We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged 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 features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The solution is scalable."
"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 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."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We can avoid downtime when there's maintenance or updates needed. Also, we have homogenous hardware, so we have a lot of trust in the solution's reliability."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"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."
"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"The solution is not very stable."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while HPE Hyper Converged 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 HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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