We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell VxBlock System based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) offers a significant breadth of features."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"The support is highly responsive."
"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 solution is scalable."
"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 solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 quite stable."
"Good flexibility and speed."
"Virtual machines for the infrastructure."
"It's at least 99 percent problem-free because it's factory-built. So from an informational point of view, everyone trusts that VxBlock has been tested well at the factory and has been configured to their requirements."
"VxBlock has good performance, so that is an advantage."
"In comparison to traditional file load systems, Dell VxBlock System can be deployed quickly and results in monthly cost savings."
"The monitoring and management parts are the most valuable. Monitoring is specifically valuable because you have one console to monitor everything. This console is called Vision."
"Good default features."
"It's a highly optimized piece of equipment that doesn't give us any problems."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Does not support different kinds of mixed applications."
"The consistency of disc quality could be improved."
"We are finding it a bit challenging in terms of the management of a specific VxBlock component. Currently, we have different units as a part of the block storage. We have one for Cisco equipment and one for Dell. When we have an issue in the infrastructure, Dell EMC VxBlock System should automatically detect it and send a notification to VC support, but, unfortunately, it is doing that only for one unit. It is not working for Cisco components. We have informed them about this area of improvement, and they are working on this. The way different parts are integrated should be improved. We should have one console to log in to see all the infrastructure in terms of each machine and hardware."
"The hardware lifecycle is not documented very well. For example, now you can buy a piece of equipment, but you don't know if the hardware is going to be a team production next month or next year."
"It is a good product, but for us, it is like a black box. We are not really sure about its internal components, and how to do the terminal upgrade, and how to make sure about the security of the device. We understand how it works, but in order to do the upgrades, we have to get help from the company. We cannot do it ourselves. In another model that we had, the internal team could do the upgrade but not in this one. There is no clear process for a new upgrade or update. They should provide a software intelligence tool that has a dashboard where you can see the current firmware, the latest firmware, and the documentation and the process for the upgrade. For VxBlock, we have different management consoles. There is no single management console that you can use to manage all components inside VxBlock. Their scale up and scale out process is also not clear. Their support is also a little bit slow in responding to the cases."
"It's a good product but the price could be lowered. It's expensive."
"The solution could use a clearer description of working methods to tell people more about its use cases."
"The only thing that I can say is when you procure the VxBlock, obviously you have to complete detailed questionnaires about your architecture including the configuration, et cetera. If you make a mistake on the implementation, then you need to rebuild the entire VxBlock. That is just a point of consideration rather than a flaw. You need to be absolutely sure and validate the upfront configuration information that you provide because your VxBlock comes delivered and built, according to that exact information."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while Dell VxBlock System is ranked 4th in Converged Infrastructure with 12 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while Dell VxBlock System is rated 7.8. 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 Dell VxBlock System writes "Can be deployed quickly, is easy to manage, and is stable and resilient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas Dell VxBlock System is most compared with Dell PowerEdge VRTX, FlexPod XCS, Dell Vscale Architecture, IBM VersaStack and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.
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.
