We performed a comparison between Scale Computing HC3 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 features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"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 product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"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."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"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'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."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"The product could use a better control center."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 19th in HCI with 8 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity and Dell PowerFlex, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Scale Computing HC3 vs. VMware vSAN report.
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