’s Storwize (which has a lot of compatibility issues, and EMC’s very expensive VPLEX solution); and it works."
"In our implementations, HDS Storage Virtualization has helped in migrating data with the least amount of downtime, compared to other storage technologies."
"This solution allowed us to move from using standalone systems to having all our data center management in one place."
"The technical support is good."
"It has a single pane of glass for management and operational control, which is the most valuable feature. The integrated storage is also valuable."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"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."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"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."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"An update to its technology would be good. The G Series has been around for more than five years and HDS seriously needs to ramp up, since the competition has better performance at a lower cost with better features and functionalities. For example, it needs redirect on write Snapshot, preconfigured storage tiering with better IOPS, built-in deduplication technology on hybrid disk, etc."
"HDS reaches a ceiling depending on model. The G200 cannot transition to G400, the G400 can transition to G600 but cannot transition to G800, which is the top-end model."
"An area for improvement would be technical support. In the next release, I would like to see more features added to make this a more complete solution."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
Earn 20 points
Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is ranked 23rd in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series writes "Allows for centralized management with great interconnectivity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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