HPE SimpliVity and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market. Based on feature comparisons, HPE SimpliVity has a slight advantage with its robust data management capabilities.
Features: HPE SimpliVity stands out with inline deduplication, integrated backup and disaster recovery, and efficient storage through its Data Virtualization Platform. Fast virtual machine replication and recovery are also highlighted. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance focuses on high availability, seamless failover, and integration with Microsoft Hyper-V, providing flexibility and resource-efficient operation.
Room for Improvement: HPE SimpliVity could enhance support for more hypervisors beyond VMware, improve automation in backup tasks, and offer easier version upgrades. Users also seek broader compatibility and clearer pricing. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance would benefit from a more intuitive GUI and enhanced storage management, despite its outstanding proactive support. Better monitoring and reporting features could further improve the user experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both products receive positive feedback for ease of deployment in on-premises setups. HPE SimpliVity is noted for streamlined integration and management, yet post-HPE acquisition support quality varies. StarWind is praised for its straightforward installation, with consistently high customer satisfaction driven by proactive monitoring and responsive support.
Pricing and ROI: HPE SimpliVity offers competitive pricing, providing strong value through integrated features that lower management and operational costs compared to traditional solutions. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is recognized for affordability and a straightforward pricing model, appealing to small and medium-sized businesses with its robust, cost-effective solutions. Both platforms demonstrate solid return on investment, with notable savings in operational expenses and reduced infrastructure complexity.
The technical support from the HPE side is excellent, and I give them 10 out of 10.
With HPE, customers can scale up the HPE SimpliVity solution anytime.
From HPE's side, it is stable, and customers find it easy to manage and easy to grow.
In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination.
The greatest benefit is that customers don't need multiple hardware solutions from other vendors. Virtualization comes in a single box.
HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.
HPE SimpliVity Features
HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
HPE SimpliVity Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.
Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.
A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”
PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”
German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.
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