We compared Dell PowerFlex and VxRail based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Dell PowerFlex is praised for its flexibility, scalability, and reliability, while VxRail is appreciated for its excellent performance and seamless integration. Dell PowerFlex offers strong customer service, pricing, and return on investment, while VxRail is commended for its support and pricing structure. Dell Powerflex users emphasize the ease of use and efficient operations, while VxRail users highlight the scalability and flexibility. Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements, while VxRail users suggest improvements in scalability, compatibility, setup process, monitoring, customer support, and documentation. Overall, both products have positive user feedback with some areas for enhancement.
Features: The valuable features of Dell PowerFlex include its flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Users also praise its performance and user-friendly interface. On the other hand, VxRail is highly appreciated for its excellent performance, seamless integration, and highly scalable infrastructure solution.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Dell PowerFlex was reported as straightforward and hassle-free, making the implementation process smooth. Users found the pricing of Dell PowerFlex to be reasonable and competitive. On the other hand, VxRail also offers a favorable pricing structure with reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options., Dell PowerFlex product delivers enhanced productivity, improved efficiency, and cost savings. VxRail offers increased efficiency, improved performance, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. Both products have positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: The Dell PowerFlex could benefit from enhancements in certain areas, while suggestions for improving the VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, the duration required to establish a new tech solution varies for both Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. However, while Dell PowerFlex users reported separate timeframes for deployment and setup, VxRail users had varying experiences with some indicating that both terms may refer to the same period., The customer service for Dell PowerFlex is highly praised by users. They appreciate the efficient and helpful assistance provided by Dell's support team. Customers report that their questions and concerns are promptly addressed and resolved. Dell's commitment to a smooth experience and timely solutions is lauded. On the other hand, customers express satisfaction with the level of support received for VxRail. They appreciate the helpfulness and responsiveness of the customer service team. Users also value the knowledgeable and friendly staff during installation and troubleshooting. Overall, the customer service and support of VxRail are well-regarded.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Dell PowerFlex and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"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."
"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."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is quite stable."
"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."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support team responds quickly."
"First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is so good."
"One beneficial feature is that the solution can handle complex environments."
"We have seen ROI using this solution. It has simplified the work of the staff that we have which allows us to do more work with the same number of people, without having to incrementally grow the staff. The reliability of the product has been exceptional."
"With VxRail, we can manage the life cycle of a virtual machine."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"VxRail is a simple, efficient solution. It's easy to upgrade and scale the solution. If we increase our user base, we can easily scale it out. We have several thousand using it now."
"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"This is a great product."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"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."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"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."
"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."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The version upgrade process should be simplified."
"It still has some maturity to grow. It needs to be more tightly integrated with its own family of products. It has shown that it is open with the other products within the market, through its stack, but it needs to have the proof in the market (with use-cases), and it has to have the scalability with the integration."
"Its price could be better."
"The licensing needs to be improved upon."
"The initial setup is very complex."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented. The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 9th in HCI with 19 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while VxRail 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VxRail report.
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VxRail is a hyper converged infrastructure. While PowerFlex appliance is a flexible solution with a small starting point and massive scale potential.