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."The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"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."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"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 support team responds quickly."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"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 manageability feature is the most important aspect of the solution."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"The product provides a single management console for managing everything."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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 cost must be improved."
"My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"I would want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
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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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