We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex 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."The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Updates need improvement."
"The management console could use a facelift."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"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."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell VxBlock System, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.