We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes 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 failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"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."
"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 features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"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."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"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."
"The solution must be more flexible."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
Earn 20 points
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 20th in HCI. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0. 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 Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE SimpliVity, whereas Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes report.
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