We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod XCS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) offers a significant breadth of features."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"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 integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support team responds quickly."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"When you open the box, they give you a very nice diagram. Which was my initial guide through setting up any NetApp SAN. It worked itself out pretty well."
"The most valuable features are the CVDs and the support behind it from both companies."
"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."
"Simplicity and integration with NetApp are its most valuable features."
"The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand."
"The solution is innovative. It handles virtual networking. Also, it can upgrade blades and continue working seamlessly, which is excellent."
"Not a perfect ten because it could use better integration on the network side between UCS and the switching layerKnowing that everything works, having a single place to be able to find out compatibility and things like that are the biggest benefits of this solution. The fact that LACP is not supported on UCS blades isn't so great. It would be nice if it was."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility in configuration and the setup."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"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."
"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 need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"Sometimes, when the newer versions of any of the partners’ firmware or software come out, there's still sometimes a lag of the partners to support all of those new components."
"FlexPods can include the new networking and new virtualization of storage and data center interconnectivity with the networking side of it. They can evolve and grow by connecting pods together."
"We would like better management of cases. For example, if you open a FlexPod case, it's not always straightforward. It would be nice to have centralized resource to open FlexPod cases and ease up management of our cases."
"Compatibility issues with replication. The Oracle table formats were not working and storage replications did not work as well, until we had to introduce other components to make it work."
"There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had."
"There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed."
"FlexPod XCS needs to improve its pricing."
"We use technical support from time to time. Most of the time if we really need assistance we end up having to get above the tier one support. We're able to do a lot of the tier one troubleshooting on our own."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Is very resilient and protects our data, but the solution is complex". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell VxBlock System, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Oracle Exadata, Dell VxBlock System and Dell PowerEdge VRTX.
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