We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN Ready Nodes and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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.
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."
"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"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."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"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."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"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 doesn't scale."
"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."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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