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."StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"The program is stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The support team responds quickly."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"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."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"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 documentation can be better for the free tier."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"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."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"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."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"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."
"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 installation is complex."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Updates need improvement."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
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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 Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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