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HPE SimpliVity vs StorMagic SvSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN
Sponsored
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
189
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
HPE SimpliVity
Ranking in HCI
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
153
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StorMagic SvSAN
Ranking in HCI
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE SimpliVity is 9.7%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StorMagic SvSAN is 2.0%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Hosni - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 24, 2024
Provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor
You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost-effective point. Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems, it has always done exactly what it set out to do. It provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V. It's simple and easy to use, The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation.
Xavier Perez - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 3, 2024
Has a deployment phase that is straightforward but needs improvement in the area of scalability
The main issue with HPE SimpliVity is that you are very attached to VMware or VMware dependencies because the tool works with VMware technology. HPE SimpliVity is an add-on from VMware. Nowadays, my company has a lot of concerns about VMware's licensing policy. Another big concern of the tool is related to security because one has to continuously update patch vulnerabilities that are appearing continuously in VMware's different versions. Actually, the foundation of all the architecture is VMware and that is one of the main issues with the tool. My company is analyzing our virtual infrastructure strategy to see if we can move to Nutanix because maybe it may work better and might have another approach. Nutanix is absolutely independent of VMware. I could add that since HPE SimpliVity is very precisely dependent on VMware, it is not open to containers unlike Nutanix, for example. The aforementioned area is a concern that needs to be resolved by HPE.
Levent Ozdayi - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 28, 2022
The best choice for performance and price
The primary use case for StorMagic SvSAN is providing availability to different sites. You can have multiple sites, all of which will replicate the data to each other StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic. It also provides configuration flexibility as it's fully…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"SimpliVity has hardware acceleration, which frees up CPU utilization."
"Its performance and availability are most valuable."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"What I like about SimpliVity is the brand value of HP. I also like the data compression ratio, which is around more than 75% data compression ratio. HP's support and the ease of working with SimpliVity are also valuable features."
"The compression and deduplication ratio."
"It is just a one-stop shop, a single appliance that I can control through my virtual center."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"The part I like most about it is just that it does not require a lot of touch. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, and it is straightforward."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
 

Cons

"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"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."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"Upgrading the firmware/software could be more seamless."
"Our customers are always looking or a discount on the product."
"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 ease of new deployments could be improved."
"A lot of our customers are using VMware and also are using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is not very stable on the HP SimpliVity."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"HPE SimpliVity could be more flexible and scalable. I don't feel SimpliVity is flexible or easily scalable because I still need to buy another server to add to my clusters. I can't just run or harvest and add to my solution. I need to buy another server. There are a lot of components that are not giving a lot of value to me right now. I also had a few problems with the built-in hard disk drives. I've had many issues with the harvest stripes that the servers use. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's unusual to have a physical failure on the HPE platform. I don't see any value at the software level, especially in the software that manages that solution. I was waiting for something, especially in the application layer that I would use, but that is all over VMware, and it doesn't have an integrated module that I can use to manage the server and all the instances."
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"It could be a little bit more intuitive in terms of the way you set it up initially."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."
"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
"We are happy with the price."
"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."
"It is expensive for this market. Everyone says that it is a very good product, but the only complaint is about the price."
"The solution is affordable and quite reasonably priced in terms of the product one gets."
"HPE SimpliVity is much more affordable than Nutanix or VMware vSAN...The first pair of servers was about 90,000 EUR, including three years of warranty. It is 30,000 EUR per year."
"For three years, it is $60,000 for three nodes. It is quite pricey."
"All-in license, simple and fair."
"We spent $250,000 back in the day, and that was for two servers in my data center for that cluster. We then ran what they call an arbiter, and that took the place of a third server or the third node in the cluster. My DR site was one standalone server, and its horsepower was more than the two at my main site. It included my Cisco Switches that I needed to re-upgrade. It was comparable to what we were paying a year in VM."
"The price should be cheaper."
"It's about $10,000 monthly."
"70% cheaper than competitors and provides all the enterprise feature requirements at low cost."
"It's fairly cheap when compared to other options. But it can be improved as some features may not be available in the standard license. The vendor positions it as an edge product, so it isn't suitable to compare with VMware vSAN or Nutanix because that's another product altogether."
"While it is less than other solutions, such as vSAN, for instance, it is still significant. However, it is well worth it in terms of the quality of the product and the support that it allows me to have. We are buying the flagship product from them. We are always buying premium support and all the features that we need, so it is a little bit steep upfront, but it is less than other solutions and comes with excellent support."
"The licensing cost is $7,000 per two nodes for two terabytes."
"The product has good pricing."
"The price of the solution is reasonable. Our budget was two terabytes and the price met our use case well."
"The pricing of StorMagic SvSAN is fairly good because if you compare it with VMware, it's at a better price. This is an important thing to remember."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
57%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Computer Software Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
If you are comfortable with the solution and you feel that you don't need support, you can begin with the free licenc...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
Areas for improvement in StarWind Virtual SAN include simplifying the setup process, especially for users with limite...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...
What do you like most about HPE SimpliVity?
The solution's technical support is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
The price is almost equal to VMware vSAN, making it not much cost saving. However, the time-saving during upgrades is...
What do you like most about StorMagic SvSAN?
It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StorMagic SvSAN?
It is a fair trade. It is a little bit expensive at first blush just in terms of the initial licensing cost. I have b...
What needs improvement with StorMagic SvSAN?
It could be a little bit more intuitive in terms of the way you set it up initially. The interface has recently under...
 

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS
SimpliVity, HPE HCI
StorMagic
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
Sheetz Inc., Giant Eagle, RWE Renewables, Keiser Corp., TDK, Oxford University, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Rommelsbacher, Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort, Eugen Forschner GmbH
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE SimpliVity vs. StorMagic SvSAN and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.