We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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."It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"The support team responds quickly."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"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 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."
"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 feature is high availability."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The solution is scalable."
"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."
"It is stable and scalable."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."
"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."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"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."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"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 solution must be more flexible."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."
"The cloud deployment could be improved."
"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."
More Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Earn 20 points
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 22nd in HCI. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is rated 8.0. 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 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure writes "Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE SimpliVity, whereas Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure report.
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