We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"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."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The solution is quite stable."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"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 of this solution is integration."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"The installation is complex."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 7th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Scale Computing HC3, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, VxRail and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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