We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and StarWind Virtual SAN 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 catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"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 support is highly responsive."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"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."
"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 would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"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."
"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 biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"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."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while StarWind Virtual SAN 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 Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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