We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI 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."Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"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."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"The support team responds quickly."
"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 program is stable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"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."
"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."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"Nimble is easy to use, but hard to install. Once it's installed, it's user-friendly. Reporting is another advantage because we get a lot of statistical forecasting. It helps us see into the future with that."
"Very good in-line compression."
"Simply being able to move objects and the duplication feature have been quite effective."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI has the most valuable features for performance, resilience, and scalability."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"This is a great product."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"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."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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 installation is complex."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"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."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"The product does not support file services."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"They should improve just the support."
"The product is expensive."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"The solution must be hypervisor-agnostic."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 13th in HCI with 23 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2. 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 HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Alletra dHCI report.
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