We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"They offer top-tier support."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The solution is quite stable."
"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."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The program is stable."
"The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"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."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful 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."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"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."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Dell VxBlock System, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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