Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

Hitachi SVOS is well suited for all environment in todays world. Storage plays a pivot role in all services provided in the current digital age. The Hitachi SVOS along with their blade proides magnificient perfromance boost which is not comparable to any vendors. Companies which has a huge database should consider this an option to evaluate. In addition orgnization who has a highly virtualized enviroment could also look at this product during their evaluation stage. This product is less benfit due to its cost in an environment where they have more number of physical servers as there are other solution which can be leveraged at a lower costs as they would not be utilizing the full feature set provided by the appliance

Incentivized

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• Intergreation of legancy storage solutions
• Single pane for future storage configurations
• Amazing replication capability for disaster recovery purposes

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• Ease of use can be increased so that SMB segment could leverage without the need of having a storage administrator
• Firmware upgrade for the legancy storage device from HSVOS pane

Incentivized

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

There is definitely no comparison to any of the products when comparing to Hitachi SVOS. I beleieve this is the only unique product which can leverage older storage systems. Dell Avamar can be a great product if you are considering DR replication alone. The DR replication ratio is quite high in Dell avamar. However given that the current bandwidth available outweights this benefit

Incentivized

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• It is quite an expensive solution compared to other vendors so we cant expect a ROI within 3 years time as always.
• 3 years has been a standard ROI review, however storage solution like Hitachi SVOS are meant to lasts for a longer period like 6 years in my consideration.
• However, this solution provides a great benefit to make use of legacy appliances.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized