We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity 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."This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"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."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The solution is scalable."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support is highly responsive."
"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 support team responds quickly."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"A very small package but with lots of memory and CPU."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"The HyperGuarantee is unique and the accelerator card is the primary IP with the product."
"Offsite backup, replication, and duplication of data are important for our plant environment since we are hard on our equipment."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. The management is easy, and you don't have to have a lot of knowledge about storage, network, etc. It is simple to manage and simple to implement, and that's its key feature."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"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 solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"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."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
"The price is quite high. The system could also be more scalable."
"I wish to see an improved compute node selection, to allow us to select something other than merely the two socket system."
"The installation process could be simplified. It's a bit technical for non-IT users."
"It is not as flexible as we want. We have asked for some more granular scalability. For example, the ability to add some disks, and not another node, if we need more storage."
"The way that it handles the memory could be better."
"Increased storage capacity for big data, something that we have not had."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. 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 HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE SimpliVity report.
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