We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN Ready Nodes and HPE SimpliVity 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."StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"It is easy to install."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"Stability is pretty good. We have no complaints as it has been running seamlessly with no downtime."
"We can get backups faster. We have a smaller footprint for hardware, which takes up less space. So, we use less electricity and floor space."
"It has been performing well. It was more than what we expected."
"The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done."
"No SAN switches and having a native backup is pretty cool."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"It is easy to set up."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"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."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"The initial setup was a little complex because we were in the first version, fresh releases."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time."
"The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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