We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StorMagic SvSAN 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."A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"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."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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 solution is scalable."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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."
"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 is highly responsive."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"This synchronization is easy with StorMagic, and we can establish availability between servers."
"StorMagic SvSAN is a very effective solution and the interface is good."
"StorMagic SvSAN's best feature is that it is platform agnostic."
"It helps us prevent any data loss while working with the failover clusters."
"What I found most valuable in StorMagic SvSAN is integration. As a software-defined storage solution, it's also very easy to use and it's the trend in the market today. StorMagic SvSAN also made the customer happy because the customer could use his existing hardware with it. The customer had rack-mounted storage, so he didn't want to purchase a dedicated hardware for storage purposes. He just upgraded his hard disk drives."
"The most valuable feature of StorMagic SvSAN is its high availability. We have not had any downtime or data loss. Business continuity is highly important."
"It gives zero downtime and it works with two nodes rather than three nodes, unlike other solutions."
"We compared two solutions for this use case, but we went with StorMagic because it had more capabilities than the others. It's also more reliable, especially in production environments that require availability and sustainability."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"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."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"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."
"They should enable data compression deduplication features for the platform."
"The deployment of StorMagic SvSAN is very small. However, you need some time to do it. It's important to make a test deployment before the real deployment."
"There are two features missing: there's no REST API functionality, and there is no date duplication in it."
"The only improvement area I can see is their licensing. For example, the memory caching feature is only available in an advanced license. Normally, it's in a standard license. It would be better if they had memory caching features in the product. Some backup features should also be in the product"
"In the next release, StorMagic SvSAN should include multi-node clusters, which would allow storage spaces to be used more efficiently."
"If we want to want to replicate the VM to the cloud, or off-site, it does not allow it because of asynchronous. There is no option available."
"In terms of what could be improved in StorMagic SvSAN, I don't have a major issue with it, but its user interface should be more customer-oriented."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while StorMagic SvSAN is ranked 13th in HCI with 9 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while StorMagic SvSAN is rated 8.2. 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 StorMagic SvSAN writes "The best choice for performance and price". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE SimpliVity, whereas StorMagic SvSAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, DataCore SANsymphony, HPE SimpliVity, LINBIT SDS and Veeam Backup & Replication. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StorMagic SvSAN report.
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