We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged 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 Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) offers a significant breadth of features."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The program is stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are fast deployment, security, and it is easy to upgrade."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"The most valuable feature is the in-built backup system. The backup speed is also excellent."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"If you were comparing this solution to VMware, it has more features, and it's very fast on the recovery."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"The solution has many good features."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"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 installation is complex."
"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."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"Data protection and optimization: It is really weak. They do not offer deduplication or compression."
"The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved."
"This solution is very costly."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while HPE Hyper Converged 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 Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. HPE Hyper Converged report.
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