We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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."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 ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The price was right."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"I am impressed with the product's firewall and virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"You can get almost all the features of the tool at a low cost. The tool also has built-in backup mechanisms. It also has a physical firewall for internet management which other competitors lack."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"Very user-friendly and simple."
"It was not expensive at all."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"Support may be an issue for customers in some industries. For example, financial institutions may require 24/7 support."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"The cost must be improved."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"The initialization is not fully automated and has room for improvement."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure report.
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