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."The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"We're doing a lot of VMware for IT so this solution is really valuable from a VMH point of view. We're trying to assist our customers mainly with management, because that's what they want. The most important aspects are ease of management, as well as ease of configuration, allowing them to attach additional nodes and resources for the applications."
"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The program is stable."
"The most valuable features are the CVDs and the support behind it from both companies."
"The solution’s unified support for the entire stack is critically important because we cannot afford downtime."
"For anyone who needs the flexibility of moving around profiles from physical device to physical device, it really adds an additional layer of virtualization."
"The product is very stable and it does what it needs to do."
"This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization."
"The system is designed for easy scaling. Because we define everything clearly. So when we plug the system in, we apply the profile, and it scales easily."
"The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager."
"It simplifies infrastructure from edge to port to cloud. It proves that deployment is easy and straightforward. There isn't any need to do extra work."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"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."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"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 would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"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."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The installation is complex."
"We have experienced issues with patching. When there are Cisco releases, there are some vulnerabilities, i.e., security vulnerabilities. We are as a financial company and need to be on top patching. As a company, we cannot have continuous downtime to do patching, which is a challenge that we have faced."
"Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved."
"There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options."
"I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this."
"The last two calls that I have made to NetApp support have been handled too casually. People are too lax, not quite as professional as I would have liked."
"The initial setup for FlexPod is complex."
"According to the product managers, there are some new products coming which will address some of our concerns around portability and compliance."
"We would like FlexPod to have more power, though it is not lacking in power now."
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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