We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN 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 support team responds quickly."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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 is high availability."
"The program is stable."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"There should be more functionality available for routing."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The installation is complex."
"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 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."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"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."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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