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, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"The support is highly responsive."
"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."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The program is stable."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"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 most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"FlexPod gives us the opportunity to deploy a product which is fully built and racked with minimal touch installation when it arrives onsite, so we can do all the configuration remotely."
"It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. They provided a lot of documentation."
"The solution’s validated designs for major enterprise apps in our organization are very important. It's basically become critical to our organization to have that system functioning a 100 percent of the time. If that system is not functional, then our doctors and nurses can't provide the care to the patients in an effective way. So, it's important that it is stable, works, and easy to understand."
"FlexPod has improved our company as far as ease of management, stability, and redundancy."
"The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches."
"We have absolutely been able to save space."
"It's a kind of one-stop shop as far as support goes."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"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 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."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"I'd like to see a little bit simpler management pane. Using UCS Director to front everything is good but for a lot of that upper mid-market, it's probably a little bit of overkill for what they need. They just want a nice, simply portal to go through and see what's going on. So if there was something that was middle of the road, it would be well received."
"FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side."
"The initial setup for FlexPod is complex."
"The FlexPod service and support could be improved."
"The only support call that we have had in six years was related to an ONTAP upgrade, where one of the controllers didn't patch properly."
"FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design."
"I'd like them to bring back the GUI for NetApp ONTAP. They changed the interface in version 9.8, and it's not great. In 9.9 they've tried to bring it back a little bit, but it's still not great."
"I would like to see increased performance."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6. 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 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 SimpliVity and Scale Computing HC3, whereas FlexPod XCS is most compared with Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Dell VxBlock System and Dell PowerEdge VRTX.
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